Count Maverick "Zale" Samson
Born January 31st, 1676, Maverick “Zale” Samson was born in Adlerdorf, in the Kingdom of Eisenburg to the exiled Samson family from the Kingdom of Albion. At 16, he ran away from home to join the Caledonian Uprising, fighting the Albines for the independence of his highland homeland. He made a name for himself as “Zale”, a skilled master-at-arms, fighting in Chieftain Stuart Caledon’s personal retinue, the leader of the uprising. Ultimately the Caledonians were defeated, and Zale fled to the Berbera Coast on a merchant ship in 1695.
Zale’s ship was beset by Berbery corsairs, and he was taken prisoner after defending the crew with tenacity. He won the respect of the corsair captain, Mashhad Al-Rudeen, who took Zale’s offer to join the crew in exchange for the lives of the merchants. He fought all over the coast of the Old Continent, pillaging Albine and Herabrían merchant ships for years, becoming Al-Rudeen’s first mate. After 5 years with pirates, he would take over as captain of his ship, the Amina, when Al-Rudeen passed away from illness in his old age in 1700. He would rename the ship to Intepidus Anima. Becoming a captain, he became a leading figure in the Berbera Emirs, akin to a bandit lord in the alliance of pirates.
Eventually, the Berbera Corsairs would start to enter into conflict with the Vera Marian League, an alliance of mercantile city-states nestling the Marian Sea, just east of Herabría. At the decisive Battle of Lepanta in 1701, the Vera Marians would crush the Corsairs and splinter them into smaller factions. Seeing the tides of destiny change, Zale would pledge his ship, the Intrepidus Anima, to the Vera Marians and help modernize their fleet. The Doge of Vincenzo, Signore Aspetto, would be jealous of Zale’s newfound success and would accuse him of plotting against the League. Plotting for his assassination, the Doge would plant explosives on the Intrepidus Amina, sinking it once it pulled into harbor. Zale would be heavily wounded in the blast, drifting away at sea.
He would be picked up by an Albine merchant ship bound for Port Charlotte, a coastal city at the northern border of the Kingdom of Albion. Settling in Port Charlotte, he would become an trusted expert on piracy to Commodore Horace Breckenridge, the leader of the Royal Navy in the region. As a privateer, he’d help Commodore Breckenridge combat piracy in the region, and would eventually enter high society as a courtier for the Lord of Port Charlotte, Lord Franklin Rossendale. In 1703, an alliance of knights and cossack horsemen from the Principality of Palischia, under the leadership of Grand Prince Piotr Romanovsky, would besiege Port Charlotte.
Zale would defend the coast as a privateer but wouldn’t see much action during the war against the Palischians. The Grand Prince intended to make Port Charlotte his first coastal city and the capital of an empire, so he would devise a strategy to have cannons fire on supply ships anytime they neared Port Charlotte. Combined with the relentless horse archers that the Cossacks fielded, the Albines lost Port Charlotte in under a month.
Soon after, the Grand Prince would ascend to become the Tsar of the newly proclaimed Northern Empire. Zale, now starting over for the 5th time, opted to retire into obscurity. Fate, however, would have other plans. Looking to modernize his new Northern Fleet, the Tsar would contact Zale, offering to make him a knight in the Northern Fleet. Zale would accept, becoming a druzhinnik in 1704, and then a lieutenant in 1709, onboard IMS Katyusha, under the command of Lieutenant Kalinkski. When the Tsar appointed Boyar Palischov to send a convoy to the New World to raid the Kingdom of Great Albion's sugar plantation colonies, Lieutenant Zale joined Lieutenant Kalinski aboard IMS Katyusha as his executive officer. When Boyar Palischov's convoy accidentally reached Varov-More in 1714, the Boyar was killed in the Devil's Shroud, leaving Frigate-Captain Makarov, Lieutenant Kalinkski, Lieutenant Mosinov, and himself as the last remaining leaders of the Northern Fleet's expedition. Zale’s experience would prove him to be an officer worth his weight in gold, while under Lieutenant Kalinkski’s command.
In February 1715, Lieutenant Zale would sail with Lieutenant Kalinkski to find the Shroudbreaker, so the Northern Fleet could escape Varov-More. Using Lieutenant Kalinkski's detailed and meticulous charts and combined with the journal of the notorious pirate Ramsey Singh found by Lieutenant Mosinov a mere week before, the resourceful duo uncovered the Shroudbreaker and wrote their names into history as not only expert naval officers, but founding fathers of archaeology. He, alongside Lieutenant Mosinov, would volunteer on a difficult mission to rescue Jaroslav Sibirsky, the Imperial Prokuror of the Northern Fleet. Tragically, the mission would go wrong and Sibirsky would be shot through the head by Grand Maritime Union contractors while Northern Fleet guardsmen were rowing to safety. Alongside Streltsy Sergeant Molotov and Cannon Crewman Sigmanov, he would be awarded the Cossack Cross for excellence in battle against the GMU.
On February 28th, 1715, Zale would betray the Northern Fleet by attempting to sell off the guardsmen of the Northern Fleet as recruits for Vera Marian privateers present in Varov-More. With his plans uncovered, he fled in the night on a rowboat. The Northern Fleet would follow his trail, with IMS Arabella under the temporary command of Frigate-Captain Makarov finding Zale at the island of "Shipwreck Bay" on March 2nd, 1715. After an attempted inspection, he would declare hostility to the Northern Fleet and would be killed by Streltsy Sergeant Molotov while ashore whilst violently resisting arrest. The 2 sloops that Zale had brought to the battle would be sunk by IMS Arabella.
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