For most early sailors, cured foods, like salt pork, would have comprised the majority of their diet when out at sea for long periods. So, with that in mind, imagine what an 17th or 18th century maritime Thanksgiving might look like- dry, hard, leathery, and mouth-abradingly salty. Care to try out a little salt pork yourself over the holiday, as a relief from turkey sandwiches and turkey a la King? Check out this video from 18th century reproduction sutler JAS Townsend. If you want a truly 18th century seafaring experience, wash it all down with some rum-based grog…but it probably won’t make the pork taste any better!

Corn-ucopia

       

One of the first history lessons most of us learn as schoolchildren is the one about the Pilgrims and the Indians, sitting down together to a peaceful supper of roasted wild turkey, maize, and…wait, did they have anything other than turkey and maize, in the story? We assume this meal would have been gathered, not grown, since the Pilgrims didn’t exactly have the whole ‘supporting themselves’ thing down yet, but once you get past the two obvious plate-fillers, it’s hard to imagine what else would have been on the menu. There doesn’t seem to be much overlap between what the Pilgrims would eat and what the New World could naturally provide. The Pilgrims sought to establish and transplant European culture. Behaving like hunters and gatherers was, from their perspective, simply not to be considered.

This attitude was pervasive, and not limited to the colonies of the Northeast. In the Chesapeake, the colonists at Jamestown and into the 17th century shared this disinterest in native foods, even when it meant famine, as in the example of the Starving Time of the winter of 1608-1609. Although surrounded by waterways lined with tuckahoe (the survival food for Chesapeake Indians),  at the height of their desperation the Jamestown settlers fed on horses, cats, dogs, rats, and in a few notable cases, their dead comrades, rather than subsist on sources of wild nourishment around them.

       

                                                   Chesapeake tuckahoe.

Why were the colonists so unable to assimilate their tastes to the incredible bounty of the New World ? Well, one major reason may be that the strength of comfort in the familiar should never be underestimated.  Simply put, if they didn’t recognize it from home, it wasn’t going into their mouths. They would eat familiar foods like oysters, venison, and sturgeon with gusto, as evidenced by archaeological investigations into their trash piles, but disdained wild foods like groundnut, wild rice, and cattail.  The only notable exception to this rule? Corn. In British English, 'corn’ just meant 'grain’, and in the Colonies, maize was treated as a substitute for the wheat fields the settlers were unable or unmotivated to grow in their colonial outposts. Colonists even referred to corn as  “Guinny wheat,” or “Turkie wheat.“

                              

Two of the 'providential’ discoveries in the New World by the Pilgrims involve this culture-bridging grain. One was the finding of caches of Indian corn, buried in the ground to overwinter for next spring’s seed, along the coast of Cape Cod, as the Pilgrims traveled inland seeking succor. The other was the legendary Pilgrim 'instruction’ by Squanto of corn cultivation techniques. Stated Governor Bradford of the process:

“In April of the first year they began to plant their corne, in which service Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both ye manner how to set it, and after, how to dress and tend it.”

In Jamestown, John Smith wheedled and threatened the Chesapeake Indians to continue the supply of maize to the cookpots of the settlers, and many of the negotiations were tense, hostile, and occasionally life-threatening. Unbeknownst to the Jamestown colonists, their arrival to the Chesapeake was in the middle of a protracted drought that had severely impacted the harvest of maize, a situation that was a serious flaw in the settler’s plan to largely rely on the Indians for corn. Only after several years of sporadic corn trade, subsequent months of malnourishment, and the occasional arrival of tall ships from England, laden with supplies, was every colonist in Virginia required, by law, to grow their own corn.

The prevalence and tradition of Indian corn didn’t just stop in the field. Many of the dishes colonists prepared with maize were similar, if not identical, to the recipes developed by Indians, and the names of these foods prepared in longhouses and daub and wattle dwellings alike echo with native influence: hominy, pone, suppawn, samp, succotash. Some of them we even prepare today.

      

So this Thanksgiving, when you bow your head and think of all the things you’re grateful for, spare a little gratitude for the humble cob. Although turkey might get all the glory, our colonial predecessors, through trial, error, arrogance, and finally, appreciation, knew the might of the maize.

Chesapeake Indians are nameless and faceless in many history books after Jamestown and the beginning of colonization. But several tribes, like the Pamunkey, continued to survive to the modern day because they were able to successfully adapt for continuation through the centuries. Those adaptations, although ultimately successful in maintaining the Pamunkey traditions and right to their lands, were often painful, as we can see in this video that documents the arachelogical work around the Braffteron, an early 18th century Indian boys school at William and Mary.

A Whale of a Good Time

    

On June 1st, 1889, a throng of genteel gawkers stood around the giant carcass. Although dead for weeks, the whale was perfectly preserved and would have appeared completely lifelike if it weren’t for the billowing wafts of formaldehyde that emanated from its thick, elephantine hide. Some of the more adventurous in the crowd purchased tickets to enter the monster’s mouth, which in true Victorian fashion, had been outfitted for comfort with a settee, a table, and carpeting.This was a remarkable, if macabre sight, made all the more so by the fact that this Jonah-style amusement was being offered in the northern part of the Chesapeake’s main stem, hundreds of miles from any whaling port. Indeed, the whale had been killed in Cape Cod, and then pickled, sold, and transported as a tourist attraction for a new resort hot-spot: Tolchester Beach.

Resort towns, indeed vacations at all, were growing in popularity in the end of the 19th century for the new middle classes.  For earlier generations, only the wealthy elite could have taken the waters or colonic treatment at various East Coast sanatoria or, if a stint abroad was fancied, the Grand Tour of Europe.

                     

For the lower and middle classes, however, there had been extremely limited recreational options throughout the majority of the 19th century, for a few reasons. One was time- the workday or workweek had not been regulated, so employees for the large industrial factories had few available hours, besides the Sabbath, that wasn’t already spoken for. In addition, the great outdoors was seen as treacherous and full of disease. Prior to Pasteur’s advancements in germ theory and Lister’s subsequent work with disease transmission, the concept of ‘miasma’ or literally 'bad air’ held sway. Fear of communicable disease, and a lack of understanding about where it came from meant most people avoided the outdoors altogether. Houses weren’t built with porches, no one swam in the rivers, and only eccentrics like enlightenists would dare to, say, build a cabin in the woods next to Walden pond. The world was simply too dangerous, too full of creeping, airborne pathogens ready to strike you down with cholera, yellow fever, or influenza.

   

This mid-19th century satirical image of the London Board of Health shows that although the miasma theory was taken seriously, it still had the air of the ridiculous, even at the time.

Stage left, enter modern science. It’s easy to forget how quickly some of the major scientific advances in public health actually happened, and what a huge impact these changes would quickly have on everyday people. For example, in the beginning of the 19th century, open sewers full of excrement, effluent, garbage and carcasses, were considered a noxious but accepted part of city life. By the end of the 19th century, cities like London, due to huge strides in science and public health, were installing the first modern sewers and rejecting the pestilent past of their predecessors.

Locally, Baltimore would wait until 1915 to follow London’s example with sewerage, but a better grasp of illness and its causes would lead more city dwellers to seek refuge in the summer months from the increasing population, intense heat, smoke and smog from coal and wood fires, and the stench of a city where a heavy rain turned the harbor into a floating privy.

Nationally, Americans were following the trend to move away from urban America and out into nature by creating the  US Park system (and smaller parks, like Central Park in New York), using bicycles, playing croquet, joining the Boy Scouts, and participating in a whole slew of new recreational activities, most of which were enjoying while wearing funny and ill-suited (though respectable!) clothing. 

     

For the burgeoning, newly-outdoors-enthusiastic middle class in Baltimore and Washington, the benefits of fresh air, cool breezes, and moderate exercise could be best enjoyed on a new recreational frontier- the Chesapeake Bay. What had, up until this point, been a transportation and shellfish source, was now being eyed with interest by day-trippers who were newcomers amongst the log canoes, watermen, and bugeyes.

This interest was not lost on steamboat firms that were taking advantage of this new opportunity. Steamboats had been the main source of transportation on the Chesapeake since the mid-19th century, and many were kitted out luxuriously, with carved wood panelling, private berths, and menus featuring terrapin soup and roasted Canvasback duck. As the rescreation trend grew, and consumers wanted a new way of connection with the Chesapeake (rather than literally consuming it in a nice consomme’), steamboat lines sought to profit by taking their passengers to the remote, sandy locations on the Eastern Shore.

   

This image, from the collections of the Maryland Historical Society, advertises Tolchester Beach, a resort town in Kent County which was owned and run by the same company that provided the steamboat service.

Tolchester Beach shared many similiarities with steamboat-serviced beach towns throughout the Chesapeake- it offered amusements, food, lodging, and swimming, all for a fee, and could be reached within an easy day’s trip by steamboat. Amusements, which, in 1889,  atypically meant a beached whale. Normal summer festivities were of the usual sort: bathing in the Bay’s warm water in a rented suit (swimming was such a new activity that most people didn’t have their own, personal swimsuit), sucking on lemons with peppermint sticks, listening to music from the bandstand, riding on a miniature locomotive, or enjoying ice cream in Tolchester’s dairy.

    

Swimmers at Tolchester. Note the steamboat pier in the background.

   

Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society. Tolchester’s Carousel.

    

This locomotive was operational up until the park’s closure in 1962.

     

Despite amusements with names like “The Tickler,” Tolchester Beach was considered a family destination, and promoted itself to Bible groups, teetotalers, and other such wholesome folk.

  

There was even a roller coaster!

Tolchester and resort towns of its ilk were so popular that songs were written about them. You can listen to Campbell and Burr’s 1913 tune, “Sailing Down the Chesapeake” here: http://bit.ly/t92X5F

But these resort days lasted only as long as the steamboats did. Upon the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, the hourglass was tilted for beaches like Tolchester. Automobiles and the lure of saltier water, bigger waves,and more thrilling attractions lured the public away from the dun-colored beaches of the Chesapeake to the sugary dunes and twinkling rides of the Atlantic resorts. By 1962, Tolchester was closed and demolished, its rides dismantled and the great old 'dairy’ that greeted steamboat revelers with its arched facade was burned.

   

Photo courtesy Maryland Historical Society

Parts of Tolchester still live on, however, in bits and pieces saved by savvy  collectors who took away what they could before the resort was destroyed. At Echo Hill Camp in Worton, an old amusement ride, The Whip, has been reborn as a dining hall. And here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, the old bandstand, once echoing with the brassy strains of ragtime, still entertains visitors to the Chesapeake with tunes of a Saturday evening in the summer.

    

The music might have changed, and the outfits look a little less starched and proper, but close your eyes, and you could be at Tolchester again, with a lemon and peppermint in one hand and your other arm around your best girl.

      

Filter Feeder Friday

  Panopeus herbstii: the black-fingered mud crab or sometimes common mud crab.  

     

One of the reasons everyone touts oysters as one of the foundational species of the Chesapeake can be seen here in this picture.

This little guy, a common mud crab,  is a frequent hitchhiker in the oyster shells we pull up off the bottom on our Ecology Cruises here at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and is one of the many animals you find as you rummage through the catch in an oyster dredge. In addition to filtering water, the reef habitat created by oysters acts as an ‘apartment building’, providing little nooks and crannies for all sorts of tiny and intricate layers of life. Worms, mussels, barnacles with wavering 'feet’ extending from their shell trapdoors, skilletfish pillowed in their own eggs, naked goby fish, bryzoans extending their lacy mesh; all forms of life abound on an oyster reef tenement. Even dead oysters provide nourishment and shelter for all manner of small, weird creatures. 

So remember- even on the iciest days this winter, when the surface looks frozen and lifeless, below all these animals go about their business, thriving in the water that holds just enough salt to keep the oyster bar humming.

It's all just camouflage

     

It’s the Waterfowl Festival in Easton, Maryland this weekend, and it’s got me thinking about sport hunting. For many of our visitors at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, it’s not only a foreign topic, it’s one that is often perceived as controversial or troubling. Simply put, newcomers to this pastime tend to think of it as ‘killing for fun.’ When compared to the other reasons for hunting (for food and to sell, known as 'market’ hunting), it can be hard to see the point behind sport hunting, in an age of conveniently pre-packaged, pre-cleaned, and pre-cut chicken parts at  available every supermarket. We don’t “need” to hunt now. So why do we still do it?

As the daughter of an avid Eastern Shore sportsman, I feel particularly well informed to discuss sport hunting and its tradition as the Chesapeake’s newest iteration of a long and respected relationship with migrating birds of all kinds. I grew up in a household where venison or goose was a much more frequent feature on my plate than beef or chicken. My father loved to hunt, but for him, it was never really about the kill- it was about the friendship and camaraderie of the guys in the blind, it was about watching the sun rise over a frigid, frost-furred marsh, it was about the subtle art of arranging a decoy rig just so, or a plaintive intonation on a goose call. We ate what he brought home, but for him, that was just a bonus of the entire process.

      

As I teach it here at CBMM, so much of the appeal of sport hunting lies in that delicate art of camouflage- whether visual, aural, or locational. Before sport hunting was developed in response to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, market hunting was the traditional approach towards harvesting waterfowl in the Chesapeake. Since there was no regulation up until that point, hunters were free to bag as many birds as they cared to shoot- and then profit by subsequently selling the birds to restaurants, steamboats, and individual consumers. Shooting was done with the birds on the water, rather than in the air, and used tools like punt guns or battery guns, which were developed to allow a hunter to dispatch the maximum number of waterfowl as quickly as possible. Often the gunning was done at night, while the geese, ducks, and swans slept in the water. This was not a method of finesse, rather one of efficiency and mass harvest.

                         

We have several of these guns at the Museum, and they are almost fascinatingly ogre-scaled. The sixth grade boys particularly love them.

One thing to keep in mind regarding market hunting is that the Chesapeake’s waterfowling population was certainly not the only place where this attitude prevailed. The New World from the time of European first contact had seemed a place of endless bounty. For many of these settlers, especially those with a Christian mindset, it was understood that these wide open spaces, clear rivers, and forests were abounding with life for them. Now, we call it 'manifest destiny’. Then, it was just the birds, fish and animals god provided for sustenance. And what a bounty it was - early accounts from colonists are brimming with breathless descriptions of birds and beasts in populations never seen or even imagined. William Strachey described the Bay in 1610 as “covered with flocks of waterfowl…in such abundance as are not in all the world to be equalled.” George Alsop estimated in the mid-17th century that one flock of ducks at the head of the Bay was a mile wide and seven miles long.

Frankly put, no one could imagine any type of hunting could really make a dent.

But by the early 20th century, it was clear through the plummeting numbers of migratory geese, ducks and swans, that yes, indeed, overharvesting could have a seriously negative impact. The need for regulation was clear. The following Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918,  dramatically changed the approach towards hunting in the Chesapeake. With the sale of migratory birds outlawed, and subsequent legislation limiting the amount of birds each hunter could harvest and also mandating that birds could only be shot on the wing, hunters had to radically alter how and why they waterfowled. Now gunners had to create a setting, complete with sound, bird replicas, and a hiding spot, that birds had to be lured into. Hunters were challenged to familiarize themselves with the habits, calls, and preferences of the individual birds they sought. For example, in the wide-open, shallow waters of the Susquehanna Flats, where millions of migrating canvasbacks descended to plunder the verdant underwater meadows that grow there, hunters had to develop a way of concealing themselves in the middle of a wide open Bay. The response? Sinkboxes: partially submerged floating vessels, with wide rims for supporting canvasback decoys, often painted the color of the water. (See the sinkbox on the left in the photo below.)

    

Along with canvasback calls and box weighted and floating decoys, the 'rig’ of a canvasback hunter mimicked the sounds, sights and location that the ducks preferred. To hunt successfully, this was now the challenge- every hunter had to know the subtle art of camouflage, and through that, also had to intimately acquaint themselves with the birds they hunted. The birds and the style of hunting depended on the natural inclinations of the waterfowl- whether canvasbacks, mergansers, geese, or wood ducks. Hunters can now be found in blinds, in pits in farm fields, on boats, and in corn fields, each hunting a particular bird with a certain call, decoy rig, and schedule.

This merganser decoy, photo courtesy of Dave Harp, represents the local, species-specific kind of tool hunters developed after 1918.

The habitat, life cycle, food preferences, calls, and movement of individual species has become part of the learning process. Through this appreciative observation, along with strategy and the development of bird-specific skill, sport hunting became the activity it is now- one that often creates ardent hunters that consider themselves passionate conservationists. Ducks Unlimited, for example, founded by sportsmen, is the leader in wetland and waterfowl conservation with a simple premise: you protect the birds and their habit, you have more birds to hunt without negatively impacting the population.

   

So, when I’ve got those visitors at the Museum who say, “But isn’t sport hunting all about killing for fun?” I say, “The fun isn’t in the kill. For most sport hunters, it’s all in the camouflage.”

I’m currently teaching an afterschool program at Gunston School in Centreville, Maryland for middle school kids from Queen Anne’s County. Yesterday’s program was on waterfowling, and so when scouring the web for a video that would help to embody the historic Chesapeake’s prodigious population of waterfowl, I thought this one fit the bill. I challenged the students to identify as many of the birds as they could, and I found, at most they recognized three: ducks, geese, and swans.

What a remarkable change from the days (50 years ago or more) when Chesapeake children, raised in connection with the world around them, could have identified on sight the waterfowl indigenous to their particular arm of the watershed: canvasbacks in the Susquehanna flats, or mergansers in the vast marshes on the lower Eastern Shore. Each of those birds represented food or money, and also made up the kaleidoscope of winter colors, sounds, and images that made their neck of the Bay home. Dabbling ducks and diving ducks made up the vast proportion of the flock then, with some smaller populations of Canada geese and Tundra swans scattered within.

Just in this video, we can see the changes: geese, snow geese in particular, make up a huge proportion of the migrating fowl. What the video doesn’t catch is what I can see in the classroom: our connection with those birds, as more than an auditory backdrop in the colder months, is waning. But from the excitement and interest of the students in my classroom as I showed them this clip and then discussed the birds of the Atlantic Flyway, it proves isn’t too late to show our kids what they’re missing.

Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee pay it forward

Everyone knows what a soggy fall we had here in the Chesapeake- but what were the repercussions beyond moldy shoes and washed-out dirt roads? Some serious ones for the Bay and the people who work it, it seems. Many of you are familiar with the now-notorious image of the huge surge of heavy silt crashing into the main stem of the Bay from the Susquehanna following weeks of incessant rain- 23 to 32 inches in total.  

                    

At the time of the storms, scientists couldn’t yet quantify the impact the hurricane and tropical storms might have. In an article interviewing scientists at the Virginia Institute on Marine Science, one VIMS professor said: “Without the background data provided by our monitoring programs, we’d have no way of quantifying both the short-and long-term impacts of these one-time events, and their potential impacts on Bay health and restoration efforts.”

(read full article here: http://bit.ly/oYA52T)

While most of the concern immediately following the rainfall was directed towards submerged aquatic vegetation and the sediment load, it seems that another serious consequence has also been felt: mass oyster deaths. Like Hurricane Agnes in 1972, which churned the Chesapeake with torrential floodwaters, consequently wiping out all oyster beds north of the Bay Bridge, these series of storm events in 2011 appear to have taken a similar toll, according to watermen.

In this article in Hometown Annapolis, one of the last remaining skipjacks on the Western shore has pulled into the dock for good because of the oyster kill:

“Skipjack season started Tuesday and Sweitzer went out for the first time on Wednesday. What he found was troubling. The skipjack’s dredges were full of dead oysters.Over and over again, each lick of the dredge brought up nothing but deceased bivalves.

"The dredge came up with probably 150 oysters in it and they were all dead,” (Capt. Barry) Sweitzer said. “It was devastating. I’ve never seen anything like it.”’

read article here: (http://bit.ly/sxrOEU)

The upper Bay die-off is now being investigated by DNR, with the possibility of the Chesapeake’s oyster being federally declared a disaster- read about it here in the Annapolis Capital: http://bit.ly/uupVw9

I predict this won’t be the last story we hear like this in the next coming months. Even this Saturday at Oysterfest, both the dredging demonstration and the Ecology Cruise failed to pull up even one live oyster off of the bottom of the Miles. Mark Adams, leading the tonging demonstrations on Volunteer, kept saying, “It’s all just gravel down there.”

If the buzz amongst those working the water is true, the effects of Irene and the fall tropical storms could have an unprecedented impact for the animals in the Bay that need salinity to survive- especially oysters. That loss could have huge repercussions for the water quality of the Chesapeake, for the watermen that work it, and for oyster market this winter and in the future. I’ll keep you posted as this story develops.

      

Let’s hope these aren’t the only oysters we see this winter season.

Out of a dam springs a reef

       

There’s an article today in the Baltimore Sun about the creation, just this week, of a brand new oyster sanctuary at the mouth of the Chester River. Utilizing rubble from a demolished dam on the Patapsco River, the sanctuary represents two years of collaborative efforts between the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the State of Maryland, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get the site conceptualized, approved, and established.

The sanctuary is by no means without controversy, however. Chester River watermen have raised concerns about the possible contaminants lurking in the concrete of the old dam, and how permanent submersion in water may cause them to leach into the river. Also, as this project is the first of its kind in the tributaries of the Upper Eastern Shore, watermen are leery of long-term, unforeseen outcomes resulting from dumping millions of tons of concrete onto the river bottom.

Concerned watermen and locals should take heart, however; a project similar to this initiative has successfully created habitat for oysters on the Severn River. Experiments with concrete ‘reef balls’ have also been effective.

The Chester was long a location for some of the Chesapeake’s richest oyster beds: many will recall, in particular, the deadly skirmishes over the 'white gold’ that took place on the Chester in the 19th century during the Oyster Wars. While those days of plenty and plunder may be gone forever, perhaps this reef project is the beginning of a a new lease on life, clinging to the bottom of the Chester, for the imperiled Chesapeake Crassostrea virginicus.

Read the Baltimore Sun article here: http://bit.ly/skeg2U

Chesapeake eels are a way to improve water quality- but how? This video shows that one tributary is increasing the amount of mussels in their tributary to the Susquehanna by adding- you guessed it- eels!

In the earlier post, I mentioned that mussel larvae hitchhike inside the gills of eels, using them as a way to move from one location to another. By increasing the amount of eels, you provide hosts that are also a source of mobility. This organization is releasing more eels into their waterway, hoping that the baby filter-feeding mussels come along for the ride- cleaning the water while they’re at it.

Today’s post is a great piece on freshwater eels that was on NPR’s “Environment in Focus” series, produced by CBF’s Tom Pelton. There were a few points in the segment that really surprised me- (who knew eels were so cool?):

1. That freshwater eels carry hitchhiking mussel larvae in their gills. 2. The sex of eels can be determined by the crowded conditions in which they’re raised. 3. Eels, on their final trip to the Sargasso Sea, lose their stomachs, stop eating completely, and assume a whole host of new attributes, like enlarged eyes.

    Enjoy the program and share your amazing new facts about eels with our visitors the next time you’re pulling up an eel pot on Waterman’s Wharf!

    Exhibit Exploration- 11/01/11- Chesapeake Science for Non-Scientists

          

    If the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is a history museum where the past happened yesterday, than one of the parts of the story we need to tell is basic Bay biology and how it has changed as a result of human impact. But where to begin? The flora, fauna, and environment that lies just under the surface of the Chesapeake is immense, and constantly changing.

    A good start would be to attend tomorrow’s Exhibit Exploration, which will be the first of a two-part collaboration between CBMM and Horn Point Laboratories. Horn Point scientists will be discussing Chesapeake science in layman’s terms, tackling the animals of the Bay, then and now, and also the water quality and makeup of the Bay. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to the basics of Bay life and science, and to add a little more context to your interpretation, whether at Waterman’s Wharf, Mister Jim, or the Lighthouse.

    The program begins at 10:00 AM, in the Bay History Building. See you there!

    Chesapeake Watermen and the 'real story'

    Today’s Baltimore Sun featured an article, “Watermen: The Real Story,” written by the president of the Chesapeake Bay Commercial Fisherman’s Association, Gibby Dean. In it, Mr. Dean shares his anger and frustration at the bad rap he feels watermen have been given, and describes why he believes it’s unfounded. Read the whole article by clicking through the link above.

    Something Lighthearted

          

    Sailors and watermen have inspired or written many a bawdy song or a raucous joke- whether the product of too much grog, or just boredom, it’s pretty entertaining stuff. They have also inspired one of my favorite cartoonists, Kate Beaton, who riffs on historic and seafaring content in her work (she’s also a former Maritime Museum of British Columbia staffer!).

    You can see more of her work here: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php

    It's a beautiful day for "Rosie".

         

    It’s a beautiful, blue Tuesday at the Museum, and nothing reminds me more of the importance of the work that we do here than the scene, taken today, that this picture captures: kids, engaged; boat, slowly restored; shipwright, teaching.

    This is what we do best: connect visitors, kids and adults, to history in a way that makes it real, tangible, and within reach. It’s not an anecdote written in a foxed-page book. It’s really happening to them- this Chesapeake history of 60 years ago is made part of their current experience.And watching this program, I could see them making the connection.

    It’s a good day to be here at the Museum.

    Field trip in December!

                           

    So, for those of you that were not able to make the last Volunteer Education meeting (naughty, naughty!), I made a brief announcement about the revival of the Volunteer/ Docent Field Trip program. What it comes down to is the fact that I can spend hours explaining a new idea, concept, or approach, but seeing and learning about it in person is a much more effective and fun way of mastering new material.

    Also, I just think it would be fun to get out of St. Michaels with some of you volunteers.

    The first spot, for our December trip, I decided would be ‘Livie’s choice’, so I went for Historic Londontown. See their website here: http://bit.ly/mRGLQu

    As all of you know, I frequently try to dissuade you from interpreting the Colonial tobacco era in terms of numbers- millions of hogsheads, thousands of acres, hundreds of slaves, etc. It depersonalizes the historic narrative, and frankly, most people can’t truly envision numbers in a meaningful way (unless it’s money, which is maybe the best way to make history seem remote and calculated- I mean, net profit? Dry, dry, dry).

    Historic Londontown, on the other hand, is actively embracing the concept of personalizing the 17th and 18th centuries, and is doing that primarily by focusing on the culture and impact that tobacco produced. This focus can be appreciated in their different interpretive spaces, whether an historic manor house, a reconstructed 'tenement’, or an archaeological dig. It’s the people, how they lived, where they slept, what they ate that is the leading story they tell. Through those stories, you learn more about the time, and what a pervasive influence the tobacco industry had on every facet of 17th and 18th century individuals. The importance is on how history affected people, rather than how a few movers and shakers affected history.

    Think of it as “where is the 'I’ in history?” If you were to travel back in time, how would that new time, culture, way of life have impacted you?

    The field trip is scheduled for December 15th. You can sign up on the volunteer website, or contact me for details. Hope to see you 'round Londontown!

                         

                              Where is the “I” in this picture of Londontown’s gardens?

    Tattoos...the little-discussed part of Maritime social history

                          

    In the new issue of Common Place, an online journal of historic articles sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, there’s a great review of a new book published through the Independent Seaport Museum, “Skin and Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor.” The review opens with a quote that caught by ever-Chesapeake-interested-eye, an account written by a crewmember of the USS Monitor during a swim on the coast of Tidewater Virginia:

    “…I wish you could see the bodys of some of these old sailors: they are regular Picture Books. [They] have India Ink pricked all over their body. One has a Snake coiled around his leg, some have splendid done pieces of Coats of Arms of states, American Flags, and most all have the Crusifiction of Christ on some part of their Body…”

    It’s one of those perfect examples of how personal, intimate, and relatable history can be. How easily it can translate into our own world, and how little things have really changed over time. Change the vessel, and move it forward 150 years, and that same scene could be witnessed all over the Chesapeake. Probably with different tattoos, though.

    Read the full review here: http://www.common-place.org/vol-12/no-01/reviews/mcneur.shtml

    John Smith 400 Project site

    Those of you that attended my recent lecture on the John Smith 400 Project were encouraged to check out this website (linked above) that Sultana developed for the initiative. It’s a really wonderful site to check out, with lots of historic information on Smith’s journeys, background on the shallop and its construction, and some very well-written educational materials. Spend a few minutes poking around the site- you’re sure to find something useful or new.