Dappa
From the Quicksilver Metaweb.
Stephensonia
Dappa, physically described in The Confusion only as having "ropy locks of hair", might well have looked like this Dappa (born ca. 1664 in the Niger River delta), a fictional creation of Neal Stephenson, is a African linguist who appears briefly in Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver and has a larger part as a member of "The Ten" in the Bonanza sections of Stephenson:Neal:The Confusion. He is claimed to be property of Charles White in The System of the World and has Eliza as his publisher and patron.
The tale of how he came to be a galley slave (in the 1680s) is humorous and apparently common. We first meet him as Captain Otto van Hoek's first mate on the deck of the Minerva in the late autumn of 1713. Dappa has a remarkable gift for learning languages, and has picked up a dozen or more in his lifetime, including several Niger Bend languages (Taureg, and Bantu?), English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, Franco (i.e. Sabir), and Tamil (i.e. Malabar). He is scientifically minded and assists Daniel Waterhouse in determing a very important fact. Earlier (chronologically), he had been a partner in the Ten of ex-slaves in Bonanza, serving largely as an interpreter.
His background story starts around page 17. He grew up along the Niger River, in the kingdom of Dahomey, in West Africa.
He may also have been one of the Crewmates of Otto Kivistik in Cryptonomicon.
Authored pages
- Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:12:Minerva... (Alan Sinder)
- Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:13:Some Irish, the rest Angolan... (Alan Sinder)
- Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:166:Schooners (Neal Stephenson)
- Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:166:Strange information (Neal Stephenson)