The Silk Straits of Kashgar: A Portolan Chart

[aeshnidae]

My completed map for the April 2018 Challenge, “Pirates!” As you may have guessed from the challenge name, the entries had to have some link to pirates. I decided to go with an old map that had unintentionally become of treasure map. I went back to the portolan chart style that I used for my map of Kashgar. This was hand drawn in Photoshop on a Wacom tablet. The gold is from a photo of gold foil and the paper background is a digital image of a blank creased page from an old US government document. The fonts are Treasure Map Deadhand (Quinn’s writing), Arr Matey (the other writing), and Alhambra (the original mapmaker’s writing).

WIP is here.

Once an esteemed lawyer in the Barony of Riverhold, Sorrel Blackwell became the most successful pirate to sail the precarious Silk Straits of Kashgar. Known as The Barrister, Blackwell and his ship, the Lady Justice, plundered Kashgarian ships full of spices and silks as revenge for the murder of his wife and children at the hands of the Prince of Kashgar. Legend has it that The Barrister amassed a fortune of gold, silks, and spices and hid them somewhere in Kashgar. Assisted by Kashgarian nobles who had fallen out of favor with the Sultan, Blackwell intended to use these treasures to raise a mercenary army and declare war on the Sultan and Prince. And then...Blackwell and his ship disappeared. Did the Lady Justice meet her end at Cape Doom? At Shipwreck Point? No one knows, but for the past 180 years, adventurers have sought his legendary Treasures of the Silk Straits.