The fifty-second parallel ran directly from Ipswich to the Hague, so any half-wit with a backstaff and an ephemeris could sail unerringly from one to the other and back. Daniel knew the territory well – the North Sea infiltrated the Suffolk coast with so many spreading rays of brackish water that when you gazed east at sunrise the terrain seemed to be crazed with rivers of light. It was impossible to travel up the coast proper. The road from London was situated ten to twenty miles inland, running more or less straight from Chelmsford to Colchester to Ipswich, and everything to the right side – between it and the sea – was hopeless, from the point of view of a King or anyone else who wanted to rule it: a long strip of fens diced up by estuaries and therefore equally impassable to horses and boats, easier to reach from Holland than from London. Staying there wasn't so bad, and staying out was even better, but movement was rarely worth the trouble. Objects would not move in a resistive medium unless impelled by a powerful force – ergo, any travelers in that coastal strip had to be smugglers, drawn by profit and repulsed by laws, shipping England's rude goods to Holland and importing Holland's finished ones. So Daniel, like his brothers Sterling and Oliver and Raleigh before him, had spent much time in this territory as a youth, loading and unloading flat-bottomed Dutch boats lurking beneath weeping willows in dark river-courses.