Jan 10, 2008

Chapter 2: Transcript of Tracey's Voice Mail Message

Thanks to Arthur, here is the transcript of Tracey's Voice Mail Message that we hear before the Trivia Questions:

Hey Sam,
I wasn't sure if you'd get my email so I thought I'd leave a message.
OK, The Black Rock. It was a slave ship that worked the black market in the late 1900's. It disappeared mysteriously in the South Indian Ocean in 1881.

It was on it's way back from a gold collecting expedition in Papau New Guinea.
The ship was en route to Africa where the gold was to be illegally exchanged for slaves.

Nice, huh? Anyway, apparently New Guinean traders claim the ship sailed away in an Easterly direction, not West as it should have. And it was never seen again.

From what I can make out there were 40 crew on board....and get this... after the "Black Rock" disappeared, no company claimed ownership of the vessel, probably because of its links to slave trading which was outlawed by then.

Now while no direct ownership can be proven, what is known is that Black Rock left the Portsmouth docks from slip 23, and a group called the New World Sea Traders managed slips 18 through 27.

The owner of the New World Sea Traders was a former ship's captain by the name of Magnus Hanso and he would often captain numerous voyages each year - there's a possibility he was in charge of the Black Rock on that last voyage.

OK, I hope that's useful.

Still don't know what all this has to do with anything but I trust you know what you're doing. See ya.

6 comments:

A Dubs said...

What's been bugging me is that the voice mail states that the ship was working the black market in the late 1900's but it disappeared in 1881! Huh? I assume they meant the late 19th century.

Machodog said...

yeh i noticed that too! i don't think they could have put that there by accident could they?

Unknown said...

I was just coming to comment on that. Seemed strange. I don't know, it seems that if it were truly accidental, it would have been corrected, but I can't think of why they would use that as a clue.

terentule said...

You know what's interesting? She said, that the ship sailed away in an Easterly direction, not West as it should have. It reminds me that picture of compass on Maxwell group site.

Bigtooth said...

Is the clue word (well, phrase) resulting from the game not working for anyone else, or is it just me?

The Hade said...

Thank you very much for the transcript!
Does anybody happen to have the original MP3 audio file of that message available for download?