George Anton Schaeffer: Shipping Germans to Brazil

George Anton Schaeffer leaves Russia in 1813 after being involved in a secret plan of Tsar Alexander I to have a giant shark-shaped, hydrogen filled, balloon made to drop timed-fuse explosives on Napoleon Bonaparte and his invading army in 1812. As part of a Russian-American-Company-chartered circumnavigation of the world he is stranded in Sitka, Alaska, from where Russian-American Manager Alexander Baranov sends him on a mission to the Hawaiian Islands. There he meddles in island politics, becoming the de facto ruler of Kaua’i with its last independent King Kaumuali’i and building forts there in 1816-7 which remain to this day. This book, the THIRD in a trilogy, describes the life of his wife Barbara who waits for him in St. Petersburg for over five years, and his adventures paying the way to Brazil, where he founds a colony called Frankenthal in the Bahia State, of thousands of German mercenaries and emigrant families for Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I.