He was a gifted cadet until he started setting navy boats on fire, fighting bears, and experimenting with 'oil and mashed potatoes while drunk.'

The East India scenes have it all: juicy intelligence reports, malicious plots, and beautiful documents through which we learn, among other things, that Delaney excelled in the East India company's own military seminary when he was 11. An excellent swimmer, he sports a cross-shaped scar under his left eye and says things like 'One thing Africa did not cure is that I still love you.' His father bought his mother from a Native American tribe, he's in love with his sister, he almost died on a slave ship, and both his parents were insane. No 19th-century Englishman returns from Africa without uncut diamonds, and James Keziah Delaney does not disappoint. I would move on, but I can't, because Delaney's back story is too much.

American trade interests, he also enjoys talking to himself in a weird language, carving birds with painfully bent necks into wood, and hanging out naked on ships with colored stones that may or may not be gems while reflecting on the horrors of slavery. And if he's remarkably well-versed in the ways that Nootka island lines up with British vs. But Delaney is not dead, he is complex: A pragmatic type who brooks no nonsense - he peremptorily orders his father's creditors to form an orderly line so he can settle their bills - Delaney is also a rumored cannibal.

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