Starbuck, Peet, & paranoia

[Sean Carroll]

: 
:      How do we know caffiene plays an important part in Mason & Dixon?
:      
:      M.

It was mentioned in the blurb issued by Henry Holt and Co.:

  Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the 
  British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between
  Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. 
  Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated
  eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, 
  ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major 
  caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatch'd pair--one rollicking, the other 
  depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-romantic--from their first journey 
  together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back, 
  through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, 
  on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe 
  and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented to them 
  by the Age of Reason.

I think this has already been posted to the list, but I just pulled it
from one of Tim Ware's web pages:

  http://www.hyperarts.com/mason-dixon/mason-dixon.html

Also on this page you can find more info about M&D, including the fact
that they did a lot of travelling on long sea voyages.  This got me to
wondering if my tongue-in-cheek suggestion might not have something
going for it, in the form of allusions to Ahab and Starbuck in Melville's
book.  Then the initials hit me...

Or am I just finding connections where they aren't really there?

Sean
carroll at itp.ucsb.edu
http://itp.ucsb.edu/~carroll
 
p.s. "Ahab", of course, has a colorful history.  In the 1st and 2nd
books of Kings he is King of Israel, led astray by his wife Jezebel,
who got people to worship Baal and Ashtoreth (an early version of
the Slothropite Heresy, if you like).  After he died she was done 
away with by defenestration, but not until after she managed to
put on her best outfit.