Trevor Collins

Put his head on a pike and say, we don't appreciate piracy.

We don't want any more international scandals.

etc.

But maybe also they said, OK, you're either going to die or we're going to use you and your network.

You're essentially a ghost now, but you're a spy for us.

Interesting.

So in this letter, it does note that a reply should be addressed to the post house in Falmouth, Cornwall.

It just so happens that at that time, Defoe himself was in Cornwall under the guise of being a shipwreck treasure diver named Claude Guillot.

Ironically, he was a treasure diver in 1700.

Okay, so Defoe allegedly worked as a spy himself for William III and invented a numeric code for spy mail.

And so it's not like it's one for one directly linked to Dafoe, but the fact that it has Avery on there, Avery the pirate, it's using numeric code, and it says in order to respond, postmark it here where another theorized spy is who also is said to have invented this kind of numeric code.

It's kind of making some informed assumptions to make this conclusion.

Obviously, if we had it dead to rights, we'd have an answer.

Right.

What a tangled web.

A very tangled web.

There's one other piece that helps strengthen the theory, though.

The recipient of this letter was Reverend James Richardson in Orchard Street, London.

Now this was interesting because this address was linked to London's first public lending library, which just so happened to have been set up by the other guy I talked about, Tennyson, and Richardson was the librarian of this location.

So now you have another theorized spy and a location that they set up is now also directly linked into the web of this letter being moved around.