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Samantha Learns a Lesson

American Girls

Samantha Learns a Lesson by Susan S. Adler, 1986.

This is part of the Samantha, An American Girl series.

Samantha attends Miss Crampton’s Academy for Girls in Mount Bedford. She is doing well and has some friends at school, but she misses her friend Nellie. She knows how poor Nellie’s family is and worries about how they are doing.

One day, Samantha comes home from school to a surprise: Nellie has returned to town with her family. Samantha’s grandmother recommended Nellie’s family to a friend, Mrs. Van Sicklen, who has hired Nellie’s father as a driver and Nellie’s mother as a maid. Nellie and her sisters will also be helping with household chores. They will also get the chance to go to school, although they will be attending public school and not the private school that Samantha attends.

When they begin attending school, Nellie’s younger sisters do fine in the first grade, where they are expected to be beginners, but Nellie herself has trouble in the second grade. Nellie is a little old for second grade, so the other children make fun of her for being there, and she is so nervous that she makes embarrassing mistakes in front of her teacher and the other students. Nellie thinks that perhaps she’s too old to start going to school, but Samantha realizes that what she needs is a little extra help.

Samantha talks to her own teacher and explains the situation. She says that she would like to help teach Nellie what she needs to know, but she is not sure what Nellie needs to know in order to pass the second grade. Samantha’s teacher, Miss Stevens, thinks that it is nice that Samantha wants to help Nellie and gives her a set of second grade readers to study with pages marked for assignments. Samantha tells her grandmother what she is planning to do, and she says that it is fine, as long as the extra tutoring doesn’t interfere with Nellie’s house work too much.

Nellie accepts Samantha’s help at their secret, private “school” that Samantha calls “Mount Better School.” During their lessons, Samantha discovers that Nellie is very good at math because she used to have to help her mother with shopping and had to keep track of her money. Nellie cannot always come for lessons because of her work, but Samantha’s tutoring helps her to improve.

One day, when Samantha is walking home from school with Nellie and her sisters, a mean girl from Samantha’s school, Edith, sees them and criticizes Samantha for spending time with servants. She says that her mother would never allow her to play with servants. Samantha asks her grandmother what Edith means, and her grandmother says that Edith is a young lady. When Samantha asks why she is allowed to play with Nellie, her grandmother says that they are not really playing, that Samantha is helping Nellie, which makes it different. That explanation doesn’t entirely satisfy Samantha.

However, her grandmother is both understanding of the help that Samantha has been giving to Nellie and serious about the need to help others. When Edith’s mother and other ladies of the neighborhood come to visit and complain about Nellie’s family and how Samantha is spending time with them, Samantha’s grandmother defends them and says that Samantha is doing good.

Meanwhile, Samantha’s school is preparing for a public speaking contest with the theme “Progress in America.” To prepare for her speech, Samantha asks her grandmother, her Uncle Gard, and other people what they think about progress and what the best inventions are. They mention inventions like the telephone, electric lights, automobiles, and factories. Samantha is fascinated by the idea of factories and the variety of products that they can make. However, when Samantha reads her speech to Nellie, Nellie is not nearly so enthusiastic about factories as a sign of progress. Nellie used to work in a factory herself, and she knows that they are not pleasant places. She tells Samantha how factories are noisy and how dangerous the machines are for the workers. The factory workers are also very poorly paid, which is why the products they make are so cheap.

Nellie’s stories about factories bother Samantha. When it is time for the public speaking contest, Samantha delivers a changed version of her speech in which she discusses the dangers of child labor and how some form of progress, particularly ones that endanger children, are not good forms of progress. Samantha’s thoughtful speech wins the contest, and her grandmother understands that Samantha has been learning things from Nellie even while teaching her.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about education and child labor during the early 1900s.

The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Meet Samantha

American Girls

Meet Samantha by Susan S. Adler, 1986.

This is the first book in the Samantha, An American Girl series.

Samantha Parkington is a nine-year-old orphan. She belongs to a wealthy family and lives with her grandmother, called Grandmary, in the Hudson Valley in New York. Grandmary is often strict with Samantha, trying to teach her to be a proper young lady, but Samantha finds it difficult. Samantha’s grandmother loves her, but she has very old-fashioned ideas about how girls should behave. When Samantha wants to try making and selling boomerangs in order to earn money to buy a doll, using instructions from The Boys’ Handy Book, her grandmother stops her, saying that young ladies do not earn money. She would rather that Samantha earn the doll as a reward for doing what she is told and practicing her piano lessons. Samantha also has an uncle, Uncle Gard, who has a girlfriend named Cornelia. Cornelia is a more modern woman, who would see nothing wrong with Samantha wanting to earn some money.

One of her grandmother’s servants, a black woman named Jessie, is kind and motherly to Samantha. Jessie often patches Samantha up after her various escapades and mishaps. Jessie’s husband, Lincoln, is a train porter, and Jessie tells Samantha exciting stories about the places that Lincoln has seen in his work, like New Orleans. Sometimes, Lincoln brings Samantha post cards from these places.

Samantha soon learns that a new girl her age is coming to a neighbor’s house. She has been wanting a playmate, so she goes over to the neighbor’s house to introduce herself. The new girl’s name is Nellie, but she has come to be a servant for the neighbors, the Rylands. Nellie’s family is poor, so Nellie needs to work as a maid help her parents earn money and support her younger sisters. Samantha is surprised when Nellie describes her family’s circumstances in New York City. Samantha has never been poor, and she doesn’t know what it’s like to be cold and hungry. Nellie says that the air in the countryside is better for her, and she gets better food working for the Rylands. Nellie tells Samantha that she has never been to school, and Samantha offers to teach her.

Then, Jessie suddenly announces that she is leaving her job at Grandmary’s house. Grandmary doesn’t seem surprised, but Samantha is. Jessie offers no explanation for leaving, and when Samantha tries to ask, Grandmary and the other servants do not want to talk about it. Samantha tells Nellie about Jessie leaving, coming up with fanciful reasons why she might leave her job, but Nellie offers the practical explanation that Jessie might be having a baby. Nellie knows more about it than Samantha because she has younger sisters, but she acknowledges that adults of this time period do not like to talk about people having babies, particularly in front of children. Neither Nellie nor Samantha entirely knows why.

However, Samantha is still concerned about Jessie. Samantha doesn’t know where Jessie lives, but Nellie does. The two girls sneak out one evening to visit Jessie and learn for themselves what the matter is. This is the first time that Samantha has been to the part of her town where black people live, further opening her eyes to the lives of people from lower classes of society. Nellie is a little surprised at how Samantha, who is more educated, sometimes knows so little about the ways that other people live.

It turns out that Jessie does have a new baby. Jessie reassures Samantha that she and the baby are fine, but since her husband needs to travel because of his job as a train porter, she needs to stay at home with her baby now. Samantha thinks of a way to help Jessie keep her job and care for her baby at the same time, persuading her grandmother to let Jessie come back. Unfortunately, Nellie soon has to leave because Mrs. Ryland doesn’t think that she’s strong enough to work as a maid and decides to send her back to her family in New York City. Samantha gives Nellie her new doll as a going-away present, and she is very concerned about how Nellie and her family will manage.

In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about how wealthy people and their servants lived during the early 1900s.

Something that occurred to me later is that Jessie is about the right age to be Addy‘s daughter, from another American Girls series. I don’t think that there’s a real connection between Jessie and Addy because the Samantha books were written before the Addy series. However, when I stopped to think about their relative ages (Addy would be about 49 years old in 1904, and Jessie is probably in her 20s), it occurred to me that if Addy had a daughter, she would probably be an adult at this time, and she might be doing something very similar to what Jessie is doing, working as a seamstress.

The book is currently available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Kate Greenaway’s Book of Games

Kate Greenaway’s Book of Games by Kate Greenaway, 1889.

A book about children’s games with rules and general pastimes. The book doesn’t distinguish between the two, but I do because, to me, games have specific rules whereas more general pastimes and toys do not.

Many of the games and pastimes would be familiar to people in modern times and are still popular. Some games are like playground games (some of them are even still played on playgrounds today) that require running and motions, and others are more talking games (some of those have become classic road trip games, played in the car). Pastimes include making soap bubbles, flying kites, and using swings.

The book includes games like I Love my Love with an “A”, Blind Man’s Buff, Frog in the Middle, Russian Scandal (This is an old name for the Game of Telephone, before the invention of the telephone became really popular. I’ve also heard it as Russian Gossip, although I don’t know why it’s specifically “Russian.”), French and English (which is basically Capture the Flag), Oranges and Lemons (which is played like London Bridge is Falling Down, only with a different rhyme), and Twenty Questions. Some of the less familiar ones, especially to young Americans today, might be Puss in the Corner (a game that involves players running and changing places with each other and the person who is left without a place being “it” or the “puss”), Mary’s Gone A-Milking (a chase game with a song), What Is My Thought Like? (a talking/guessing game that involves creativity), and The Old Soldier and Judge and Jury (which are both talking games with words that are forbidden to say).

One of the interesting things about this book, besides noticing which games are still played and which are more obscure now, is that the children in the pictures are actually wearing clothes that are from an earlier part of the 19th century from when the book was written. This is a classic feature of Kate Greenaway’s illustrations, also seen in her other books. Modern people who are less familiar with the evolution of 19th century clothing might not notice that detail.

This book is still in print in modern times. It also available to borrow for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

For more information about Victorian games in general, see the Victorian Games section of my Historical Games site. History and games are both hobbies of mine.

Posted on by TracyC

Felicity’s Craft Book

American Girls

Felicity’s Craft Book by Rebecca Sample Bernstein and Jodi Evert, 1994.

This is a companion book to the Felicity, An American Girl series.  It explains about the types of crafts that people would do in Colonial America and gives instructions for projects that readers can make at home.

In the beginning of the book, there is a brief history of crafting in America.  It explains that, in the earliest days of the American colonies, people had to get most of their goods from Europe because they had to spend their time and energy on building homes and establishing farms in order to survive.  However, as the colonies became more established, people were more able to make goods for themselves, both in their own homes and as professional craftspeople.  By the time that Felicity lived, during the late 1700s, there were many skilled craftspeople, and those craftspeople also trained new people in their professions in apprenticeships.

Before presenting craft projects that readers can make, the book also offers a few tips for safety and neatness while making things. The crafts are also divided into sections relating to topics like writing, sewing, games and toys, and scented objects that you can make with plants.

The projects explained in this book include:

A quill pen and two types of ink – The book gives instructions for making ink from different types of berries (such as raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries, which make red or purple ink) and walnut shells (which makes a brown ink).

A wax seal – To be used with sealing wax or wax from a candle. These were used to seal letters before the invention of envelopes with glue. (I know that there are people and companies that still make these because I have one myself and the sealing wax to use with it.)

Game of Graces – A hoop with a pair of sticks that were used for a tossing game.

Cup and Ball Game – A common toy in which a cup is attached to the end of a short stick and a ball is tied to it.  Players have to move the toy around and make the ball swing into the cup.

Kites – Made with lightweight paper.

Folding Fan – Made with poster board and ribbon.

Fancy Straw Hat – Explains how to decorate a hat with flowers and ribbon.

Fruit Pyramid – Used as a table centerpiece.

Cross-Stitch Sampler – A basic sampler using only the cross-stitch. (Colonial girls would create more elaborate samplers to show off the range of stitches they could make.)

Sachet – A small bag of potpourri (sweet-smelling dried plants).  Colonists would put sachets into trunks and wardrobes where they were storing their clothes to make them smell nice.  (Some people still do this in modern times.)  In a later part of the book, they also give instructions for making potpourri with herbs and flower petals.

Friendship Pincushion – An embroidered pincushion.

Tussie-Mussie – A small bouquet, like the kind that bridesmaids and flower girls might carry.  (The book says that people in Colonial times might carry one or maybe a pomander ball if they went to visit a sick person because they had an idea that breathing bad air would spread sickness and they were trying to freshen the air with fresh scents.  That’s not quite how sickness is spread, but they were partly correct about sicknesses being airborn.)

Pomander Ball – An orange scented and decorated with spices and cloves.  Besides freshening the air, they can also make nice decorations.

In the sections about different types of projects, there is additional historical information about life and crafts in Colonial America. Because, in the books, Felicity’s grandfather owns a plantation and one of the books takes place there, the craft book also has a section about plantations that includes a brief description of plantation life and slavery, noting that the lifestyle and pastimes that plantation owners enjoyed would not have been possible without their slaves to take care of the plantation chores for them.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Molly’s Cook Book

American Girls

Molly’s Cook Book by Polly Athan, Rebecca Sample Bernstein, Terri Braun, Jodi Evert, and Jeanne Thieme, 1994.

This is a companion book to the Molly, An American Girl series.  It has recipes from the 1940s that people would have made during World War II.  A section at the beginning of the book explains how shortages and rationing during the war changed the way that people shopped for food and cooked.  For example, people on the homefront didn’t have many canned foods because many canned foods were shipped overseas to soldiers and much of the metal that would have been used to make more cans for food was being used to make other war supplies.  Because certain types of food were in short supply, individuals and families would receive ration books, which contained stamps that represented which types of foods they would be able to buy and how much.  Cookbooks printed during the war focused on creating meals that used little or no rationed products.  People also planted Victory gardens and grew their own vegetables to fill out their meals.

The cookbook is divided into sections for different meals:

Breakfast – Fried Potatoes, Toad-in-a-Hole (not the British dish – this is eggs cooked in a frame of bread, what I first learned to make as Eggs-in-a-Frame), Fried Bacon, Quick Coffee Cake, and Frozen Fruit Cups.

Dinner – Vitamin A Salad (made with carrots and lemon gelatin), Deviled Eggs, Carrot Curls and Celery Fans, Vitality Meat Loaf, Parsley Biscuits, Volcano Potatoes, and Applesauce Cupcakes.

Favorite Foods – French toast, Waldorf salad, PBJ Roll-ups, Jelly Flags, Victory Garden Soup, Nut-and-Raisin Bread, and Fruit Bars.

In each section of recipes, there is more historical information about food in World War II.  There is also a section in the back with party ideas from the 1940s.

For more World War II recipes, I recommend The 1940’s Experiment, which is a blog with recipes from World War II and an explanation of how they can be used to both save money and lose weight because they were intentionally designed to make maximum use of limited resources, both economically and nutritionally. In Molly’s Cook Book, there is a chart that government experts during World War II used to give people guidance on how to budget their food money among seven food groups. The diet that they recommended, both nutritionally and to limit certain rationed foods, was heavy on vegetables and fruits and lighter on meats, grains, and dairy products. This type of diet is basically in keeping with modern nutritional advice, which also emphasizes the importance of vegetables and fruit.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The Ravenmaster’s Secret

The Ravenmaster’s Secret by Elvira Woodruff, 2003.

Forrest Harper is the son of the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London in 1735.  The story begins by explaining the tradition of keeping ravens at the Tower of London because of the superstition that the Tower would be conquered by its enemies if the ravens ever abandoned it.  This superstition led to the creation of the job of Ravenmaster, who looks after a flock of ravens that live at the Tower with wings clipped so that they can’t fly away.

Forrest Harper lives at the Tower with his parents and sisters, training to become a Ravenmaster, like his father.  He likes the ravens, and they like him.  He is pretty good at caring for ravens, but there is something that bothers him: he thinks that he isn’t brave enough and that others think that he is a coward, too.  He is smaller than the other boys and is often teased.  He has trouble cutting up the squirrels that the rat catcher’s boy (his only real friend, although his mother doesn’t approve of him) brings to him to feed to the ravens.  Even though it’s necessary, Forrest doesn’t like the sight of blood and feels kind of sorry for the squirrels.  Worse still, when Forrest’s family attends the public hangings (which were treated as a kind of festival day with music and entertainment in Forrest’s time), Forrest is unable to look at the criminals who are being hanged.  The one time he does try it, he throws up, and again, the other boys tease him mercilessly for it.  Forrest’s problem, as readers will see, isn’t so much that he’s a coward as he has more empathy than the other boys, both for animals and people, and that isn’t really as much of a problem as he believes.  His father tells him to ignore the bullies because they are foolish, and their foolishness will show in time.

Forrest sometimes dreams of going out into the wider world, beyond the Tower, where he could do something brave that would impress everyone.  The rat catcher’s boy, whose real name is Ned although most people just call him Rat, also dreams of running away because he is an orphan, treated harshly by his master and always in danger of being turned over to the chimney sweep to be used as a climbing boy.  He doesn’t think that Forrest has a real problem because his life at the Tower is pretty good, living comfortably at the Tower with his parents, whatever the local bullies say.  Still, the two boys often imagine what it would be like to go to sea together and have adventures.  When there is an announcement that a new prisoner will be arriving at the Tower, a Scottish Jacobite rebel, Forrest thinks that helping to guard a dangerous rebel will make the Tower bullies respect him.

To Forrest’s surprise and embarrassment, this rebel actually turns out to be a girl.  She is the daughter of the rebel Owen Stewart, who is being held in a different tower at the Tower of London (the Tower of London is actually a fortress with multiple towers – she is imprisoned in Bloody Tower and her father is in Bell Tower).  She has been charged with treason, along with her father and uncle.  Forrest isn’t happy about being given the task of taking food to a girl prisoner. 

However, Madeline McKay Stewart, the girl prisoner, is pretty tough in her own right.  Although Maddy’s been separated from her father and uncle and all three of them are likely to be executed, she is being pretty brave about it.  She talks to Rat and Forrest.  She is interested in Forrest’s pet raven, Tuck, and tells him about how she used to feed baby owls back home.  She talks about her life and family in Scotland, and Forrest realizes that he’s starting to think of her as a friend instead of an enemy to be guarded.

While Forrest is used to hearing English people criticize the Scots for being “savage,” he is astonished and a bit offended when Maddy talks about English people being “evil.”  For the first time, it makes him think of the situation from the other side.  He knows that not all English people are evil and realizes, having seen that Maddy actually has refined manners, that Scottish people aren’t “savage.”  One day, at Maddy’s request, he takes a message to her father in exchange for her ring, which he plans to sell in order to buy Ned back from the chimney sweep after the rat catcher loses his term of indenture to the chimney sweep in a game of cards, sparing him from the horrible life and health problems that the young climbing boys suffer.  Then, Owen Stewart gives Forrest a message to take back to Maddy.  Without really meaning to, Forrest realizes that he has suddenly become a go-between for the rebels and could be considered a conspirator under English law.

As Forrest considers the fate that lies ahead for Maddy and the nature of war between England and the Scottish rebels, it occurs to him that the adults in his life have often done the opposite of the things that they have always taught him were important.  His father always emphasized fairness, yet the war and Maddy’s possible execution are unfair.  Maddy shares Forrest’s feeling that the world might be a better place if people didn’t become adults and abandon their values.

Then, Maddy’s father and uncle are shot while attempting to escape, and Maddy is left completely alone.  Forrest feels badly for Maddy.  Soon after, he is unexpectedly approached by a carpenter who seems to know that he has become friends with Maddy.  The carpenter, who is a stranger to Forrest, tells him that Maddy will soon be executed by beheading but that he has a way to save her life.  Forrest has to decide if he is willing to trust the stranger and save Maddy, knowing that doing so would make him a traitor himself.

One of the parts of this story that interested me was how Forrest noted the hypocrisy in the adults around him as he was trying to decide what he should do.  Qualities that adults often praise and try to instill in their children are often ignored in the way that the adults live and even in how they treat other children, like Ned and Maddy.  Abandoning values, even the ones that they really want their children to have, isn’t something that adults have to do as they grow older, but it is something that some adults do if they think they must in order to live as they want to live or accomplish something that they want to accomplish.  The adults who think that Maddy should be beheaded would probably say that they were doing it for the greater good in promoting their cause against the rebels.  However, treating Ned as a piece of disposable property is something that they mostly do because they can and because they know that there is nothing that Ned can do to stop them.  Ned actually tries to repay his indenture legally with money that Forrest gives him, but although the sweep accepts the money, he refuses to let him go, saying that no one will take Ned’s word over his and that he could always use the money to make sure that Ned is hung as a thief if he tries to make trouble.  It is this type of attitude and situation that make the children realize that they are on their own to solve their problems and that working within the law is not going to be an option for them because the law is not just and it is not on their side.  It’s a frustrating situation, and I often feel frustrated when I encounter this type of thing in books, but fortunately, things do turn out well in the end.

This is one of those coming-of-age stories where a boy must decide what he stands for and where he really belongs.  Through Maddy and the inscription on her ring, which means “Face Your Destiny,” Forrest comes to understand the destiny that is right for him as he helps both Maddy and Ned escape to a better life elsewhere. 

The book also includes some interesting historical information. There’s a map of the Tower of London in the front of the book, and in the back, a short history of the Tower with information about famous prisoners and escapes. There is also a glossary of English and Scottish words that modern children (especially American children) might not know, such as breeches, wench, loch, and tattie-bogle (scarecrow).


The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.  (To borrow a book through Internet Archive, you have to sign up for an account, but it’s free, and then you read the book in your browser window.)

Spoiler: In the last chapter of the book, it explains what happened to the characters after the story ends.  Forrest does become the Ravenmaster after his father, realizing that it is the right kind of life for him and that he no longer desires to have adventures outside the Tower.  He has a wife and daughter, and years later, he receives a message from Ned, who says that he has become a captain in the Royal Navy and that Maddy has gone to live in the colonies with other Stewarts (something that my own Jacobite ancestors did, which is how I got to where I am now).

Posted on by TracyC

The Time of the Forest

The Time of the Forest by Tom McGowen, 1988.

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.

Posted on by TracyC

Pirates

Magic Tree House Research Guide

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.


Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner

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.