Posted on by TracyC

Mystery on Skull Island

Mystery on Skull Island by Elizabeth McDavid Jones, 2001.

This book is part of the American Girl History Mysteries series.

It’s 1724, and twelve-year-old Rachel Howell is traveling to where her father lives in Charles Town, South Carolina. Rachel has been living with her grandparents in New York since her mother died seven years earlier. Her father also used to live in New York, but after his wife’s death, he decided to move to South Carolina, hoping to start a new life. Now, her father has established himself in South Carolina and wants Rachel to come and live with him. Rachel has wanted to live with her father for some time, but she’s nervous because she doesn’t know what life in South Carolina will be like.

Rachel’s new life has a terrifying beginning when the ship that is taking her to Charles Town is attacked by pirates. The pirates force the passengers on board to hand over jewelry and other expensive items. They even take Rachel’s pendant, which belonged to her deceased mother. Fortunately, the pirates don’t hurt or kill anyone and let the ship go once they’ve taken everything of interest to them.

When Rachel arrives in Charles Town, she and her father have difficulty recognizing each other at first, but they are happy to finally be together. Rachel’s father is appalled when he hears about the pirates stealing Rachel’s mother’s necklace, but he is relieved that Rachel is all right. He explains that piracy has been a serious problem to shipping in the area. The local government has tried to combat the problem with harsh punishments, hanging many offenders. However, the pirates have money, and so local businesses still tolerate their presence.

The talk of pirates is shocking, but Rachel is soon in for another shock when her father tells her that he has become engaged and that Rachel will soon have a new mother. Rachel had been looking forward to having some time alone with her father to get to know him again, so she is not pleased at the news, but the engagement is the main reason why her father has sent for her. He wants Rachel to have a mother to care for her and for them to live as a complete family again. He tells Rachel that his fiance, Miranda LeBoyer, is from Philadelphia. She will be arriving in Charles Town soon with her aunt.

Rachel’s father is often busy with his work in the shipping industry, but he grants Rachel more freedom than she had with her grandparents, so she is able to explore her new town and make some new friends. The first friends she makes are the Pugh family, especially the daughter, Sally, who is about Rachel’s age. The Pughs own a local tavern, and Rachel often goes to visit them, sometimes helping with chores and learning to cook. She tells Sally about her worries about her new stepmother, but Sally says that she might not be so bad.

Like her life in South Carolina, Rachel’s first encounter with the woman her father plans to marry takes a disturbing turn. First, Miranda seems to disapprove of Sally and her brother, and Rachel fears that she will interfere with their friendship. Then, her father’s new business partner, Mr. Craven, stops by, and Rachel notices that Miranda seems to both recognize and dislike Mr. Craven. She overhears a conversation between the two of them in which Miranda calls Mr. Craven a “scoundrel” and refers to some kind of illegal dealings in his past. Yet, when Rachel’s father tries to ask Miranda what they’re talking about, Miranda lies and says that they’re discussing the weather and hurricanes that occur in Charles Town. Rachel worries about why Miranda would lie to her father and what kind of dishonest business Mr. Craven might be doing. What are the secrets that people in this town are hiding, and is Miranda really what she seems to be? With the help of her new friends, will Rachel find out the truth before it’s too late?

There is a section in the back of the book with historical information about piracy and life in South Carolina during the 18th century.

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

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

Pirates Past Noon

Magic Tree House

#4 Pirates Past Noon by Mary Pope Osborne, 1994.

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.

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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.

Posted on by TracyC

The Best Book of Pirates

The Best Book of Pirates by Barnaby Howard, 2002, 2006.

This is an easy and informative non-fiction picture book about pirates.  Rather than focusing on any particular time period or geographic area, the book gives a broad overview.  In the beginning, it explains a little about different groups of pirates through history, including Vikings, Corsairs, Buccaneers, and Privateers.  There is also a brief explanation of the Pirate Round, a sea route often taken by pirates during the late 17th century and into the 18th century.  The route led from North America and the Caribbean to Africa, circling the coast of South Africa to Madagascar and on to the Middle East and India.  (If you’ve seen the movie Cutthroat Island, the crew will basically be taking this route when the movie ends, heading from the Caribbean to Madagascar.)

There is a diagram of a pirate ship from the late 17th century, showing what it would have looked like on the inside, and there are also examples of Jolly Roger flags, which were designed by individual pirates as personal identification, typically including skulls and skeletons to frighten their victims.  There is also some general information about what life would be like on board a pirate ship and the types of weapons they might have.

Then, the book begins to focus more on groups of pirates that operated in specific geographical areas and some of the more famous pirates from history.  The Barbary pirates (also called Barbary corsairs) were Muslims who raided Christian ships along the coast of North Africa and the Mediterranean during the 1500s.  Among the most famous Barbary pirates were a pair of brothers called Barbarossa (“Red Beard”).  Sometimes, European and American pirate ships that went to Africa to find gold and ivory also entered the slave trade.

In the section about the Spanish Main, it explains how privateers and pirates raided Spanish ships taking Aztec treasures from Mexico to Spain.  Buccaneers were specifically pirates who raided ships in the Caribbean.  Their name came from the type of fires they used when cooking meat (boucan or buccan).

There were also Asian pirates who raided the coasts of China and the Philippines and areas around the Indian Ocean.  Chinese pirates and Dayak pirates from Borneo were powerful in the region until the 1840s, when the British Navy destroyed many of their ships.

There is a section in the book specifically about female pirates.  Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who sailed with “Calico Jack” Rackham, were famous.  Grace O’Malley was a famous Irish pirate who was also an Irish noblewoman.  Madame Cheng was a Chinese pirate who took over her husband’s fleet after his death (but because this is a children’s book, it doesn’t mention her previous career).  Alwilda was a Medieval Swedish princess who turned pirate after her father tried to make her marry a man she did not want to marry (although her story may only be legend).

The book also talks about the famous stories of pirates burying treasure, although it says that pirates would usually spend their money quickly, sell items for money they could spend, or gamble it all away.

At the end of the book, there is a short section about modern pirates and how their goals and tools of the trade have changed.

The book isn’t very long, but I think that it provides a good, general overview of the subject of pirates throughout history, and the pictures are fascinating and detailed.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Pirate Diary

PirateDiary

Pirate Diary: The Journal of Jake Carpenter by Richard Platt, 2001.

Young Jake Carpenter lives with his father in North Carolina in 1716.  His mother is dead, and his father is a medical doctor.  His father wants him to become a doctor as well, but he has decided that it’s important to the boy’s education that he see something of the world first, so he is allowing Jake to go to sea with his uncle, Will, who is a sailor.  Jake is excited about the prospect, and Will has told him many stories about the sea.

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Jake isn’t allowed to bring much with him because there is limited space on board the ship for personal belongings, and there are many things that Jake has to get used to, like sleeping in a hammock, the names for all the different parts of the ship, seasickness, the poor quality of food on the ship, and using the horn lanterns which are safer for candles on board ship but don’t cast much light.  Jake makes friends with Abraham, the cook’s boy, who promises him extra food in exchange for teaching him to read.  Jake’s main job on the ship is to help the carpenter, so he begins learning his trade.

When the ship is underway, Jake and his uncle learn that the captain is running from debts and that the ship is carrying contraband.  Jake doesn’t think that smuggling is a very serious crime because the main purpose is to avoid paying extra taxes on certain types of goods, and other members of the crew say that it isn’t fair for Americans to continue paying taxes to England when the king doesn’t really care about them or what they want.  The ship sails the Caribbean, but crew members say that they try to avoid docking at English-controlled ports, like the ones in Jamaica, so they won’t have to pay the customs fees. Abraham says that even if they were caught with their contraband, the authorities would likely look the other way if they offer them a share.  Will tells Jake that the captain of the ship will most likely hold back their wages in order to keep them with the ship for as long as possible, like he does with other sailors.

Discipline on board the ship is harsh and arbitrary, according to the captain’s whims.  When Will speaks up to save Jake from a harsh flogging, he himself is flogged and abandoned in a small boat.  Jake believes that his uncle will die because they left him at sea with no provisions!

Then, the ship is captured by pirates!

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Far from making things worse, Jake’s situation and that of the rest of the crew actually improves because of the pirate attack.  With the captain captured, his cruel punishments are over, and members of his crew eagerly join the pirates in the capture.  The pirates ask the crew about the treatment their captain has given them, saying that it will help them to decide what to do with him, and crew members explain the cruelties they have suffered, including what the captain did to Will.  They end up marooning the captain and his equally-cruel second mate on an island with drinking water.

As Jake’s father predicted, Jake gets to see a lot and learn a lot about life and death during his time at sea, perhaps even more than expected while under the command of the pirates.  He gets some experience in dealing with injuries as he has to help the ship’s carpenter saw off the leg of a man whose wound was too infected to treat in any other way, although the man later died anyway.  Later, the pirates join up with other pirate ships, and Jake participates in a raid on a Spanish treasure fleet!

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It’s not all excitement, and Jake spends some time talking about the routine chores that sailors did and how they would pass the time on board ship when nothing else was going on.  He does get to see St. Elmo’s Fire on the upper rigging of the ship, and the crew spots a “mermaid” once on a misty day.

An offer of amnesty for those willing to give up pirating allows Jake and other members of the crew to return home where he learns that his uncle has managed to survive after all!

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In the back of the book is a section with historical information.  It explains the history and geography of the American Colonies, where Jake lived and the history of piracy from the first known pirates to the privateers and buccaneers that led to the golden age of piracy in the 18th century.  Jake is a fictional character, but some of the pirates that Jake met in the story were real people, and the section in the back explains more about them.  The book is part of a series of historical picture books.

Posted on by TracyC

The Case of the Wandering Werewolf

wanderingwerewolfThe Case of the Wandering Werewolf by Drew Stevenson, 1987.

A boy called Chips approaches Raymond with the story that there might be a werewolf in Lost Woods, outside of town. Chips likes animals, and he has been going into the woods to spring animal traps that someone has been leaving there. One evening, Chips thought he saw a man who seemed to turn into a wolf, and the wolf chased Chips away, only stopping when Chips crossed the creek. Chips has heard of Huntley’s monster hunting activities, and he asks Raymond to tell Huntley about the werewolf and see if he will investigate.

To Raymond’s surprise, Huntley says that he has already heard about the werewolf from another source, which he refuses to reveal.  However, he is eager to investigate, on behalf of Chips and his other mysterious source. Verna, who overhears what Chips says about the werewolf, invites herself along on the hunt.

wanderingwerewolfpic1The monster hunt becomes more complicated when Bucky Bovine, a bully at their school, seems determined to stop them from going to Lost Woods to look for the monster. Does Bucky know something about the beast, or could he even be the monster himself?

As always, there are other explanations besides monsters and mysteries that require solving.  Fortunately, Huntley is an excellent detective as well as a Monster Hunter, and he puts the pieces together to explain not only the werewolf but other strange things that have been happening around town.

The book is part of the Monster Hunter series and is currently available online through Internet Archive.