Ike Anwhistle and the Sugar Bowl

[Ennui]

Hilarious...but in all seriousness, if he mentions the duchess in the sentence, it suggests someone else is disguising as the ship-captain. He's not saying he disguised as them all...

Jacob is Lemony's father, so the formality is just as odd with him. He may be too old to be active anyway. I feel sure that the letters were put next to each other not only because of their shared subjects, but to highlight the stylistic inconsistencies.

Backed up by the index, and by the sheer irony of the surname Sham (it would be so Snicketesque to make it a real name) it seems to me that there is a very strong case for Captain Sham being real.

Also, when Julio is revealed as being his first name, it seems so arbitrary and odd. Surely it is drawing attention to the initials JS?

Olaf briefly disguised as him, but the real Captain is still out there.

[Antenora]

I also thought that the letter's formal tone sounded like someone writing to a distant acquaintance or business associate, not to a brother or son. Julio Sham might not really be a ship captain, but whoever he was, he was on the Prospero and wanted to help Lemony. Sham may well be a real last name; it sounds sort of Irish.

What confuses me a whole lot about that letter is the bit about the lurking enemies disguised as passenger and/or seagulls. Seagulls? What gives?

[Antenora]

That's pretty funny! At my school, we get these big seagulls in winter, and they eat all the garbage we drop. However, I've never seen them attack anyone. What I was wondering about was how on earth a (supposedly) normal human could disguise himself as seagull. They're only about two feet tall, tops.

[Antenora]

What if they were evil VFD carrier crows in little seagull suits? That would make more sense that a person dressed as a gull.

[Ennui]

The crows are on the good side.

Seagulls will readily kill anyone eating a sandwich...