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The diary of Laura Jernegan, a young girl who traveled with her family on her father's whaling ship in the 1860s who records her schooling, dangerous whale hunts, and the activities of her baby brother. Includes activities and a timeline related to this era.
Children are fascinated with sailing ships, lighthouses, whaling, shipwrecks, and mutinies, and these 50-plus activities will provide them with a boatful of fun. This activity guide shows kids what life was like for the greenhands, old salts, and captains on the high seas during the great age of sail in the 19th century: aboard square-riggers, clippers, whalers, schooners, and packet ships. Life aboard ship was an exciting subculture of American life with its own language, food, music, art, and social structure. Children will learn that many captains brought their wives and children aboard ship, and that kids who learned how to walk at sea often found it difficult to walk on dry land. The book begins with the China Tea trade in the late 18th century and ends with the last whaler leaving New Bedford in 1924. Kids will create scrimshaw using black ink and a bar of white soap; make a model lighthouse using a bike reflector, an oatmeal box, and a plastic soda bottle; and paint china with traditional designs using a blue paint pen and a basic white plate. Included are additional simple activities requiring common household objects that are sure to please busy parents and teachers alike.
Discusses everyday life, duties, ports of call, foods, meals, cooking methods, and holidays of whaling ship crews in the early-to-mid 1800's. Includes recipes.
When Eliza Barnes was growing up in the lobstering village of Little Harbor, Maine, she could haul a trap and row a skiff with the best of them—but she’d always known she’d leave that life behind. Now she’s settled in the high-society circle of an affluent Massachusetts town with her husband and two daughters. But when her father—a widowed lobsterman—injures himself in a boating accident, Eliza returns to her hometown to come to his aid. When she arrives in Maine, she discovers her father’s situation is more dire than he let on. Her homecoming is further complicated by the reemergence of her first love—and the repercussions of their shared secret. Then Eliza meets Mary Brown, a seventeen-year-old local who is at a crossroad of her own, and Eliza can’t help but wonder what her life would have been like if she'd stayed. By turns poignant, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny, The Captain’s Daughter is an unforgettable novel about the choices we make and the consequences we face in their wake.
In the author's words, her book includes the island's fabulous collection of historic and contemporary tidbits, including those about people who come to the island in secret; celebrity scandals, as seen from the point of view of people who live on Martha's Vineyard; unsolved murders; sea monster sightings; paranormal events; shipwrecks; and some only on the Vineyard eccentrics and crackpots from the last 350 years.
In 1850, fourteen year old, Sarah Owen Burgess, daughter of a Nantucket whaling ship captain, took pen in hand to begin a personal journal. What resulted was a history of Nantucket and Nantucketers at the end of an historical period as her beloved island slipped into hard times. When the railroad came to the mainland, making shipment of whale oil and oil products more efficient, New Bedford usurped Nantucket's prosperity leaving the island down on its luck and insecure about the future and Sarah recorded it all. Her inspiration for her role as a woman in a time when women's roles were few were the suffragette and abolitionist, Lucretia Mott and astronomer, Maria Mitchell, also daughters of Nantucket. High sea adventure, exotic ports, romance and, above all, a close-up look at Nantucket history.
The history of whaling as an industry on this continent has been well-told in books, including some that have been bestsellers, but what hasn’t been told is the story of whaling’s leaders of color in an era when the only other option was slavery. Whaling was one of the first American industries to exhibit diversity. A man became a captain not because he was white or well connected, but because he knew how to kill a whale. Along the way, he could learn navigation and reading and writing. Whaling presented a tantalizing alternative to mainland life. Working with archival records at whaling museums, in libraries, from private archives and interviews with people whose ancestors were whaling masters, Finley culls stories from the lives of over 50 black whaling captains to create a portrait of what life was like for these leaders of color on the high seas. Each time a ship spotted a whale, a group often including the captain would jump into a small boat, row to the whale, and attack it, at times with the captain delivering the killing blow. The first, second, or third mate and boat steerer could eventually have opportunities to move into increasingly responsible roles. Finley explains how this skills-based system propelled captains of color to the helm. The book concludes as facts and factions conspire to kill the industry, including wars, weather, bad management, poor judgment, disease, obsolescence, and a non-renewable natural resource. Ironically, the end of the Civil War allowed the African Americans who were captains to exit the difficult and dangerous occupation—and make room for the Cape Verdean who picked up the mantle, literally to the end of the industry.
