Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-32713779-20170729065610/@comment-2112031-20170803231522

Sol Pacificus wrote:

The Wikia Editor wrote: I believe it was made reasonably clear that the Templar Admiral was delivering the package on behalf of the Templars in France. The Admiral was even referred to as an "errand boy".

Hm, I still think that that's kind of an assumption, even if fairly reasonable. They could've been part of a group of French Templars who just seized it from the Assassins, packaged it in a parcel from their camp or temporary base, then were sending it to Saint-Dominigue.

As I mentioned on the Precursor boxes talk page, the main point of contention is whether or not Harrison was aware of the incident with the box and, if he was, why he didn't mention it. I'll copy what I wrote there:

John Harrison's letter in Rogue suggests that he doesn't know about or is otherwise unconcerned with the box that was stoled by Adéwalé in 1735. The Templars' plan to send the box to Saint-Dominigue was shown to have been planned out ahead of time, as the Assassins knew when the box was due to arrive, who was transporting it and who was meant to receive it.

If there is only one box, and Harrison didn't known about it, it suggests that the Templars transporting it hadn't informed the British Rite. If Harrison did know about it, then one has to wonder why he didn't mention it in his letter and search for it in Saint-Dominigue, where, at the time he wrote the letter in 1742, it was either in possession of Bastienne Joséphe (the original intended recipient) or François Mackandal, the Mentor of the Saint-Dominigue Brotherhood.

If there are two boxes, then one can interpret Harrison's search for Ezio's box as an attempt to replace the one they lost to the Assassins in 1735, which sounds pretty reasonable to me.

The main source for this confusion is probably because Chronicles makes it seem as though the Templars got their hands on the box when Zhang Yong sent it out of China in 1532 and still had it by 1839, with nothing to suggest that they had lost it in the interim. Harrison's letter in Rogue, on the other hand, states that the Chinese Brotherhood still had the box up to a century after Shao Jun's death and then sent it out of China via the Manila Galleons bound for Acapulco, with the Templars having no idea where it was. It's not unreasonable to assume that the Templars found Ezio's box sometime after 1742, with Francis Cotton having it in his possession by 1839.

At the moment, the Precursor boxes article assumes that Ezio's box was still in the Templars' possession in 1742, with Harrison somehow being unaware of that fact. However, unless there is a line of dialogue in Chronicles: India that explicitly suggests this, I believe it makes more sense to assume that the Chinese Brotherhood ultimately managed to retrieve the box and that, as of 1742, the Templars had neither of the two boxes in their possession.