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. 

~*~*~*~*~*~

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

CROSSWORDS=CROSS WORDS for Priscilla Brown

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In Hot Ticket, Olivia deciphers four cryptic crossword clues in the four minutes Callum takes to make her latte;she is the only character in my novels whose crossword interest is even peripheral to the plot. In a couple of my other stories, newspapers open at the crossword page appear in characters' living rooms, but merely as detail adding to their lifestyle background.

Personally, however, I am seriously challenged by cryptics. As a writer, words are my tools. Why, therefore, can't I come anywhere near to solving these brainteasers? I'm confident I have a good vocabulary and general knowledge, and straight or quick crosswords don't usually cause me to metaphorically tear my hair. But my cryptic failure annoys and frustrates me. In an effort to overcome this, I attended a four-hour course for beginners on tackling the beasties. Seventeen hopefuls braved the outside 40 degree (Celsius) heat to welcome the inside airconditioned classroom, where only our brains began to fry.

I always thought 'wordplay' was what I did with my writing, playing with words, moving them around, adding, amending, deleting. This attempt to construct or reconstruct a sentence, paragraph, chapter, and the whole novel manuscript into sequences of words is intended to best convey the story line in my head, and to offer significant emotional experiences for readers. I learned that in the cryptic crossword world, 'wordplay' is in itself a kind of puzzle which presents assorted techniques useful as guides to the solutions. So that is a bit like how I work as a novelist.

Our excellent tutor in this class took us through these techniques, with comprehensive handouts including mini crosswords each exemplifying a different technique. Of course, in these, we knew which was required; in real crosswords, solvers may be able to make an educated (or more likely in my case, uneducated) guess as to which the compiler is utilising, but nothing can be said to be certain. Not terribly helpful!

During the ten-minute tea break, we discussed conundrums we had come across in cryptics,and all were relieved to know we are not stupid and not alone in our ineptitude at unscrambling clues which appear utterly meaningless.

After the class, I finished the small crosswords remaining in the handouts (with answers); instead of trepidation and bafflement at the sight of a cryptic, I am beginning to apply what I learned. I have a long way to go before I can make sense of clues like rotten egg - take it back which initially indicates to me that I should reverse the order of the letters, resulting in nonsense. In fairness, there was more to this clue concerning hens, who surely do not want any egg back.

I need to work on a different way of thinking, to suspend the habit of thinking like a 'quick' puzzle solver and to re-orient my brain into a lateral direction. But right now I'm going to return to my novel in progress, where the wordplay is in control!

Successful puzzling from solver-in-training Priscilla

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Eighteenth Century Laundry Day

by Kathy Fischer-Brown

In my last post I discussed some of the more fascinating aspects of researching and writing historical fiction. You might even remember my mention of how incorporating details from the research into the writing helps bring the period and setting alive for me as well as for the reader. These details also go a long way toward keeping the characters in their place and time—and the author from creating annoying anachronisms. These aspects of dress, furniture, food and its preparation, travel, and accomplishing the day-to-day tasks, which we today might take for granted, are among those little motes that add to the “feel” of the time.

This has never been more true when you consider how laundry was done back in the mid- to late 1700s. Here in the early 21^st century, tossing a load of wash into a machine (top loading or the newer, more efficient front loaders), adding your choice of liquid or powdered detergent, softener and whitener is pretty much a no brainer. The cleansing agent even comes with its own handy measuring cup; temperature settings involve nothing more than the turn of a dial (or press of a button), as does the size of the load and water level. In many cases, you can even choose an extra rinse or spin. When the load is finished, the machine beeps, lest you’ve gone on to something else in the 20-or so minutes it takes for the cycle to complete and let it slip your mind. Then you toss the whole mass of t-shirts, socks, towels, and what-not, into the other machine; add a dryer sheet; set the temperature (for wash and wear, permanent press, or delicate); flip the switch; and for another 30-40 minutes you can play ball with the dogs in the yard, run to the supermarket for those much-needed ingredients for your mid-week supper, or catch up on the latest episode of the TV show you’d DVR’d the night before. (Or on my case, you research some more and/or write.)

Even with these modern conveniences as a part of my life, I hate doing laundry. But while writing the opening scene of Where the River Narrows, my contribution (along with Ron Crouch) to BWL’s “Canadian Historical Brides” series (Quebec), I realized just how lucky I am.

First, consider how difficult a task it was to schlep and heat enough water to wash bed linens, under garments, shirts, tablecloths, and a host of incidentals for a considerably sized family and their servants. Consider also that “wash day” (with these and other complications) was more likely a monthly affair rather than the two- or three-times a week event here in the present. And then consider that, even as it was an all-day, coordinated event, it had to be done, and was done in all seasons and all weather.

From an interesting site (http://www.woodvilleplantation.org/Schedule/laundry_day_18th_century1.pdf) I found when looking into this aspect of the life of Elisabeth Van Alen (the book’s heroine), I found the following:

Water would have been carried to the boiling cauldron in buckets carried on the shoulders with a yoke. Assuming that each of these buckets holds 2 ½ gallons, the laundress would be able to transport 5 gallons per trip. … The boiler used to hold the heated water generally held 20-40 gallons of water per individual load, thus requiring a minimum 4 trips per load of laundry. (Not including 10 more gallons for the scrub and rinse water!)

Fortunately for Elisabeth, her family home is situated on the Mohawk River, with a creek flowing down from the hills on the east side of their house. But this little treatise from the Woodville Plantation in Bridgeville, PA, also points out that fire was vital to heating this water, along with the trials and tribulations of amassing enough wood:

Generally on wash day, the laundress and her crew would awaken at 4:30 AM in order to gather wood and prepare the fires used to heat the water. On an average day, cooking fires would require approximately 30 large pieces of wood to prepare all three meals for the day. The amount used on laundry day would most likely be double that amount, or 50-60 large pieces of wood. Laundry fires were generally larger, and the heavier, knotty wood chunks that were unsuitable for the controlled cooking fires would have been used during the laundering process. Assuming that a large piece of split wood weighs approximately 3 pounds, an 18^th century laundress would be required to move 150-200 pounds of wood, prior to even beginning the task at hand.

Then there was the matter of soap. Or the lack of it. And getting out stains (no miracle spray leave-on-and-throw-in-the-machine wonders). 

Commercially-made soap could be bought, but it was very expensive and not always available, especially out on the New York frontier in 1774. So, this was something that was made at home (along with candles) from animal fats and the accumulated ashes from the fireplace(s). Lye was caustic and not easy on the hands, to put it mildly (no pun intended). But it did its job well. This concoction was added to the “copper,” usually a large pot that would also double as cooking vessel, which was placed over the fire built from those unwieldy logs lugged in for the purpose and those 30-40 gallons of water hauled from the creek. It was a hot and sticky job, agitating the contents with paddles, then extricating the steaming articles, rinsing and wringing them before setting them to dry. 

The favored method of drying was to spread the wash on low-lying bushes in the sun, or laying them out on the grass—something about the effects of chlorophyll. (Remember, this description is about what it was like during clement weather; imagine doing laundry in the depths of winter!) There were clothes lines back then, but the clothespin hadn’t yet been invented. And when everything was dry, there was the task of smoothing out the wrinkles.

The iron was an item that not every household could afford. And even if they could afford an iron, they would have to own at least two. These were flat-irons or “sad irons” (from the word “solid,” which is exactly what they were). Heavy, cumbersome beasts, they demanded to be kept close to the fire to stay hot. Which, in turn, led to the unfortunate eventuality of their picking up soot and grime, and…you guessed it…smearing smudge—if not burning holes—over the stuff you just spent the better part of the day sweating and and toiling over to get clean. One innovation of the time was the box-iron, which happily did away with scorching. These irons had a hinged door on the back and were fitted with an iron insert that could be kept hot and swapped out with another to prevent burning your linens. More common though—and a lot less hazardous—was the linen press: a table with a parallel board attached, which, when the screws were tightened over folded linens, did the job just right without hot slugs and scorching irons.

Starching was also done, a task that I am most thankful has lost its popularily. But they did it on a common basis. Without Niagara Spray Starch. Instead, they used water collected after cooking potatoes. (Fascinating how they made ample and varied use of pretty much everything they raised, produced, or created with their hands.)

Most well-to-do families of this period employed servants to do laundry and other menial chores, but Elisabeth’s family lives under extenuating circumstances. These compel her not only to supervise but to take charge and participate in many a mundane task, such as laundry, and organizing the family's meager staff. Qualities that will serve her well later on in the story when the American Revolution turns her world upside-down. When her home and lands are confiscated by Rebels, she and what remains of her family, is forced to flee to Canada. And as Shakespeare once said, “Thereby hangs a tale.”

I hope you enjoyed this little journey into the past. Please check out the first installments of Book We Love’s “Canadian Historical Brides” series of novels. Comments are always welcome :-)

~*~

Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh’s Daughter, Courting the Devil, The Partisan’s Wife, and The Return of Tachlanad, her 2016 release, an epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her Books We Love Author page or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are available in e-book and in paperback from Amazon, Kobo, and other online retailers.

A Master Passion--From the Cutting Room Floor

I wrote and rewrote A Master Passion for a period of fifteen years, ending with a novel well over a 1000 pages long. Some scenes, especially those in the beginning which dealt with the far less well-known Elizabeth Schuyler, were cut. This scene, telling us more about the future Mrs. Hamilton, was among the ones that fell by the wayside.

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Tench Tilghman had come north, an emissary from the Continental Congress, to attend a parley with the Indians.  General Schuyler and the Americans wished to obtain assurances of neutrality before a war with Britain broke out. 

            Today, though, as if there was no great war threatening, Tilghman and a group of young Albany gentry were on a picnic to the falls at Cohoes, which he had been told was "one of the notable sights of the region."  The Colonel accompanied Betsy in a climb to get a close look at the falls.

             The path Miss Schuyler elected was surprisingly bad. There were rocks to scramble over and around and briar patches to negotiate, but she seemed to enjoy this sort of rough ramble. At first he had wondered if this was one of these female ploys which would end with her leaning on his arm.

            Pray God I will not have to reveal my wretched state to another coquette in search of a husband.

          However, he soon learned that this dainty young lady could more than kept pace with him. Their way was almost vertical, frequently necessitating an undignified down-on-all-fours attack.  The way she'd brought him up, agile and uncomplaining as a boy, demonstrated that she'd made the climb many times.  

          Her stockings flashed, revealing the outline of pretty calves as she scaled the last rock.  Tilghman, following her, had the insouciant thought that the "best view" might possibly be from exactly where he was. 

          At the breathless top, they paused, panting,  and admired the view. Tilghman experienced an unexpected rush of pleasure. The young woman's easy manner almost made him feel he was in male company--almost.

           

          "Come, Colonel Tilghman!" Betsy shouted over the noise of falling water.  "Here's the place I spoke of."

            When he reached the height, he found himself a bare arm's length from enormous quantities of green water hurtling over a narrow lip of stone.  Falling, it became a spectacular white veil.  The ground beneath his feet shook alarmingly.

            Beside him on that rocky shelf, Betsy dropped to her knees, then stretched out on her stomach to get as close as possible to the roaring water. 

           "Do come!"

            Thunder vibrated beneath them.  The quick climb, vertigo from the height, the sight of a lady young stretched at full length on the ground--and suddenly, he felt giddy.

           The wind shifted and spray blew into their faces.   Betsy turned and smiled, a dazzling flash against her nut-brown skin.

            

            Later, they withdrew to a less precarious and quieter spot, a rock farther away, but one with a good view.  Tilghman shaded his eyes and gazed west.  Forest stretched away on the other side, an endless pine blanket.

            Below, on the other side, their horses were in clear view.  Secrets, concealed from those below, appeared plainly.  A kissing couple, concealed from the others, attracted their gaze.

            "Oh, wonderful!" Betsy laughed and then covered her smile with one hand.  Tilghman had hitherto imagined such behavior to be the prerogative of the male.  “They were made for one another, but," she added, suddenly serious, "we ought not to spy."

            Tilghman nodded, something at a loss for words. In the south, young ladies would pretend to see nothing of the indiscretion taking place below.  

            "They're both Greens." 
             Tilghman didn't understand what this meant exactly, but he realized that what they witnessed, far from being a charming indiscretion, was the outcome of some long-laid Albanian dynastic plan.  Nevertheless, it was yet another jarring moment, as stimulating as anything he'd felt during his recent visit to the Oneida camp. 

            These Northerners--both red and white—were so--frank! 

           "The sky west is marvelous." Betsy led his gaze away by pointing at the towering clouds of summer, now parading slowly overhead.             

           And it is always a lady's prerogative to change the subject...

            "Yes, indeed, although I fear from the look of those we’ll soon have rain."

            "Later today, certainly.” Betsy smiled up at him. "We shall have to start back soon." Then this charming daughter of the north solemnly posed one of the most amazing questions Mr. Tilghman had ever been asked by a proper young lady.

             "Why is it, Colonel, that you don't try to kiss me?"

               Tilghman felt the sting in the question, yet he could see that it was asked  dispassionately.

            Would any Maryland girl, or any sophisticated Philadelphia flirt, say that?  In Baltimore, in Philadelphia, such a line would be delivered behind a fan, the girl’s eyes snapping with mischief and daring him to come on.

            In her tone he detected only curiosity and a certain melancholy. There was not a hint of flirtatiousness.

            "Well, certainly, I want to—ah kiss you.” He struggled after a chivalrous answer.  "As much as any man wants to kiss a lovely lady."

            Betsy sighed as he bent over her hand.  Apparently the sight of her two Green cousins kissing had put her in a confidential mood.

            "Don't tell tales, Mr. Tilghman.  My sisters are lovely. I'm just 'good-tempered Betsy'.  That's what all my cousins say.  They skate with me, they dance with me and play hide and seek, but they don't pull me behind the curtains at parties.  Or, if they do, it's just to ask whether Angelica fancies them."

            Tilghman did have blood in his veins, so, at the sight of her pensive face, he caught her close and kissed her.  What he received in return was very sweet, so sweet, in fact, that it was far  harder to break off than he had anticipated.

            "You, Sir Marylander, you kiss exactly like my cousins."  Miss Schuyler stunned him again. She bobbed to pick a tiny red and gold spray of Indian paint brush which she then carefully tucked into a buttonhole of his blue jacket.

            Before the astonished Tilghman--he'd never before endured a critique--could find a reply, the astonishing young lady added, "I heard you were pretty warm with those Oneida girls after the pow‑wow."

            Then, before he could collect his wits, Tilghman watched a flash of green and white calico whirling away. 

            "Miss Schuyler! Wait!"

            He soon caught up with her.  The girl's big black eyes--curiously like those of the Oneida girls--were bright with tears.

            Tilghman knew his face was scarlet.  As discreet as he'd thought he’d been, somehow this little northern lady knew what he'd done.  Worse--and again, absolutely unlike her southern sisters--she'd actually dared to remark upon it!

            "Never mind, sir." Betsy lifted her chin proudly. "Most of the men around here had an Indian wife in their trading days.  Even my Papa."

            Tilghman's sensibilities reeled.  Such plain speaking! His throat closed, and suddenly he had to cough and fumble for his handkerchief.

            "Please excuse me, Colonel." Betsy now too seemed embarrassed, "You must think I am--"

            "Not at all.” With a great effort, he managed to reply with only the slightest smile.  "You are simply candid, Miss.  I must say, however, that hypocrisy is more the fashion in my country."

            

~~Juliet Waldron

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