>Possibly our friends in Khorst, why not my friends in Nimistor?<
>They could have raided the Mirrorsea once with the help of the Wolf Pirates
and once with the Lunars.<
Ok, I largely agree with Peter's Harrek timeline and here is my handwaving, er, reasoning of the events in the area. I'm going to put the published stuff in[brackets] to separate them from my own ideas.
To start, you have to pity the poor Kethaelans. Nobody has (ahem) sunk more resources into their navy and gotten less for it than the Holy Country. AFAIK, they've only managed to "win" one naval campaign, against the pirates of Alatan, and I suspect the fleet from Pasos did all the heavy lifting. The Kethaelans have in the meantime gotten ignored by the Handrans [1581] and whooped on by the Alatans [1582-84], Kralori [1587], Alatan again [1602], Wolf Pirates [1606, 1611, 1613, 1616, 1620] and Nimistor [1616]. The Lunars take Karse from the sea [1619] slipping by a Kethaelan navy that is a mere shadow of its former self.
Now Harrek; he sacks Sog City [1615] (I bet he only sacks the part outside the citadel) and as a passenger on a trader, winds up joining/taking over a Wolf Pirate ship [late 1615/early 1616] in which he goes to raid the Right Arm Islands [1616] and gets to know his new friends. He may or may not have actually visited the Wolf Pirate base at the Three Step Islands at this point, but what he does learn is that although all Wolf Pirates are equal, some are more equal than others, and those are the ones who a) command multiple ships and b) have the most Yiggites in their crews. Harrek is your prototypical Alpha Male, but he's no dummy. He knows he can either knock other pirate captains on the head and take over their crews (adding by subtraction) or he can go back to the fabled homeland of the Yiggites and get a fresh bunch who haven't intermarried with the locals and gone soft. He does this [1617] and, being Harrek, succeeds beyond even his wildest expectations He plunders his way down the Fronelan and Seshnelan coasts, wintering over in Ginorth (and picking up more recruits) then works his way eastwards arriving back at the Three Step Islands sometime in late 1618. Then he spends 1619 knocking other captains on the head and becoming Pirate King, leading the now-unified fleet on its destructive invasion of the Holy Country in 1620. Whew!
Now, the Nimistor Pirate Fleet. The Kethaelans build yet another fleet after the Wolf Pirates sink the old one in Seapolis harbor [1613]. The Wolf Pirates disperse, part (most?) of their fleet heading east to ravage trade along the Teshnos coast, being spotted off of Corflu [1614] in the process. Someone comes up with the bright idea to work up the fleet by starting small and taking on someone the Kethaelans know they can beat, the small-time Nimistori coastal pirates who use their noted [Enclosure #1 pg 31] boating skill for plundering the inshore trade, smuggling, etc. The Lunars, having contacts in the area, tip off the Nimistori who gather all their longboats together secretly and ambush the Kethaelans in the maze of sandbars and channels of the Nimistor estuary, sinking or capturing some and sending the rest back to Choralinthor Bay to run right into the returning Wolf Pirates, resulting in a second and more serious defeat [1616] which is only a preview of the horrors of 1620.
So, how's that?
Gary R. Switzer
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