The story takes place in the prehistory of Denmark, among its earliest inhabitants. It shows the conflict between the hunter-gatherers, who are native to the forests of that land, and the farmers, who have traveled to the area to build a new home on the edge of the forests.
When the two groups learn of each other’s existence, they become frightened of each other. The hunters are afraid that the new people will take over their hunting grounds, and they are offended that the newcomers cut down the trees to build their homes and clear land for farming. The farmers are afraid of the forest, the wild animals inside it, and the hunters, who they fear might start hunting them.
A young hunter, Wolf, watches the farmers to learn more about them, and he is fascinated by what he sees. In some ways, the two groups are alike, and Wolf finds himself wanting to know more about the ways of the farmers and maybe even make friends with the pretty girl, Bright Dawn, who he sees tending the farmers’ goats.
However, the son of Wolf’s chief has decided that the newcomers must be destroyed. When Wolf saves Bright Dawn from the chief’s son, the two of them must learn to work together and combine the skills of their different peoples in order to survive.
In the end, after a bloody clash between their respective peoples, both Wolf and Bright Dawn are each exiled from their tribes. However, their exile actually gives them the freedom to start their own tribe that combines aspects of both of their societies.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
This story was somewhat speculative about the early days of Europe, when societies were starting to shift from hunter/gatherer groups to more settled agricultural groups. The author says that he was theorizing about the cultural clashes that may have taken place during this time.
Something I noticed about the story is that the groups, particularly the hunter/gatherer group, somewhat resembled some Native American groups around the time that they first encountered European settlers. The author didn’t say anything about using their lifestyles as inspiration or drawing any parallels between them and early Europeans, but it did make me think about the similarities between groups that are living similar lifestyles but in different places. In other words, it does seem reasonable that hunter/gatherers living in Europe would be living in circumstances that would be very similar to hunter/gatherer groups in the Americas.
Thirteen-year-old Magnolia and Paddlefoot, a Lambeosaurus, are apprenticed to the Habit Partners of Freshwater. Habitat Partners keep an eye on different aspects of the environment on Dinotopia and make sure that the environment is maintained and cared for. The Habitat Partners of Freshwater are specifically concerned with the bodies and sources of freshwater all over Dinotopia.
When Magnolia’s master, Edwick, is injured badly during the eruption of a geyser, he and his partner, a Saltasaurus named Calico, retire and leave the post to Magnolia and Paddlefoot. Magnolia thinks that she is still too young for the position, and she and Paddlefoot worry about whether they are ready to handle the job. However, they have no choice because a crisis has arisen, and Edwick is in no shape to handle it.
The Polongo River, which supplies the water for the waterfalls that power virtually everything in Waterfall City, is drying up. Magnolia and Paddlefoot must journey up the river to find out what is happening and restore the river to its proper course. Along the way, they find friends who can help them, but completing their mission means coming perilously close to the Rainy Basin where the meat-eating dinosaurs live.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Raymond Wilks is the son of a ship’s doctor. They are sailing on a ship taking convicts to the British colonies in Australia when the prisoners revolt and take over the ship during the middle of a terrible storm. Raymond’s father is killed, and the ship is wrecked, but Raymond escapes with a young thief named Hugh O’Donovan. The two of them are taken to shore by friendly dolphins, and they meet up with some of the inhabitants of Dinotopia.
At first, they are frightened of the dinosaurs, but everyone is kind to them. They are taken to Waterfall City, one of the most beautiful places in Dinotopia, and they begin learning about the history and ways of the land. People in Dinotopia don’t use money, and everyone shares with each other, trading goods and services for everything they need. There is no crime in Dinotopia because everyone has all that they need and everyone looks after each other.
Raymond, although still mourning his father’s death, thinks that Dinotopia is a wonderful place, and he admires the attitude of the people there. Hugh, who was orphaned at a young age and forced to steal to survive, has difficulty believing that the people are all as nice as they seem or the society as perfect as they say. His harsh childhood has taught him not to trust others too much. Little by little, the people of Dinotopia win Hugh over, and he desperately wants to become worthy of the kindness that people show him, although he doubts whether he ever can.
As Hugh and Raymond struggle to come to terms with their new life in Dinotopia, they encounter a flying dinosaur called a Skybax who is suffering from an old injury. The Skybax, called Windchaser, shows up from time to time and causes trouble. He is the only unhappy creature they have seen since arriving in Dinotopia, and Raymond develops a strong desire to learn what is wrong with him and help him. Raymond’s struggles to help the unhappy dinosaur lead him into danger, and Hugh fears that he may lose the best friend he’s ever had.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Pirates by Will Osborne and Mary Pope Osborne, 2001.
This book is the nonfiction companion book to Pirates Past Noon, part of the Magic Tree House Series. While the Magic Tree House Series is a fantasy series that involves time travel, there are companion books to some of the novels with nonfiction information related to the stories. The fantasy series is meant to introduce children to different historical periods and encourage an interest in reading, but the companion research guides take children further into certain subjects.
This book focuses on pirates throughout history, explaining how pirates functioned from the time of Ancient Greece and Rome, into the Middle Ages with Vikings, and beyond. It explains that, while legends and adventure stories make the lives of pirates seem fun and exciting, the realities of their lives were more harsh. Throughout the book, Jack and Annie, the characters from the main series, appear in illustrations and side notes to define certain terms or tell the readers fun trivia.
There is a chapter about New World pirates that explains the buccaneers and privateers that preyed on Spanish treasure ships in the Caribbean. The Golden Age of Piracy was in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It was a period of intense pirating activity as governments recruited privateers to attack the ships of enemy nations. Pirates also attacked ships that traded with American colonies as they increased in size and number. The Golden Age of Piracy ended in the 1720s, when governments began instituting harsher punishments for pirates and sending more warships to confront the pirates. The book includes a Gallery of Pirates where it gives brief biographies of famous pirates, like Henry Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, and “Calico Jack” Rackham with Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
There are chapters that describe the lives that pirates lived on their ships. One chapter talks about the types of ships that pirates used, how to distinguish between different types, and the trade-offs between size and speed. For example, sloops could move faster, but schooners were larger and could carry more. Although pirates operated outside of the law, they had rules for themselves to establish order and resolve conflicts on their ships, and there were punishments for people who broke the rules. People also had different jobs on pirate ships.
Part of the book also talks about legends of buried treasure and sunken ships. There is some truth to the legends, although mostly, pirates tended to spend their loot shortly after getting it instead of hiding it for later.
At the end of the book, there is a guide for doing further research which suggests research tips, other books to read and documentaries to see, and websites to visit. Of the websites listed in the book, only one still exists as of this writing: Maritime Pirate History. Another one, Treasure Island, pops up thanks to the Wayback Machine. It might be possible to find the others through the Wayback Machine by actually searching the Wayback Machine for them, but with so many other new sites and books that are probably equally as good, it might not be worth the time.
One rainy afternoon, Annie urges Jack to go to the tree house with her because she has a feeling that they will soon meet its mysterious owner. When they arrive, no one is there, so the kids start looking at the books. The day is cold and wet, and Annie shows Jack a picture of a sunny beach, saying that she wishes they were there. Soon, they find themselves on the beach.
They have fun at first, but then some pirates come to the beach, looking for a treasure buried by Captain Kidd. The evil pirate, Cap’n Bones, makes the kids prisoners aboard his ship until they figure out where the treasure is hidden from the clue written on the captain’s map.
The clue says that the treasure is hidden underneath the whale’s eye, and from the ship, Jack and Annie realize that the island is shaped like a whale with a big boulder for its eye. The kids make the pirate captain take them back to the island in exchange for telling him where the treasure is. While the pirates are digging for the treasure, a parrot flies over, saying, “Go back!” The pirates take that as a sign of an approaching storm and flee, leaving the kids behind.
A storm does come, but Jack still has difficultly tearing himself away from the treasure that they’ve uncovered. Finally, the parrot convinces him to leave, and he and Annie use the tree house to go home again.
Once they’re back in Pennsylvania, the parrot appears and turns into a woman and says that she’s Morgan le Fay. She is the owner of the tree house and the amulet. Besides being King Arthur’s sister and an enchantress, she is also the librarian of Camelot. She has been using the tree house to travel to other times to collect books that the scribes in Camelot can copy for their library. She put the spell on the tree house so that she can travel to some of the places in the books herself. The kids can use the spell only because Annie truly believes in magic and Jack really loves books. She and the tree house disappear as the kids head home, but Jack discovers that she left her amulet with him as a sign that she will come back.
I was surprised that the owner of the tree house turned out to be Morgan le Fay, both because an Arthurian character didn’t seem to quite fit with a magical children’s tree house and because Morgan le Fay wasn’t one of the good characters in the Arthurian legends. The exact nature of the character of Morgan le Fay changed through different retellings of the Arthurian legends, and she wasn’t always an adversary or villain, but she does do things in some of the stories that wouldn’t make her a good heroine for children’s literature. However, none of that matters in this series because, here, she’s just an enchantress from Camelot who is interested in books.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
#1 Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne, 1992.
Eight-year-old Jack is walking home with his seven-year-old sister, Annie, when Annie spots a tree house in the woods that they’ve never seen before. In spite of Jack’s warnings, Annie climbs up into the tree house and yells down that there are a bunch of books in there. Jack loves books, so he also climbs up into the tree house to see what she’s found.
There are books in the tree house about all sorts of interesting times and places. When Jack starts looking at a book about dinosaurs, he wishes that he could see one himself. Suddenly, the tree house takes the kids back in time to a land filled with dinosaurs. The two of them have some hair-raising adventures as they try to figure out how to get back home, getting some help from a friendly Pteranodon when they need to escape from a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The kids figure out that the tree house will take them anywhere they want as long as they look at a picture of the place in one of the books and wish to go there. There is a book about Pennsylvania in the tree house with a picture of their home town in it, so all they need to do is to look at it and wish they were there in order to go home.
While they are still in the land of the dinosaurs, Jack finds a gold amulet with the letter M on it. He thinks it belongs to whoever owns the tree house, so he picks it up and brings it back with them, although by the end of the book, the kids still don’t know who it really belongs to. The ownership of the tree house is something that they eventually figure out through their adventures with it. (See book #4 in the series for the answer.)
#39 The Ghost Ship Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1994.
The Alden children are visiting the New England seaside town of Ragged Cove while traveling with their grandfather on a business trip. They enjoy visiting the sea, but on a stormy night at the inn where they are staying, they learn that the town has its own ghost story about a ship called the Flying Cloud that sank off the coast years ago. When storms are coming, people see strange lights that some people think might be the spirits of the people on the Flying Cloud.
As the Aldens soon learn, the events of the Flying Cloud are still affecting people who live in the town. When the ship was wrecked, the only member of the crew who made it to shore was a cabin boy, who died shortly afterward, mumbling about how one of the crew members had taken command of the ship away from the captain in an apparent mutiny. The descendant of the ship’s captain, a woman who manages the small local museum, is bitter toward the descendant of the man who apparently led the mutiny, who now gives whale watch tours.
The Aldens find it strange how events of the distant past can still mean so much to people who are still living, but they find themselves caught up in learning the real secrets of the Flying Cloud when they go on a whale watch tour and their guide, Captain Bob, also takes them scavenging for wreckage after the storm. They make an amazing discovery of a sailors’ post box, a metal box where sailors used to leave messages for each other or objects that they wanted to have delivered home before they would arrive themselves. This particular box has been untouched in a niche in a rock for years, and it has information about the Flying Cloud. At first, Captain Bob is reluctant to part with it, but the Aldens persuade him that it should go to the museum. Captain Bob says that they should take it there on his behalf because the woman who runs the museum won’t want to see him.
The woman who runs the museum is amazed at the find and is eager to explore the contents of the box. However, when the Aldens leave her alone with it for a short time, they notice that a leather book that was in the box suddenly disappears. The woman denies that it was ever there, making the Aldens suspicious. Then, they later hear that someone broke into the museum and stole the entire contents of the box. Who is really responsible for the break-in, and what really happened on the Flying Cloud all those years ago?
Part of the mystery concerns how people deal with history, especially history that concerns them in a very personal way, when new information is uncovered that changes the story. That the woman who runs the museum is responsible for the book that disappears is obvious because she denies its existence when the Aldens know that they left it with her. The book turns out to be the log book of the Flying Cloud with its final entry, left behind in the post box when the crew began to doubt if they’d make it safely home. The story about the woman’s ancestor, the brave captain who was apparently the victim of a mutiny, isn’t quite what she had always believed, what her family told her, and what she herself had reported in a book that she wrote about the incident. It was partly true, but the final log entry contains new information that puts the whole situation into a different light. The woman struggles not only with the changing story but how that story affected her own behavior, and she worries that what she wrote in her book was a lie. A friend of hers comforts her by saying that it wasn’t a lie, it was the truth as they all understood it for years, just not the complete story, as it turns out. Benny’s proposal that the woman write a new book with the new information makes her feel better.
(Spoiler: It’s not really a mutiny if the captain is incapacitated, and the captain had already died of a severe illness by the time that the ship was wrecked. The person who was blamed for the mutiny wasn’t really at fault.)
The story also explains a little about scrimshaw for an educational element. They describe various objects that sailors could make from scrimshaw. When I first heard of it, it was described as being decorative, but the book talks about useful things, like sewing needles and pie crimpers, that were made with scrimshaw.
Mystery of the Pirate’s Ghost by Elizabeth Honness, 1966.
Abby
and Kit Hubbard’s mother has just received a letter telling her than her half
brother, Jonathan Pingree, has died and left her the old Pingree mansion. He has left over bequests to other family
members as well, and money to be held in trust for Abby and Kit. It’s exciting news, and the family may move
to live in the mansion they have inherited, although it partly depends on Mrs.
Hubbard’s other relatives.
Mrs. Hubbard, who was born Natalie Pingree, has never met her half-brother or half-sister. They were her father’s children, from his first marriage. She doesn’t know much about her father’s early life because he died when she was very young, and all that she knows about him is what her mother told her. Apparently, her father’s first marriage was not a happy one. He stayed in that marriage long enough for his first two children, Jonathan and Ann, to become teenagers. Then, he made sure that his first wife and children were settled comfortably enough in the family home and left them to move to Philadelphia to start a new life by himself. Sometime later, his first wife died and he married Natalie’s mother, who was much younger. After his death, Natalie and her mother moved in with her mother’s sister, Aunt Sophie. When Natalie got married, Aunt Sophie sent a wedding invitation to Johnathan and Ann, but they never came to the wedding or made any reply. Natalie assumed that they felt uncomfortable about their father’s remarriage and didn’t want to see her, which is why she’s so surprised about Jonathan leaving the family home to her. The only reason she can think of why he would do that is that neither he nor his sister ever married or had children of their own, so there was no one else to leave the house to. Both of them were more than 30 years older than Natalie, and Ann is now an elderly woman, still living in the house. Jonathan’s will has made provision for her as well, and the Hubbards go to see her at the Pingree mansion.
Mrs. Hubbard is pleasantly surprised that Ann is actually happy to see her. Ann Pingree explains that the reason why she and Jonathan never replied to the wedding invitation was that, until that invitation arrived, neither of them had known that their father had another child, and they felt awkward about it. However, Ann has been lonely since Jonathan’s death, being the last of the Pingrees, and she is glad to have Natalie and her husband and children with her and is eager to have them move into the mansion and live there. (Ann doesn’t live in the old mansion itself, but she does live nearby.)
Aunt Ann shows the family around the old mansion and explains more about its history and the history of the Pingree family. It turns out that the house, which has existed since Colonial times, although it has been burned, remodeled, and expanded over time. The house also has a number of secrets. Apparently, there used to be a tunnel running from the basement of the house to the beach that was used to bring in smuggled goods during the Colonial Era. There is also a hidden room behind a fireplace upstairs where the children of the family could hide during Indian attacks. (It doesn’t say how often that happened.) To the family’s surprise, Ann also tells them that the mansion is supposed to be haunted. The kids think it all sounds exciting, although Ann doesn’t explain much about the ghost the first time she mentions it. (Kit uses the phrase, “Honest Injun?” when asking Aunt Ann if she really means it when she says that the house is haunted. This isn’t a term that people use anymore because it isn’t considered appropriate.)
Mr. Hubbard is able to get his job transferred to a different branch of the company he works for, so the Hubbard family decides that they will move into the Pingree mansion. The kids like living by the beach, and their parents tell them that they can use the old ballroom of the house as a kind of rec room. Soon, they meet a couple of other children who live in cottages nearby, Chuck and Patty, and make friends with them. Chuck and Patty have already heard that the Pingree house is supposed to be haunted, although they’ve never seen anything really mysterious, just a light in the house once when they thought that the house was supposed to be empty.
The next time Aunt Ann comes to visit, the four children ask her to tell them about the ghost, and she tells them the story of the first Pingree to live at Pingree Point. This ancestor, also named Jonathan Pingree, built the original house in the late 1600s. He was a shipbuilder who owned several ships of his own, and he wanted to live near the sea. Later, he also became a privateer. When the kids call Jonathan a pirate, Aunt Anne agrees and explains that, unlike a pirate, Jonathan’s position as privateer was all perfectly legal because he had a Letter of Marque. (Yes, privateers operated within the law, but yes, they were also essentially pirates who raided other ships for their goods. In other words, they did the same things, but privateers did it with permission whereas ordinary pirates didn’t get permission. Historically, some privateers continued their pirating even after permission was revoked, so as Aunt Ann says, “the line between that and piracy was finely drawn.”) His son, Robert, was sailing on one of his father’s ships when it was taken by other pirates, and Robert was forced to join their crew. The family never saw Robert again and only found out what had happened from a fellow crew member who was set adrift and managed to make it back home. What happened to Robert is a mystery. His family didn’t know if he had really taken to the life of a pirate and couldn’t return home because he couldn’t face his family, if he had been killed in some fight, if he had been hung for piracy because he had gotten caught and couldn’t prove that he was forced into it. However, members of the family claimed that Robert’s spirit did return to the house and that he knocks at doors and windows, begging to be let back into his old home. Aunt Ann says that she’s never seen the ghost herself, but old houses can make all kinds of noises on windy nights, and that’s what she thinks the “ghost” is. As Chuck and Patty leave, they say, “we hope that old ghost doesn’t show up to frighten you.” Of course, we all know that it will because otherwise this book would have a different title.
One day, Kit is bored and starts playing around in the secret room, pretending that he’s hiding from American Indians. While Kit is in the secret room, he overhears the servants, John and his wife Essie, who have worked for the family for years, talking. Essie seems very upset and wants John not to do something that might risk their home and jobs, but John says that it’s too late and that they’re already “in it” and “can’t get out.” Kit tells Abby what he heard. That night, Abby hears banging and wailing during a storm and fears that it’s the ghost. Soon, other strange things happen, like a desk that mysteriously disappears and a cupboard that also mysteriously appears in its place. The children like John, and they don’t want to think badly of him, but he’s definitely doing something suspicious. One night, the children try to spy on him, and Abby once again hears the wailing and sees a mysterious, cloaked figure in the fog. Is it the ghost?
There are some interesting facets of this story that make it a little different from other children’s books of this type. For one thing, the children confide their concerns to their parents almost immediately, and the parents immediately believe them. In so many children’s mysteries, either the children decide to investigate mysterious events on their own before telling the parents or the parents disbelieve them, forcing the children to investigate on their own. It was kind of refreshing to see the family working together on this mystery. It actually makes the story seem more realistic to me because I can’t imagine that I would have been able to keep worries about mysterious things secret from my parents as a child, and they would have noticed if I was sneaking around, trying to investigate people, anyway. Abby and Kit do something dangerous by themselves before the story is over, but they also confide what they’ve done to their parents at the first opportunity and do not take the same foolish chance again.
The truth of John’s activities comes to light fairly quickly, although it takes a little longer for the family and the authorities to decide how to handle the situation. Investigating John brings to light some of the Pingree family secrets, and Abby and Kit soon discover the fate of Robert the pirate and the truth of his ghost. I’ll spoil the story a little and tell you that the ghost that Abby sees is apparently real, but it isn’t very scary. Once they learn the truth of what happened to Robert and see that his body gets a decent burial, the ghost appears to be at peace.
One thing that bothered me was the way that the characters talk about Native Americans in the book. It’s not the talk about Native American sometimes abducting children because I know that happened. It’s more how they picture that would happen. In the scene where Kit was hiding in the secret room, Kit imagines that the Indians were attracted to the house by the smell of his mother’s cooking and that he went into hiding while his mother fed them to avoid being abducted. As part of his scenario, he imagines that his mother would have wanted to “hold her nose against the Indian smell.” What? Where did that come from? There are all kinds of tropes about Native Americans in popular culture, from the “noble savage” image to that silly “Tonto talk” that actors did in old tv westerns, but since when are they supposed to smell bad? I’ve never seen characters in cheesy westerns hold their noses before, so what’s the deal? I tried Googling it to see if there’s a trope that I missed, but I couldn’t find anything about it. I’m very disappointed in you, Elizabeth Honness.
This book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
The Secrets of the Pirate Inn by Wylly Folk St. John, 1968.
One day, Jack, Amy, and Sally’s mother receives some surprising mail for her deceased father. The children never met their grandfather, who died before they were born, but the letters concern their grandfather’s Uncle Will. Uncle Will is an 88-year-old man, and one of the letters is from Miss Dibble from the Welfare Department in Port Oglethorpe, Georgia, the seaside town where Uncle Will is living. Miss Dibble is concerned that Uncle Will is no longer in his right mind and not capable of taking care of himself, and she is hoping that his family will persuade him to go live in a retirement home.
The children’s mother says that Uncle Will was an adventurer and a wild character even in his younger years, always playing games and doing eccentric things, so the situation may not be as bad as Miss Dibble thinks it is. The mother has never met Uncle Will, either, because her grandmother disapproved of him and discouraged him from hanging around the rest of the family years ago. She knows that her father always thought of him as being a fun uncle and that he used to own some land in North Georgia, where he found a priceless diamond.
The
second letter comes from Uncle Will himself.
It contains a strange rhyme and a letter to his deceased nephew, saying
that he sold his land and that the money from that sale and his diamond will go
to him upon his death. Uncle Will says
that Miss Dibble is pressuring him to turn over his money to the state and to go
live in the old folks’ home. He’s been
resisting her efforts, but he admits that he has gotten absent-minded and has forgotten
where he hid his money and diamond. He
knows that the rhyme he wrote down is a clue that he made to remind himself of
the hiding place, but now he’s confused, and he’s hoping that his nephew can
help him figure it out because it’s based on a game they used to play years
ago. Because it’s been so long since he
last spoke to the family, he has no idea that his nephew has died. Uncle Will also says that he is currently
living in an old pirate’s inn near Port Oglethorpe that has its own secret
passage where pirates used to shanghai sailors.
The children think that Uncle Will and his pirate’s inn sound exciting, and they’d like to go meet him. Their mother says that she’ll have to talk to their father about it, but she thinks that it might be a good idea for them to go and check up on Uncle Will and talk to Miss Dibble. She makes up her mind when Miss Dibble sends an urgent telegram in which she says that Uncle Will is under the delusion that someone is now hiding in his house and trying to kill him for his money. The mother and the children decide to go see Uncle Will, although the father of the family can’t go because he has a business trip.
Of course, Uncle Will isn’t delusional, and there is someone after his hidden money. The old inn where Uncle Will lives is called The Bucket of Blood. When the children and their mother arrive, Uncle Will pretends to be an old pirate parrot, calling out “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” (Yes, he’s definitely an eccentric, and it’s a little more understandable why Miss Dibble thinks he might not have all of his faculties.) They introduce themselves to Uncle Will, and Uncle Will is sorry to hear that his nephew is dead, but he is pleased to meet his nephew’s daughter and her children. The children tell him that they want to help him to solve the rhyme and find his money.
The inn is full of fascinating things, although it’s lacking in modern conveniences. The mother asks Uncle Will if they can stay there, saying that they’ve brought sleeping bags with them. Uncle Will tells them that they can use the bedrooms upstairs but warns them that he’s worried that someone might be hiding somewhere upstairs (as Miss Dibble had said earlier). Uncle Will rarely goes upstairs these days because he finds it difficult to climb up there. However, the children realize that Uncle Will is not deluded when they notice footprints in the dust on the stairs, meaning that someone has been there recently. However, the footprints seem to be only going up, not down. When the search upstairs, they don’t find anyone. Where the footprints left by a ghost? Was someone really hiding in the inn, and if so, how did they leave?
There is a live action made-for-tv Disney movie based on this book. You can see the entire movie online at Internet Archive. The movie is different from the book in a number of ways. In the movie, there are three children, but it’s two boys and a girl (a brother and sister and the brother’s friend) instead of two girls and a boy (all siblings), and none of them are related to the old Irish sea captain living in the old inn. (Note: The child characters in the movie, Scott, Tippy, and Catfish, also appeared in another made-for-tv Disney movie called The Strange Monster of Strawberry Cove, which was also based on a book for children, The Mad Scientists’ Club, but that book was written by a different author, and none of those children actually appeared in either this book or that one.) The old captain in the movie has recently inherited the inn from his brother. The location was moved to Louisiana instead of Georgia, and the treasure they’re looking for was hidden by the pirate Jean Lafitte. There are rhyming clues to the treasure’s location, but they’re not the same as the rhymes in the book. The money and the diamond are also hidden in separate locations in the book. In fact, although the bulk of the money is in one place, some of it is hidden in other places.
In the book, there are also extra characters, a man named Miles who is staying with Uncle Will while he’s working on writing a book and a young runaway nicknamed Hop who is afraid that he will be sent to another foster home like the one he ran away from if Miss Dibble catches him. At first, I suspected one of these characters of being the villain of the story, trying to steal Uncle Will’s money. However, the real villain is someone we don’t really know until the end, although he has connections to other people in the story. This is different from the movie, where the villain is a suspect we meet and see often before his guilt is established. Because of this, I think that the movie was playing more fair with the readers about the mystery.
Near the beginning of this book, the characters reference The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis (also the author of Auntie Mame), which was published only a few years before this book was. Sally thought that the book was hilarious, but Jack thought that it was boring because the boy in the story, who was his age, “didn’t have a thing to do every day but listen to grownups talking.” I think this is meant to be a sign that the children’s parents are pretty modern and progressive, letting their children read a book about divorce and mixed-up family life in the 1960s. At one point, the mother tells Jack not to use euphemistic swear words like “Cripes!” just because characters in books to it. It gets on the mother’s nerves because she thinks that “They sound even worse than the words they’re being used to avoid.” She actually tells Jack, “When you’re old enough to swear by any words you like, I hope you’ll manage without euphemisms.” I mentioned in my page of 1960s children’s books that the 1960s were a turning point both in society and children’s literature, and this is an example of people’s changing attitudes. Sally, the oldest of the children, is allowed to wear lipstick, and Amy, who is twelve, is also allowed to wear it, although she thinks of it as being too much trouble to bother most of the time. (I can relate. I still sometimes throw out old make-up that I just plain forgot that I had because I’m too busy and preoccupied most of the time to think about it.)
You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner by John Malam, 2002.
This
picture book, which is part of a series, explains what it would have been like
to be a pirate’s prisoner in the 18th century. It sets the stage by casting the reader in
the role of a Spanish ship captain in 1716.
The reason why the reader is cast as a Spanish captain, captured by English pirates, is because England and Holland had been at war with Spain until 1714. During the war, the government of England (as well as Holland and France) authorized some ship captains to act as privateers, conducting raids on Spanish ships and outposts. When the war ended and the privateers were dismissed from service, some of them continued to act as independent pirates.
The book explains the geography of the “Spanish Main,” the area between the southern coast of North America and the northern coast of South America – basically, the Caribbean Sea and its islands and the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish galleons in the 18th century carried gold and treasures from the Americas to Spain as well as timber from the rainforests and goods that were transported to the Americas across the Pacific Ocean, such as spices and silk. All of these goods made Spanish treasure ships tempting targets for English pirates.
As a Spanish ship’s captain, there were a few precautions that you could take against pirate attack. One of the most basic was traveling as part of a convoy because pirates would be more likely to attack a lone ship than one that was part of a group. A fleet of ships would have a warship traveling with them for protection, and the closer your ship sailed to the warship, the less likely a pirate ship would try to separate you from the group and attack.
If the
worst situation happened and the ship was taken by pirates, a captain could try
to dress like other members of the crew to disguise his rank, but that didn’t
always work. The captain of the ship was
in danger of being taken captive because he might have information that the pirates
would find useful, like the exact route of other ships in a convoy.
The gruesome part of this book (and the source of the title, because this series basically focuses on the gruesome parts of history) is the part where they describe different forms of torture that pirates might use on a ship’s captain to convince him to tell them what they wanted to know. Besides the direct physical abuse, pirates could also keep a captive in squalid conditions to make him weaker, more vulnerable, and exposed to disease. In the end, they might simply decide to maroon the captive somewhere, even if they got the information they were after.
However, pirates could also face gruesome fates if they were caught. They could be hung and their bodies displayed publicly, as a warning to others.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 