Llamedos Jones

A noted Discworld explorer, with a name which is a coy reference to one of Roundworld's most celebrated (if fictional) explorers, also a Jones and also named after where he came from: Indiana.

He was hampered in his voyages of discovery by the fact he wasn't really looking for new lands to conquer: his main priority was evangelising his sect of Strict Observance Druidism to the heathen, i.e. everyone who wasn't already a Strict Observance Druid.

So he would set off in a small leather and wicker coracle, equipped with nothing more than a holy sickle, a sack of mistletoe, a small portable stone circle of the laptop variety, and a harmonium for the hymn singing.

Unfortunately, he could travel for no further than three and a half days in any direction before being compelled to return to Llamedos for the necessarily strict druidic observances and male voice choir practice once a week.

He was finally given dispensation by the circle elders to miss services and is believed to have discovered the Brown Islands by the very practical technique of continuing in a straight line until he hit something.

While this claim is debated, there is one island where it rains a lot, choral singing is elevated to the status of a martial art, the most important religious ceremony is carried out by two teams of fifteen men who ritually maim each other in pursuit of a small ovoid ball, and where the potent locally distilled coconut liqueur, or indeed any other intoxicating beverage drunk on the islands, is not available anywhere on the seventh day. Those lugubriously stern-faced carved heads, reminiscent of a stern-observance Druidical elder, which ring the island and face outwards, are believed to be a local attempt to grasp the concept of a stone circle. If the inside of a stone circle is a holy place, the reasoning goes, then let's not muck around, let's go for a seriously big one that makes the whole of the island holy!

Annotation

The Roundworld parallel is Fiji, a set of tropical Pacific islands formerly part of the British Empire, where Welsh missionaries took not only Christianity but also rugby football. Today, the Fijian national side always plays way above itself in rugby internationals and is regarded as a hard-to-beat middle-ranking side, in world terms - and more than that in rugby sevens, where they're actually damn' good.