Piracy
The novel begins firmly set in pirate imagery. Jack is a galley slave to a pirate crew. He is expected to do serious crime, and for the first part of the book, Jack is basically unexplored as a character, because he is finally waking up from a syphilitic insanity that has kept him in a blackout state for years. This is actually also pirate imagery, because syphilis was an epidemic in port cities. They successfully commit a masterful heist, but without organization or internal trust, they succumb to disaster.
Royalty and power
Jack, however, rises to political power by helping the Indian royals to do trade more easily. He makes phosphorous with urine and uses it as chemical warfare against a gang who dominates an important trade route to the East. He is given three years tenure as a king over an undeveloped state in India, and he becomes a king. Eliza's story is about royalty and power as well, but instead of Jack's overt combat, she uses courtly deception and Machiavellian power to rise to more authority.
World History
The imagery of World History is basically another intention of the novel, it seems. The depiction of true fact is often the focal point of a given scene, and the historical accuracy of the prose reflects serious and insightful research and study. The book shows a whole way of life, like a slice of time, and it is not localized; because Eliza is at times a political refugee, her story travels the world, and Jack's narrative takes the reader on pirate adventures throughout the Atlantic and all the way East to India and beyond, to Japan.
Alchemy
Alchemy is present in the imagery of this novel in a consistent, but subtle way. The imagery begins as symbolism, because there they find gold without the merit to earn it (a popular motif in mysticism and witchcraft) and lady fortuna, symbolized by the pirate queen, takes the money away until a later time. Other alchemical motifs include Minerva's allusion at the behest of Jack's alchemist friend, Jack's discovery of quicksilver, his fashioning of quick silver from scratch, and eventually, the alchemical genius of Newton. We meet Newton as he is approximating his eventual and epiphanic discovery of Calculus from his long life of studying alchemy and religion.
