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.
Meet the Men Who Sailed the Seas by John Dyment, 1966.
This book is part of a series of historical biographies for children. Unlike other books in the series, the book doesn’t focus on a single person, talking about the lives of many famous sailors and explorers with some historical information about sailors and sailing ships in general.
When I was a kid, I went through a phase where this was a favorite book my mine, and I carried it around and read it constantly. It’s a little surprising that I became so attached to this particular book because I grew up in Arizona, in the middle of a desert, miles from the nearest ocean. I was seven years old before I even saw an ocean and a sailing ship in real life, and even then, it was a matter of years before I saw these things a second time. Because of that, as a child, I wasn’t particularly attracted to boats or interested in ocean travel. I wasn’t even a very good swimmer (liked it, just not good at it because I didn’t get a chance to do it much when I was young), and I was kind of afraid of deep water. We learned about Christopher Columbus in school, but I thought that Columbus Day was the most boring holiday on the calendar (there was no candy and no dressing up in costumes, and I’m not even sure that we got that day off of school, which were my requirements for what made a really good holiday), and Christopher Columbus was not remotely my most favorite historical character. So what was it about this book that caught my attention? Why did I like it so much?
There are a number of things about this book to like. When I was a young kid, I wasn’t fond of nonfiction books because it was a little too much like school, but this book was different. It was one of the first nonfiction books that I really wanted to read. The large, friendly type is encouraging to younger children who are just starting to read nonfiction chapter books, and the detailed drawings are fascinating. Best of all, it’s a journey through time as well as across oceans. I always liked history.
The book starts off by explaining how early sailors might have traveled. It speculates that people first realized that they could travel by water by floating on logs and then realizing that they could carve those logs into canoes and paddle them to move in the direction they wanted to go, eventually adding sails to move even faster with less effort.
It then describes how ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and Phoenicians traveled by ship. There is a chapter about Hanno of Carthage, a Phoenician who commanded a fleet of ships and was known for sailing around the coast of Africa. (That section and the next one use the old name for the rocks at the Strait of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules.) The next chapter describes the Battle of Salamis between Greece, led by Themistocles, and Persia, led by Xerxes. This battle is particularly notable because the Greeks defeated the Persians through a clever trick even though they were out-numbered, proving that a good battle strategy could allow even smaller fleets to gain the upper hand in battle. There is also a chapter about Pytheas, a Greek sailor who sailed to Britain in search of tin and “Thule” (it’s not completely clear what he meant by Thule, although it was apparently a place north of Britain) and wrote a book about his travels.
In the early Middle Ages, Viking raiders began attacking Britain. The chapters about Vikings describe Eric the Red and his adventures in Iceland and Greenland, where he founded a colony of people from Iceland. Vikings also established a colony in the Americas that they called Vinland. However, they eventually abandoned Vinland because of conflicts with the people they called Skraelings (Native Americans). (The exact location of Vinland was in dispute for some time, and some people speculated that it might actually refer to multiple locations, but the likely site is at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.)
The other explorers and adventurers described in the book are Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan (known for sailing around South America to the Pacific), Francis Drake (his section includes an account of the battle with the Spanish Armada), and Captain Cook (known for sailing to Australia and New Zealand and claiming them for England and for insisting that his sailors eat cabbage and onions to prevent scurvy, later killed in Hawaii).
The book also discusses the Mayflower and Pilgrims, and there are chapters about American ships and sailors, like John Paul Jones, and the roles they played in the American Revolution and the new United States shortly after. Because the focus of the book focuses on sailing ships, it ends with Robert Fulton‘s steam ship, the Clermont, and Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world alone.
So, the reason why I’m still kind of attached to this book, which was old even when I first read it, is that it was my introduction to a world that I wasn’t even really interested in at first, a world that became more interesting after seeing the history and other countries connected to it. I’m still more of an armchair explorer than anything else, but this book added a dimension to my early armchair travels that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me before. As a side note, I don’t think that the book mentions that the navigation instrument that one of the men on the front is holding is an astrolabe, but I now own one of these myself. If you want to try one, you can make a simple version at home yourself. They can be used on land as well as sea!
If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island by Ellen Levine, 1993.
Like other books in this series, this book explains about a part of American history using a series of questions and answers. Each section of the book starts with a different question about what it was like to come to America as an immigrant in the past and what happened when they reached Ellis Island, one of the main ports of entry into the United States around the turn of the 20th century, just off the coast of New York City, such as, “Would everyone in your family come together?”, “What did people bring with them?”, and “What did the legal inspectors do?” Then, the book answers each of the questions.
The questions and answers start by describing what the journey to America was like from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. Typically, families would come to the United States in stages: the father of a family (or perhaps one of the older children) would make the trip first, find a job in the United States and start saving money to prepare for rest of the family to come. Depending on the family’s individual circumstances, it might be years before all the members completed the immigration process and reunited in America.
People traveled by ship in those days, and an often-forgotten part of their journey was even reaching the port the ship to America would be leaving from. Depending on the starting point of the journey and the travel arrangements each family was able to make, getting to the port might involve crossing borders between other countries, adding another layer of legal difficulties to the journey.
There was also the knowledge that they might be turned away once they arrived at Ellis Island. One of the chief concerns at the time was illness. The inspectors at Ellis Island checked immigrants for signs of infectious diseases, and the ship companies knew that if their passengers were turned away because of the fear of disease, they would be required to pay for the return voyage themselves. To help ensure that their passengers would not arrive with a disease, they would conduct their own health checks before the ship ever left port, looking for signs of illness, giving the passengers vaccines, and disinfecting things. They were particularly afraid of passengers with lice because lice can spread typhus, which is deadly. They would often cut the passengers’ hair or comb it very carefully.
The treatment passengers on ships received depended largely on their class of passage. First and second-class passengers received the best rooms and the best food, and when they arrived in New York (assuming that was their destination), they didn’t even have to go to Ellis Island at all; the immigration inspectors would inspect first and second-class passengers on board the ship. Only steerage passengers (“third class”, the cheapest possible method of travel, used by the poorest people, the largest group) would have to get off the ship for processing at Ellis Island.
The processing center at Ellis Island wasn’t just a building; it was an entire complex. The Great Hall alone was large enough to contain hundreds of people at a time, and when it was full of immigrants there were so many languages being spoken at once (sometimes as many as 30 different languages) that some people described it as sounding like the Tower of Babel. There were also dormitories that could house more than a thousand people, a hospital for the sick, a post office, banks where people could change their cash for American money, a restaurant to feed everyone (with two kitchens, one kosher and one regular), a railroad ticket office where immigrants who would be moving on from New York could make their travel arrangements, and much more. Some people called Ellis Island the “Island of Tears” because the arrival there after a long journey was an emotional experience and many immigrants were worried that they might be sent back if they couldn’t answer the inspectors’ questions to their satisfaction. At the end of the Great Hall, there was a large staircase that came to be known as the Staircase of Separation. Everyone had to go down this staircase after their examination by the inspectors. At the bottom, they would go their separate ways, depending on their travel plans or whether they had passed inspection. People who turned to the right were heading to the railroad ticket office. People turning to the left were heading to the Manhattan ferry. People who went straight were heading to the detention rooms because they hadn’t passed the inspection.
As I mentioned before, the inspectors were very concerned about people who showed signs of serious diseases. One of the first things that would happen during inspection was a brief examination by the Ellis Island doctors. Because of the massive amount of people who had to be processed, this examination lasted only a few minutes, during which the doctor would quickly check for very specific symptoms and signs of possible illness. If they didn’t see anything obviously wrong, such as red eyes (possible sign of eye infection, although for some, it was just because they’d been crying), difficulty in breathing, or lice, they would let the people pass. If the doctors thought that they saw something that might be sign of illness, they would write a letter in chalk on the person’s clothes and send them on to be examined more thoroughly by another doctor. Getting one of these letters didn’t always mean rejection. If the other doctor decided that the first doctor was mistaken or that the person’s symptoms weren’t serious, they would still be allowed into the country. Sometimes, if a person was ill but had a curable disease, they would be kept in the hospital on Ellis Island until they were better. If the doctors weren’t quite sure if a person was ill or not, they might keep the person in the dormitories for a few days and then check them again after they had a chance to rest. The people who were sent back on the ship were ones who had diseases that were incurable or seriously contagious. (It sounds heartless, but they were trying to head off deadly epidemics. During the 1800s, large cities like New York sometimes suffered serious epidemics of deadly diseases because of the sudden influx of new people who were living in overly-crowded conditions with relatively poor sanitation. By preventing people with signs of serious diseases from joining the rest of the population, they were hoping to head off new epidemics and save lives.)
One of the more controversial parts of the examination was when they tested people for possible mental problems. They wanted to make sure that they were mentally fit enough to find work, but the problem was that the tests designed by people who didn’t take cultural differences into account when they designed them. The parts where they asked people to do simple arithmetic problems or to demonstrate that they could read, count backwards, or match up sets of similar drawings were pretty straight-forward. However, sometimes they were shown a picture and asked to describe what was happening in the picture, and the immigrants gave the inspectors some surprising interpretations because it turns out that some experiences aren’t quite as universal as some people think. For example, one picture was of some children digging a hole with a dead rabbit lying nearby. It was supposed to depict children burying a dead pet. But, some people view rabbits more as food than pets, and some immigrants said that the children were doing their chores because why shouldn’t the children work in the garden (the digging) after hunting a rabbit for dinner? Fiorello La Guardia, himself from an immigrant family, an interpreter on Ellis Island and later, mayor of New York, particularly despised tests like these because the people who designed them and administered them were trying to test the minds of others without any real idea about what their lives had been like or how their minds actually worked.
The inspectors’ examinations in general weren’t always reliable because they were often hurried (dealing with so many people in a limited amount of time) and because the interpreters weren’t always accurate, which brings us to the question of why people’s names were sometimes changed at Ellis Island. Sometimes, it was intentional. Some immigrants thought that they would be more likely to be accepted by the inspectors if they had short, easy-to-pronounce names, so they would purposely give them shorter versions of their names. There was some basis for this belief because, if an inspector didn’t understand a long, unfamiliar name, they wouldn’t have much time to figure it out and so would either take their best guess at the what the name should be, shorten it when they wrote it down, or give up altogether and write a much shorter name instead. For example, when they processed Jewish people from Russia, the inspectors often ran into difficulties in understanding their last names and would sometimes just write down “Cohen” or “Levine”, no matter what the original name really was. Sometimes, name changes were just an honest mistake because the inspector didn’t know how a name was really spelled (I can speak from personal experience because my family’s last name wasn’t always spelled like it is now, and when they found out that it had been changed, it was just too much trouble to fix it) or because they had misinterpreted something that the immigrant said. One of my favorite examples of this was a young man who tried to explain to the inspector that he was an orphan (“yosem” in Yiddish). The inspector dutifully wrote his last name as Josem.
The pictures in the book are paintings based on original photographs of immigrants and Ellis Island. (See Immigrant Kids to compare some of the pictures.)
The book also contains some further information about the lives of immigrants once they arrived in America (Immigrant Kids goes into a lot more detail), the attitudes of Americans toward immigrants at the time (varied but with strong strains of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and general anti-immigrant attitudes during the 1800s), and the contributions of immigrants to American society. I actually bought this book as a souvenir on a visit to Ellis Island years ago.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 