While the rest of the known world’s eyes were focused on the struggle between Drune and Quartak, one man made a discovery that may quite literally change the world, or at the very least the maps of it. Through a combination of gross navigational incompetence, a blinkered refusal to admit he was wrong and pure blind luck, Christopher Blunderbus, captain of HMS Weevil, managed to do what no one else in recorded history has done, cross the Great Western Ocean. Although rumour has it Captain Blunderbus only meant to go on a three-day cruise when he set off, when he returned a month later, his ship was heavily laden with gold and strange artefacts. Blunderbus has reported that he had found a new continent where the ground is rich with gold deposits and whose only inhabitants are primitive-seeming natives who worship animals. Blunderbus claimed the continent in the name of King Felipe, ruler of his home country of Hispanica, but this has been largely ignored as people from many disparate countries, religions, races and guilds rush to charter ships to take them to the new world.