Tag Archives: Salem

Salem and the scarlet Letter

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After my research journey to Salem this spring, I decided to reread both The Scarlet Letter and the House of Seven Gables. I read both but a long time ago – because they were on reading lists. Let me tell you, I missed a lot in The Scarlet Letter as a fourteen year old reader. I don’t know yet what I missed in The House Of Seven Gables – I haven’t read it yet. but I’ll be willing to bet I missed most of the important points.

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It was clearly owned by a wealthy family.

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There really is a house of the seven gables. Who knew?

 

 

 

This is one of the ceilings. and there was an attic for the servants and slaves to sleep in.

Puritanism and the witch trials are clearly part of the history – and not just the tourist parts either. We stopped at the Old Burying Point.

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There were a lot of small gravestones for little children. Some families lost five and six kids. Heartbreaking. But one of the most poignant were the large memorials to the people executed during the witch trials. Since they had been found guilty of witchcraft the victims could not be buried in consecrated ground. It is thought the families slipped out at night and found the bodies and gave them a decent burial. But no one knows for sure. And the graves of course cannot be located.

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Each memorial is inscribed with the name and date of execution of one of the nineteen victims. Sobering.

I read The scarlet Letter with an entirely different perspective.

Here’s a fun fact about Hawthorne. He did not want to be associated with the Judge who sent the accused to the gallows ( a direct ancestor) so he added a w to his name.

More about the Friendship

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In 1783 The Grand Turk, a merchant vessel not unlike the Friendship, set sail for the East When it returned with a cargo of pepper from Sumatra, Derby (the owner of The Grand Turk) made a profit of 700%.

After that, merchant ships began sailing back and forth to Turkey, India and finally China. Before the War for Independence, Great Britain had a lock on this trade, and they continued to try and maintain their hold. They stopped American vessels, impressed the seamen, blockaded the coast and otherwise made nuisances of themselves. Needless to say, all it really did was inflame passions and set the stage for the War of 1812.

By the time Will Rees visits Salem, it is sixth largest city in the US and the richest. And all that wealth rested on the backs of the sailors.

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Crews quarters. And a sailor didn’t ‘t ‘own’ your bunk either, but took whatever was available. The first mate’s quarters and captain’s quarters were marginally better. At least they had a whole room, not a large one but something to themselves.

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captain's quarters

 

 

 The captain had windows.

 

 

 

 

 

Most of the hold was designed for cargo but it was put below – where the crew slept – as well.

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Honestly, I felt claustrophobic the first few minutes I was down there.

Ahoy me maties, sailor talk in ordinary speech

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Idioms are colorful parts of speech and English is full of them. They make little sense to a non-native speaker and contribute to the difficulty of learning this language.

And speaking of learning, let’s talk about learning the ropes, an expression that dates from the era of the sailing ships over 200 years ago. Ropes controlled the sails and a new sailor had to know which rope to choose from 10 or more, in the dark, and during a crisis. He had to ‘learn the ropes’.

He also had to cross the line; i.e. the Equator.

What about ‘at loggerheads’? Loggerheads were hollow spheres of iron at each end of a shaft. Once heated, they were used to melt tar in buckets. The loggerheads could never come together, hence the expression.

‘Chew the fat’? The heavy mastication required to eat the beef that had been brined for months on end.

And my personal favorite: ‘piping hot’. If you sat down to eat to as soon as the proper pipe sounded, the food was still hot.

In the 1700s, particularly the late 1700s, New England sailors were opening up trade with the East and bringing back pepper from Sumatra, spices from the Spice Islands, tea and silk from China, and cloth (madras, chintz, calico and other cottons such as seersucker and nankeen) from India. Whalers set off from Nantucket, Salem and Bedford and was a strong industry although it reached it’s peak later in the early nineteenth century.

Hard to believe but this country was already part of a global economy.