p. 118

The group of people look at the headlines of the newspaper, which writes

“A hellish deed: bomb thrown at police… Murderous conspirators in our midst. Anarchists had inflamed crowd; influenced by foreign agent?”

Vévoda has blamed the demonstrators and the five people in the house for the bombing that happened at the waterfront.

Eric jots down that the newspaper headlines are paraphrases of post-Haymarket newspaper headlines and post-Calais headlines.

The Haymarket Affair or Haymarket Riot was a actual bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting.

The Calais Riot of 1912 is a fictional violent uprising of striking workers at an ammunition factory owned by Compagnie Générale Bouchard. Many of the workers later confessed that they had no specific grievances, but instead had been drunk and provoked to violence by an anarchist agitator among them.

In the marginalia, Jen spots a record of Sobreiro in a Stockholm jail in 1624. Yet, Eric points out the many reasons why it isn’t likely to be the Sobreiro that was on the ship and wrote the book.