Emily Ius

Emily Ius (née Dale) was born into a wealthy, middle-class Anglican British background. Her father ran a profitable upholstery business. Both Emily's parents died (no specifics are recorded) around 1586. In 1587, she met Ue Ius, a Wymgani explorer visiting north-western Europe, and married him two months later. This was (presumably) the first wedding between an Indigenous Ariddian and a European; it was performed in an Anglican church.

Little is known about Emily. Records from the period are fragmentary, although her husband's visit was extensively reported on at the time. One surviving newspaper article describes Emily as "a fair-haired, pale-skinned beauty, mild and gentle of manner, educated and expressing a remarkable curiosity in all things of this life. To have married a black savage [sic] from untamed, ne'er visited lands, beyond the darkest boundaries of the mapped world, suggests that Mrs. Ius (as we must now refer to her) is truly a young lady like no other."

When Ue returned with his expedition to his native Ariddian Isles, Emily went with him. She had already converted him to her religion, and took a Bible with her. When she boarded her husband's fragile-looking raft and began her journey to the Pacific, on the opposite side of the world, she most likely had no idea where she was going; Ue had refused to divulge the location of his homeland to any European.

Her fate is unknown. No records survive, in oral Wymgani history, of her ever having reached the Ariddian Isles. It is possible that she, Ue and their expedition were lost at sea. If they did reach their destination safely, however, Emily Ius was probably the first European ever to set foot on Ariddian soil.

The mystery of her life has encouraged flights of imagination among writers from the late eighteenth century to the present. In 1932, francophone Ariddian Richard Jacquet wrote Emilie, ou La disparue du Pacifique (Emily, the Woman who vanished in the Pacific), a best-selling work of fiction which elaborated a romanticised biography of Emily Dale from childhood onwards. Jacquet theorised that she had reached her husband's homeland safely, and imagined what her life had been among the Wymgani. He suggested that she had had children, whose descendants might still be alive. The topic, with its related mysteries, continued to exert fascination on several generations. In 1978, Jacquet's novel was turned into a film, entitled simply Emily.

Recent works of fiction have mostly assumed that she survived the incredibly long journey from north-western Europe to the South Pacific. In 1883, however, an anonymous short story had imagined her early life, up to and including her setting out on her husband's ship, then had described her being killed and eaten by her starved, lost Wymgani companions adrift on the ocean. The story was considered disturbing and was censored. It was, however, one of many facets of the fiction inspired by the "Emily Dale mystery".