John the Conqueror second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo", and in "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" it is called "John De Conquer Blue". John the Conqueror was an African prince who was sold as a slave in the Americas. Despite his enslavement, his spirit was never broken and he survived in folklore as a sort of a trickster figure, because of the tricks he played to evade his masters. Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit of the "Uncle Remus" stories is said to be patterned after High John the Conqueror. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of his adventures ("High John de Conquer") in her collection of
Johannes Remus Quietanus asked questions that fitted exactly with the issues of his time: the calculation of longitudes, the nature of comets, the dimension of planets, their distances to the sun and especially the distance from the Earth to the Sun (Astronomical unit). On the last point, he had a better intuition than Kepler who gave an estimation of 3400 of Earth radius. Remus Quietanus proposed 14000. Not until 1685 did Christiaan Huygens suggest a more accurate estimation (around 23500 of Earth radius). Johannes Remus Quietanus Johann Ruderauf or Johannes Remus Quietanus (Herda 1588 - Rouffach 1654) was a German astronomer, astrologer and