One of the more interesting and key characters in Portuguese adventure to the Indian Ocean was a Jew of European origins whom the Portuguese referred to by name of Gaspar, sometimes dubbing him (or he naming himself) Gaspar da Gama, after Vasco da Gama in whose first expedition to India they met and kidnapped him; sometimes he is mentioned as Gaspar de India; and lastly by Gaspar de Almeida, in the time when he went to India with the fleet lead by viceroy Francisco Almeida.

Several stories of his origin circulate, none of which is necessarily true, in which either he, or his parents, were Jews coming from Poznan in Poland, who migrated to Middle East - Jerusalem or Alexandria - from where Gaspar eventually ended up in India. There he used his intelligence and knowledge of languages of jewish and arabic, venetian, and various indian ones like Malayalam to advance and earn him higher positions at local courts.

When Vasco Da Gama adn the Portuguese reached India in 1498, Gaspar approached them on Anjediva island talking in their language under guise of being a Christian merchant long stranded in India wishing to see his coreligionists. The Portuguese were suspicious and asked around until someone denounced him as a spy. The Portuguese tortured poor Gaspar (with burning oil) for several days, until he confessed of being a Jew, sent by a sultan of Bijapur to spy and arrange an ambush for the Portuguese. This might not be necessarily true, but the Portuguese decided to kidnap Gaspar and take him with themselves.

Gaspar took this rather as a chance than predicament. He soon became friends with Da Gama and other Portuguese leaders of the expedition, and when back in Portugal, was well liked and had frequent audiences at the Royal court, and eventually converted to Catholicism. He supplied Portuguese with key info (for example it is his information that settled the issue if Hindi were or weren't Chrisitans) and even made several trips back to India where he was a key advisor to several admirals and governors.

Despite Gaspar's case being a sort of 'happy' ending, it is a one of the several, but overall rare such cases of the broader Portuguese policy to kidnap local natives to take them back to Portugal, teach them some Portuguese and use them to gather info and serve as interpreters. Most of the others were not so lucky. They were enslaved, and forced to go on ships as slaves. Often sent as first contact interpreters to unknown regions, where many were killed.

The Chaucers were a family on the up-and-up during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We're most familiar, of course, with Geoffrey, the London-based poet, diplomat and civil servant. But his great-grandfather Andrew de Dynnyngton had (probably) been a humble Ipswich taverner, and his grandaughter would go on to become the Duchess of Suffolk and a significant player in the political tumult of Henry VI's reign. Unsurprisingly, this gradual accretion of wealth and status precipitated some family squabbles.

Little John Chaucer (Geoffrey's father) lived in Watling Street in London, with his father Robert, a vintner, and his mother Mary. One day in early December of 1324, when he was just twelve, a group of people armed with swords, bows and arrows kidnapped him, absconded with him to Ipswich, forced him to get married against his will and subjected him to what the trial document cryptically alludes to as "other unlawful acts".

The kidnappers were John's aunt Agnes de Westhale (Robert's sister), and several members of the Stacey family, who were probably also relatives. The girl he was forced to marry was Agnes's daughter, his cousin Joan (I imagine she wasn't particular keen on the idea either).

As you have probably guessed, it was an inheritance grab. John was the heir to a piece of land in Ipswich which was being kept on his behalf by his parents until he came of age. For whatever reason, Agnes and the Staceys felt that it ought to be theirs and that kidnapping a nephew was the way to go about getting it.

It isn't clear how soon John was returned to his parents, although his step-brother Thomas Heron supposedly pursued Agnes to Ipswich and robbed her of £40. In any case a trial followed in 1326, in which Agnes and co. denied they had forced John to marry and tried to argue that under the laws of the Borough of Ipswich the twelve-year-old had been in full control of his inheritance. The court ruled against them, the marriage was disregarded, and the kidnappers were ordered to pay Robert and Mary the relatively huge sum of £250 in damages (although they had in fact sued for £300).

All was not done, though, for in 1328 Geoffrey Stacey tried both to get Robert and Mary attained for perjury during the 1326 trial, and petitioned Parliament for a reduction in the cost of the damages. The former attempt was unsuccessful, and the outcome of the latter is unknown, although the value of John's Ipswich land at just 20 shillings suggests that Geoffrey may have had a point.

It's a teasing anecdote, if only because the surviving records can tell us so little about the emotional trauma that several of the involved parties must have experienced, or the personal family drama that must have underpinned the events. It's teasing, too, that the whole course of English literary history might have been changed over a petty land-grab, had John somehow remained married to Joan. Without the influence of the Geoffrey Chaucer which we got, the whole face of the English canon (Lydgate, Dunbar, Skelton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, etc.) would have been different. Makes you think.

One more thing that I would be remiss not to mention is that some writers have used this case as context to explain away Geoffrey Chaucer's possible assault of Cecily Champain in 1380. Personally, I'm sceptical of the comparison – the legal terminology and the relationship of the involved parties doesn't match up, and there are different social considerations.

Sources:

• The Life Records of Chaucer, volume II, ed. F. J. Furnivall (1876), pp. 125–131.

• Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (1992), pp. 12–14.

Edith Lanchester was at the center of a celebrated kidnapping case in 1895. Edith was 24, from a respectable upper-middle-class family, college educated, living on her own, and a committed socialist. She had also fallen in love with Shamus Sullivan, a working-class laborer and fellow member of her socialist group. However, Edith did not believe in marriage, considering it to be a form of oppression. So she told her family that she would live with Shamus but not marry him.

Upon hearing this, her father and brothers came to her apartment; they brought a Dr. Blandford; and they also brought ropes. Dr. Blandford pronounced Edith insane; he produced a certificate already signed by himself and Elsa's father, where the supposed cause of her insanity was literally listed as "over-education". Her brothers and father tied her up, and they dragged her to a waiting carriage while she screamed for help. Her landlady came to her defense and received a black eye.

Edith was deposited at the the Priory, a private asylum, where the superintendent quickly admitted that she was not insane. Shamus and her landlady went to the police and received a writ of habeas corpus. Every doctor who subsequently examined Edith, including the wonderfully named Commissioners in Lunacy, had to say that she was perfectly sane and could not legally be held--though red tape seemed to keep interfering with her release. Meanwhile, her socialist comrades gathered outside the Priory to demonstrate and sing anthems. She was released after a few days and went to live with Shamus.

The Lanchester case made international news, though of course people disagreed on what the biggest scandal actually was. Was it the ease with which the lunacy laws could be abused? (They were subsequently reformed.) Was it the injustice of current marriage law? (The Marquess of Queensberry thought so; he offered the couple a hundred pounds to go through a church wedding ceremony "under protest" and then recant immediately.) Was it Dr. Blandford's pronouncement that Edith was insane, as no well-brought up girl would take to socialism and free love if she was in her right mind? According to many the real scandal was that her father and brothers had been prevented from "saving" Edith from ruin, even if she was not "really" insane.

Although Edith had been previously close with her family, she refused to see her father again after her release from the asylum. She lived with Shamus Sullivan until his death in the 1940s. They had two children, Waldo Sullivan Lanchester, and Elsa Lanchester of Bride of Frankenstein fame.

Ooh!

So the native groups from around the Great Lakes region - and much more broadly, the "Eastern Woodlands" groups - practiced a form of ritual adoption in order to bring new warriors into their bands. It was a practice that undoubtedly pre-dated European contact, but was intensified with frequent conflicts on the scale that Europeans engaged in them. Interestingly, the race of the abductee didn't matter - Native groups captured and adopted white and black men and women - but age was very important. Generally speaking, the younger a captured person, the more they were likely to be inducted into the band as a family member. The older, the more likely they would either be ritually tortured and killed, or simply killed in combat or during a raid.

One such abductee was a seven year old kid named Billy Wells. He lived with his father and brothers in the Ohio river valley, and in the 1780s, his village was raided and he and his brother were taken by the Miami. His brother shortly escaped, but Billy couldn't, and he was kept by a Miami family as, essentially, a servant and worker, but as he grew older and learned the language he was given a name, Apekonit, which means "Carrot-top" in Miami, on account of his red hair.

Apekonit was trained as a warrior just like every other young Miami, and he was good at it. His language skills were also useful, with Apekonit luring travellers and armed parties into ambushes, leading raids, and attending council fires with white administrators as a translator. He eventually married the daughter of Little Turtle, a Miami chief, and was considered a trusted and effective warrior in the nascent Wabash Confederacy in the early 1790s.

After the fizzling campaign of Harmar and then St. Clair's Defeat, the United States let Anthony Wayne form the Legion of the United States, which started slowly building forts into Indian territory, and sending scouts everywhere.

One of those scouts was Wells' own brother. They recognized each other during one incident, and Wells was convinced to come back to meet Wayne, who offered him a spot as a scout for the US Legion, which Wells accepted. He served for the rest of that war as a scout and linguist for Wayne, and was appointed as the Indian Agent at Fort Dearborn afterward.

Even through his career as, essentially, a US state diplomat, Wells kept close ties with Little Turtle, but was never terribly popular among the natives outside of the Miami (and there were those in the Miami who grew increasingly frustrated with Little Turtle, in part because of his close relationship with Wells).

This story is only unusual for the fact that Wells rose so high in the estimation of both groups. There were a great many warriors among a great many groups that had a life as white children before their adoption. Some tried to return to their former lives and others enthusiastically embraced their new ones.