Category Archives: murder mysteries

More about the Salem witches

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A lot has been written about the Witch Terror in Salem in 1692. To a modern eyes, the easy belief in the veracity of a group of girls is incredible. (Obviously, mean girls have been around for a long time). In another post  I talked about the possibility of ergot poisoning (i.e. LSD) which I am sure would be terrifying, especially to a person who couldn’t explain to himself what was happening. But was this the whole story?

I think we all want to know what happened. It seems as though the town lost its collective mind.

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We know it was a superstitious age. But I can’t believe EVERYONE believed in the supernatural. In fact, one of the essayists of the time,  Robert Calef, believed that the trials had been engineered by Cotton Mather for personal gain. (I doubt that. Evidently fighting out different opinions in print is not a new phenomenon). And anyway, other motivations for accusing someone of witchcraft have been documented. It wasn’t only ergot poisoning or fear of the devil. Sometimes it was for gain:The old biddy hasn’t died and I want her little farm, for example. Sometimes it was to settle scores. Apparently at least part of the reason behind the accusations directed at the Nurse family had resentment and the desire for payback at the bottom.

I wonder about the girls. Clearly, once the excitement began, they kept upping the ante. I suspect they didn’t want to lose the attention. And, considering that girls were supposed to be docile and subservient then, one can understand why they would want to break out. Be the center of attention for once. Accusing half the town of consorting with the devil seems a tad extreme though. And if you look at their futures – what happens after the big crisis and the turn of the century – they pretty much disappear. Some are documented as getting married, several moved out of Salem. (No surprise there, right?)  Was there a leader among the girls with followers too frightened to say anything? I wouldn’t be surprised.

What happened to Tituba, the black slave whose stories of her past are widely credited with starting the whole witch craze. Since the stories she told about her life and her religion, voodoo, found fertile ground among the girls and seems to have served as part of the bedrock, it is surprising to me that Tituba wasn’t hanged. But although she went to jail she was not hanged.

Salem tunnels late eighteenth century

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So there were already some tunnels in Salem linking the fine houses, the docks, the brothels and the counting houses. Many of the men who had made their fortunes running privateers became Senators, a Secretary of State, and other wealthy and influential men. As Salem shipping  imported cargo from Russia, India, the East Indies, and finally China, Salem became not only the sixth largest city in the U.S. but the wealthiest.  Custom duties to a large degree supported the Federal Government.

To collect these duties during the time Rees visited Salem, the merchant ships were required to tie up about three miles out. The customs inspector would row out to inspect the cargo and assess the duties. Do I believe that this prevented smuggling? Not a chance. I’m sure a number of shippers found ways to circumvent these efforts and used the already existing tunnels to transport goods to the counting houses out of sight of the prying eyes.

In 1801 Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States and began, not only enforcing the already existing laws on the books but put in new strict laws on the collection of duties. The harbor was silting up and New Bedford, Boston, and other ports would soon become more prominent. Elias Haskell Derby Jr. found it difficult to maintain his lifestyle.  He embarked on a building program in the Commons, and put in tunnels to the wharves, the counting houses and the banks. But isn’t 1801 is several years after Death in Salem? Yes, that is so but a number of the houses listed as having tunnels connected to them were built before 1797.

I made a leap and decided to claim there were many tunnels prior to the Derby scion in 1801. The tunnels would have been helpful during the Revolutionary War and the British incursion, especially when it would have been important to move goods without British knowledge.

Finally, my excuse for this bit of slippery history is: Well, the story is fiction and I think the tunnels could have been there and been used as I described.

The tunnels of Salem – Privateers

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As the conflict between the Colonies and Great Britain heated up, privateers began smuggling goods into the colonies. What is a privateer? Basically a legal pirate. Privateer ships were privately owned and armed ship bearing a letter of marque from the State legalizing piracy.

Salem ships would stream out of port in the mornings and many would return with prizes by evening. Even the fishing shallops joined in the fun. Two-thirds of the square-rigged ships were captured by the British but the faster  sloops did much better. Many of the captains of the shipping industry got their start with the prizes captured (or stolen depending upon your point of view) from the British.

In defense of the British, they were having financial problems, due mainly to the almost continual wars with France. And it must have been frustrating to have Ships, little more than pirates, stopping their ships and taking the cargo.

The Brand new United States of America found itself in a similar situation after the War of Independence. The new country was broke. Soldiers in the Continental Army had not been paid and there was no money to pay them so they were offered land on the frontier (which was western Pennsylvania at that time.) Some of these soldiers sold the land at rock bottom prices but many moved west to claim their property, adding themselves to the sparse population already there. To fill the empty coffers of this new country, Alexander Hamilton proposed a tax on whiskey. This became the seed for one of the first challenges to face the new government – the Whiskey Rebellion of 1793. But I digress. That’s the lure and excitement of history – everything is so interlinked.

Salem Tunnels – Smuggling as a way of life

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In my new book, A Death in Salem, I use the tunnels under the city as an important plot device. Tunnels? Under Salem?

True, and one can see the remnants of these tunnels on a tour through the city, especially the great houses.

Salem has a long history as a maritime city. It was an era when smuggling was so accepted even gentlemen engaged pretty openly in smuggling. Don’t believe me? Well, in New York protection money was paid to Governor Fletcher and Thomas Tew, a Rhode Island Pirate, was frequently Fletcher’s dinner guest.

According to Salem Secret Underground by Christopher Jon Luke Dowgin, tunnels in Salem dated at least from 1667.

If people remember their American History, one of the causes leading to the War for Independence was the number of Acts and duties imposed on not just American goods but goods being imported into the colonies. Textiles, sugar, molasses – just about everything was taxed. To make matters worse, these were not duties imposed by an American government, but a government across the ocean. And a lot of the funds were used to pay troops who then patrolled for smugglers. One of the taglines from this period was ‘No taxation without representation.”

Furthermore, American ships were prohibited from sailing to India, for example, so all goods imported from the East had to come on British ships with the attached duties. American ships were permitted to sail to the Caribbean but with limits. Needless to say, American captains tried to circumvent these laws as best as they could. (No American ship went to the East until 1783 when Derby’s Grand Turk sailed to Indonesia. She returned with a cargo of pepper, a cargo that was sold at a 700 % profit.) As British imports flooded the market, the goods made in the Colonies rotted. There was no market for them.

The proscriptions upon American (Colonial) Trade enraged the Colonists. The Boston Tea Party was really the destruction of British imported Chinese tea. So American ships turned to smuggling and a lot of them became folk heroes. Britain tried to stop the smuggling by blockading the cost and stopping American ships (and impressing American seamen too.) And this became another flashpoint leading up to Revolution.

Back to Salem

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The  Customs House in Salem has now been set up as a Museum. It had some really interesting artifacts from the early sailing period. (Can anyone tell how much I love this town?)  The Customs House is set right across from the Derby wharf.

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History of the custom house with a shot of the wharves and the pier during their busiest times.

Maps of Salem’s trade routes. Remember, this was in the days of wind power and those little bitty ships.

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the Derby wharf which is still there today. In the late 1700s, all the wharves were lined with warehouses to hold the goods imported from India, Indonesia and China as well as slips where the ships were tied up.

 

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The golden eagle sat on top of the Customs House. (I believe this is a replica). It is much larger than it appears in the photo. It must have been quite a sight to see for the ships sailing into port.

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The counting houses, simple desk above, took in millions of dollars – and that was millions in the money of that time. Salem was not only the sixth largest city in the new US but also the wealthiest. The customs duties pretty much supported the federal government.

Tunnels had been constructed underneath Salem. I’ve read a number of reasons for this, including hiding the amount of wealth pouring into the city. The one that makes the most sense to me is that the merchants did not want to carry such enormous funds through the streets. It would have been very difficult to avoid paying customs since the Custom Officer rowed three miles out to where the incoming ships docked and assessed the duties then.

Finally, one final note. The museum has pieces of eight. Remember, anything that mentions pirates always includes pieces of eight. Well, this was money, made so that it could be broken into eight pieces. Can you imagine going to the store and breaking off a piece of a quarter and handing it to the shopkeeper? Wild, right?

The Librarians

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I watched the two hour debut episode knowing I would love it. After all, I loved the three movies and Warehouse 13, to which this bears a huge resemblance. And I am a librarian so when one of the ads says: “Reading is fundamental. Zombies are slow so go for the head. Think like a librarian; it may save your life,” I knew this was the show for me.

OK, maybe the real librarian job isn’t so Indiana Jonesish. But we do look up tons of things; searching for information is a core task of any librarian. But what about the Internet I can hear you say. Well, a lot of people cannot manage even a copier, let alone a computer. Even phone numbers can be hard to find. And  for those patrons who are Internet savvy and find the easy stuff, there are still questions – super hard questions – that come to us at the reference desk. Plus, although we don’t have a massive hardback copy of the Reader’s Guide anymore, we have databases that do the same thing, and that we pay for and that our patrons have just as much trouble using them as they did the Reader’s Guide. In addition to things like ancestry and consumer’s reports and so on.

Finally, although one of the prongs of a librarian’s job is information, the other is community, at least in a public library. Programs from how to dye to how to use your Kindle, how to set up email and where to find a good doctor. We are legally not allowed to offer medical, legal or tax advice, but man we sure get a lot of questions in those fields. Because my library is located near a court, we help a lot of people with family issue kind of things – referrals to lawyers and/or books and databases. And this doesn’t even include all the popular stuff like the latest bestseller or movie.

Clearly I love my job. Partly this is because being a librarian is such a clean job. We help people. And this is one of the last bastions, probably the last, where we do not expect the users to come in with a credit card. Sure, you’ll pay modest fines for overdues, generally in the area of .10 cents a day. and you’ll pay for photocopies. But you don’t have to be a member to sit and read the paper. Or to check your email on a computer. Or to ask a question.

So, although we don’t save the world by searching for magical artifacts, I feel we do our bit in saving the world a little bit at a time.

New book on amazon

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I am so happy and excited to say that I just found my new book listed on Amazon. I knew, of course, it was coming out but did not know it was beginning to appear as a pre-order. I also found the release date, which I did not know until know. I am excited.

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Sailor Superstitions

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I got started researching superstitions when I was researching my new book Death in Salem. It turns out sailors are a superstitious lot. As one might expect, many sailors thought women on board were bad luck. I wonder what happened to the wives of the captains who sailed with their husbands. Moreover, there were women who sent in disguise as men. (Always wondered how that was possible but it did happen.)

Sailors would also not sign up if there was a Jonah, someone who had served on more than one unlucky ship. They were afraid he might be the one who had caused the bad luck. I wonder how much this affected the sailors in Salem. They were very diverse, from Africans and Indians to escaped slaves, Irish, Portuguese and more. I would guess that this very diversity mitigated some of the superstitions carried over from England, and added a few new ones.

One belief that was carried over from Europe was a belief that killing dolphins was bad luck. And it may have been. There are plenty of stories of dolphins carrying sailors in danger of drowning to shore.

The belief that the caul (the membrane that covers newborns) protected from drowning was widespread and for awhile cauls were valuable. When a sailor left the sea, he sold his caul to another sailor.

It was once customary for sailors to be tattooed with good luck symbols to ward off evil. The compass rose was supposed to help a sailor find his way back home. Later on, the tattoos became more generalized and often identified which journeys the sailor had made, whether around the cape or to China.

A note about keelhauling. I remember hearing about this when I watched Popeye cartoons. (I know, right?) Anyway, the American Navy abolished this in 1800 and the British Navy in 1835. What a brutal punishment this was! The prisoners arms and legs were fastened with a long line. The end was held at the opposite end of the ship. The prisoner was dropped into the water and dragged underneath the ship (along the keel). Invariably he drowned or bled to death from the cuts left by the barnacles on the hull. Hanging would have been more humane.

Silly superstitions and more

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Here are some of the superstitions I find silly. If a cow moos after midnight, someone in the immediate family will soon die.  Since cows moo all the time I think we can all be glad this one isn’t true. Or maybe it is. Since a cow moos all the time, it’s bound to coincide with a death, right?

If someone places three chairs in a row, someone will die. (really?)

Opening an umbrella in the house means someone will die in six months.

If a young girl sleeps with an apple under her pillow, she will dream about the man she will marry.

If a cat sharpens his claws on a wooden fence there will be a heavy downpour later that day. In fact, there are quite a few involving cats. Perhaps this is so because cats were so often seen as witches’s familiars.

Many superstitions relate to unmarried girls seeing the face of their future husbands or superstitions guaranteeing a happy future marriage. The tradition of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” is one of these. Not following this prescription is supposed to result in an Unhappy marriage.

Silly or not, there are quite a few old beliefs that we still sorta kinda follow today, as with the above. Another one: it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride right before the wedding.

Poor man’s fertilizer: A snowfall in April or May means a good harvest. This one is actually true: a late snowfall puts nitrogen into the soil which is good for plants.

Speaking ill of the dead will mean someone close to you dies within the year.

The one who gets the bigger piece of a wishbone will achieve their wish.

A black cat means bad luck.

13 is an unlucky number. Some hotels still do not have a thirteenth floor.

Here’s a big one: Halloween. It may have degenerated into a candy collecting orgy but the costumes and the connection with food have a long history back to times before the Romans.

The groundhog and his shadow. With all the furor around Puxatawney Phil one would think the rodent some form of royalty.

What I find so interesting about these old beliefs is their staying power.  My mother used to quote:

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight

red sky in the morning, sailors take warning”

as a predictor of the next day’s weather. I still think of it when I see a particularly fiery sunset.

 

True, many of them have become celebrations for children or ones that adults enjoy with tongues firmly planted in cheeks. But  I know that there are many conversations about the groundhog and his shadow so there still is some belief.