Some 17th c History & James Bartley by Katherine Pym

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You’d think we’d get along considering the size of our world. We should have our own patch of land, our own lean-to and a garden plot to grow veggies but it seems we are an argumentative species. Nothing is safe. 

Take the 17^th century. Compared to today, there weren’t many folks on the planet. London was a metropolis, with a large portion of the English population within its walls. Holland had her canals and Amsterdam. Paris belonged to France. These nations found plenty of land to explore but as squabbling children, they all wanted the same spots. 

East India Company Battle in Indonesia

During the early part of 17^th century, the English and Dutch each had an East India Company who plied foreign waters, seeking trade. Whenever the Dutch or English sailed into the same harbor, there were sea battles, torture and murder. There were plenty of islands in the South Pacific and the Caribbean but the grass was always greener on the other’s atoll. 

To compete, it wasn’t until the 1660’s that France established their own East India Company, but the French had not been idle the first half of the century. They established colonies all over the world, in the East and West Indies, along the Norwegian and North American coasts. 

In the Banda Islands of today’s Indonesia where nutmeg grew, a fierce rivalry sprang up between the Dutch and English. They fought over these islands until the native peoples were decimated and the crop completely destroyed. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode where the mindset is so stubborn, the enemy would rather see the death of a planet than share it. 

Killing a Whale

Whaling was another product the French, English and Dutch fought over. There were a lot of whales in the seas, but everyone congregated on the same shores. Initially, Norwegian islands offered places where whale and walrus meat could be processed but others sailed on to the cold waters of the Atlantic for whale blubber. 

Stories ensued from these exertions. Hostilities transferred from country against country to whales against men. 

Whales are big animals. They fight for what is theirs. Moby Dick came into being where a large mammalian beast fought in a life and death struggle against a madman, and then there was James Bartley. 

Off the Falkland Islands, the crew on a whaler spotted an 80’ whale basking in the cold waters, sifting krill through its fringed baleen. Men climbed the ships’ shrouds, hung from the yardarms and pointed. Two small boats were launched. It was time to kill a whale!

Processing Whale Blubber etc.

One harpooner sent his weapon into the whale, who lashed out. The small boats in peril, men fell overboard. Water sprayed the remaining men but they bagged their prey. They hauled the 80’ beast onto the vessel and began to dissect it. 

Someone reported a man missing, a James Bartley. Everyone assumed he had drowned in the battle against the big whale. They shrugged and continued to dissect the animal. After 6 hours of backbreaking work, they threw in the towel and went to sleep for the night. 

The next morning, they were at it again. “Suddenly sailors were startled by something in the stomach which gave spasmodic signs of life. Inside they found the missing sailor, James Barley, doubled up and unconscious. He was placed on deck and treated to a bath of seawater, which soon revived him, but his mind was not clear and the crew placed him in the captain’s quarters.” 

Poor Sod about to Beaten by Whale

Once Bartley recovered his senses, he related that he’d been hit by the whale’s tail and had been “encompassed by great darkness, and he felt he was slipping along a smooth passage that seemed to move and carry him forward. His hands came in contact with a yielding, slimy substance, which seemed to shrink from his touch. He could easily breathe, but the heat was terrible. It seemed to open the pores of his skin and draw out his vitality. The next he remembered he was in the captain’s cabin.”

Even as James Bartley survived being sucked into the belly of a beast, he was lucky. The whale was more benign than being tortured by a hostile, East India Company person. 

The Salt Box, YA Fantasy

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Many thanks to: 

The People’s Almanac by David Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NY, 1975, page 1399

Wikipedia Commons, public domain

Let’s Go Fishing by Katherine Pym

Release date July 1, 20017

I wrote “The End” on my first draft of Pillars of Avalon, a story of 17^th century Newfoundland, Canada. When I first started this project, I thought this would be difficult since settlers in the New World struggled to stay alive. They hunted, fished and peeked over big boulders to see if wild savages lurked in the distance, waiting to scalp them. 

How could I write a full novel of almost 95,000 words on episodes of crude survival that would numb the reader over time? It would make them think: Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live then. What a pain!

Then I came upon Sir David & Lady Sara Kirke. They were wine merchants living in London. King Charles I gave David and his brothers carte blanche (in the form of a letter of marque) to pillage and destroy French settlements along the Canadian coast. 

I thought, Oh good. A pirate story. I’ve always liked heroes with a slightly wicked bent. If one is too good, he/she is boring. 

But David Kirke was more than a king sanctioned pirate. While he pillaged and set ships afire along the St. Lawrence River, he was also a businessman. He saw opportunity wherever he went. One of those places was Ferryland, Newfoundland, where the fishing was supreme-o.

Fishing on the grand banks NL with icebergs

Men returned to England after a season along the grand banks and enthused how the waters teemed with fish. The cold waters were so crowded that to breathe, the fish jumped into fishing boats just to get away from the overwhelmingly packed seas. 

London and Dartmouth merchants leased ships of sail and traded goods like wine, clothing, and farm implements from England in exchange for dry salt fish and cod-oil. No money was to exchange hands. To transport money was illegal. Everything was traded, or supposed to be. When you see or read pirate stories, their chests filled with silver and gold coins, (if they are law abiding fellows) the money would have come from Spain or Portugal, France or any port of call in the Mediterranean. 

But I digress: 

Crude Fishing Equipment

Closer Look at one end

Boats with 5 men fished daily in the late spring to early autumn months. They were expected to haul in over 300 cod a day using the most primitive of tools. (In high summer, 1000 fishing boats could be in the water at the same time.) Cod could be as heavy as 120 lbs (54.43108 kg). Nets were apparently not used. Seins were used for the smaller schools of fish, like herring. 

Depending on the day and who did what, a fisherman would use this primitive device to haul upward to 100 fish per day. One would think the hemp line would slice through a leather glove and cut your hand. 

Every day, fish would be brought ashore to be processed. The fish would be gutted and beheaded by men called ‘Headers’. Cod livers would be thrown into barrels for cod-oil. The Header pushed the gutted fish to the ‘Splitter’ who opened the fish and removed the spine.

Notes have come down through the ages how quickly this could be done, up to “24 score in half an hour”.  If a team of gutters and splitters processed fish for 10 hours, that’s 9,600 fish per day—that’s one team. 

After the fish were gutted and salted, they were washed off in sea water, then laid flat on a rocky shore or flake. A flake is a low table covered with pine boughs or such which allow air to pass around the fish and dry uniformly. Boys would stand by, waving a large enough object to keep the flies away since maggots would destroy a dry salt crop.  

Fish Flakes covered with Cod

The calculations are like this: 

In the summer months, a period of 8-10 weeks, a crew of 5 would be expected to catch and cure 200 quintals (quintal=112 lbs or 50.80234kg of salt fish). That is an amount of 22,400 lbs/10,160.47kg of fish in a season. At 11 shillings per quintal (17th century prices), the merchants would garner several thousand pounds sterling per fishing boat per season. If a merchant owned several fishing boats, the numbers are staggering. 

Sir David & Lady Sara Kirke saw the potential and eventually went into the "sack" trade, where goods were traded for fish. They exploited this when they moved to Ferryland in 1638, and by the time of Sara's death in 1684 or 1685, she was a wealthy plantation owner. 

So, that’s one story line, but how many fishing tales are good for a long novel? Well, I found a whole bunch of other stories that filled the breach, which I will relate in another blogspot post. Very exciting.

 PILLARS OF AVALON will be released July 1, 2017. 

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Many thanks to WikiCommons, public domain and

Pictures of fishing lines, page 26, Fish Into Wine, The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century by Peter E. Pope (University of North Caroline Press, 2004

The Happy Place - Gail Roughton

           “I need to visit my happy place.” How often we hear that! But what, exactly, is a happy place? And where is it? “Oh, it’s all in our heads!” you say. Well, that’s right. And then again—it’s not. We all carry our permanent happy place with us. See, it’s not limited in location or the space-time continuum. It can be with you any place, any time. All we have to do is remember. Remember the place where magic lived, where memories were made, the memories of things past that shaped us, changed us, molded us, into the person we are. Where was my place? A little beat-up, sun-seared wooden fishing dock on the banks of Stone Creek.

I was born in the Deep South in the 50’s and grew up in the early and mid-60’s. It was a pivotal time in history when the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the space program began to drag even the sleepiest little Southern town kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. Rowan & Martin regularly socked it to the country as Laugh-In looked at the news, and Simon & Garfunkel sang of their brother who had died so his brothers could be free. None of that made much never-mind to me, though. I was busy following my Daddy around like a shadow whenever he was home from work. He was a construction foreman and a master carpenter. On weekends, he’d take me to his building sites, where I walked on the long light poles of Macon’s Henderson Stadium when they still lay on the ground and wrote on the chalkboards of schools-to-be long before students entered their doors. Daddy’s gone, but most of the structures he helped build still stand, strong and functional, still in use. That’s rather a form of immortality, don’t you think?

We lived a few miles outside the mid-sized Middle Georgia city of Macon in a small country neighborhood of only four or five houses, perched on the banks of Stone Creek Swamp. Readers might recognize the name from The Color of Seven. Stone Creek itself ran about half a mile behind the house. I guess I was nine or so when our neighbor “up the hill”, Mr. Emory Scoven, built the dock over the spot where Stone Creek expanded into a small pond.

Mr. Emory was a retired railroad man who lived with his brother, sister, and sister-in-law in the house on the hill next door to us. I ran in and out of that house without knocking, with total impunity. Nobody in our neighborhood knocked back then. I loved the other residents of that house, Mr. Will, Miss Lucille, and Miss Ethel, but Mr. Emory? Mr. Emory was a modern day Pied Piper. Children loved him like lint loves wool. Once upon a time the neighborhood had brimmed with kids who’d dogged his every step, but in my time, the child population was down to one. Me. And on summer days when school was out and Daddy was still at work, I trailed the man unmercifully while he tended the yards and fruit trees he so loved. If he ever grew impatient or tired of my company, he never showed it. His railroad tales were better than the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm.

Late spring and summer evenings were the best times of all. Daddy came home from work, showered and ate. That’s when we headed out the back door to join Mr. Emory at the dock and cast our lines into the leaf-brown waters of the creek. The three of us sat for hours in perfect contentment, talking or not talking, it really didn’t matter either way, while the corks from our fishing lines bobbed on the water. It didn’t matter if we caught anything, either, and in fact, we preferred not to, especially since we always released any fish caught that evening back into the creek when incipient darkness forced us back up the trail toward the house. We caught some of those fish pretty much every day. I learned to recognize them over the course of a summer because all fish don’t look alike, not even fish of the same species. They have individual shadowings of color and irregularities in their gills and fins.

That’s childhood. That’s my happy place. The creek, the dock, Daddy and Mr. Emory. Sitting cross-legged on bare planking, slapping at mosquitoes as they discovered my bare arms and legs. Cane poles only, of course, because rods and reels were useless in the close confines of the creek and its small pool and would only catch uselessly in the brush and undergrowth of the banks.

I remember the sound of the frogs as dusk fell, and birds flying low across the pond’s clearing. Sometimes you could see the head of a water moccasin swimming across the creek further downstream, crossing a safe distance from the intrusion of the dock upon their territory.

Nothing else on God’s green earth feels like late evening in the spring in the Deep South. The air feels like velvet, light trembles off the water, birds fly overhead. The sounds of the frogs and insects make their own symphony. I have no pictures of that creek and dock to post. Digital cameras were far into the future. Children don’t think of such things as recording special moments on film. No matter. There’s no way any camera could have properly recorded those moments, those men, that place, that time. The photographs are in my heart. They always will be. I take them out and look at them frequently, especially when I’m writing. 

I know somewhere out there, they’re still fishing together on the banks of Stone Creek. I love you, Daddy. I love you, Mr. Emory.

Country Justice

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