Usually I am very happy to get to St. Patty’s Day; I put in my peas. Not this year. Even with the warm up there is still too much snow on the ground. And more coming.
OK, I know that we sometimes get snow this late, sometimes into April. But after this year? Seriously?
What is wrong with this weather? I thought climate change meant we’d be more like Florida, not Alaska.
In fact, we have Alaska’s weather. The Iditirod had to be pushed way north. Hey, they could have had it in my yard.
I am very excited and happy to announce I have selected a new audio book narrator for “Cradle to Grave” and “Death in Salem”. As any librarian will tell you, audiobooks are very very popular. A good narrator can really make a story shine. I am very glad to see both these titles become audiobooks for all my patrons.
I am happy and excited to announce I have just signed the contracts with Dreamscape for audiobooks editions of “Cradle to Grave” and “Death in Salem“. Because Cradle is already out, I hope to see the audiobook come out this spring. “Death in Salem” won’t be out until June 17, 2015 so I hope the audio will be available in the summer.
I am cautiously optimistic that I will be able to choose the reader.
Just a reminder too: I will be running a giveaway from Goodreads and my website for “A Simple Murder” through the month of March. I hope to run another for Death in Salem, maybe in May?, but that will be determined by the number of copies I will get from the publisher.
Although the witch craze in Salem ended, with many consequences as I have mentioned in an earlier post, the belief in witches did not end. With an increasing interest and belief in science, a belief in witches faded but did not disappear, either in Europe or in the Colonies – new United States. Legally, a witch trial and a judicial solution to perceived witch craft became unlikely (and I imagine that the uncritical acceptance of spectral evidence by Samuel Parris in Salem had a lot to do with increasing skepticism) hanging by lynch mobs could still happen.
In Europe women were still attacked and in some cases executed for witchcraft. In Denmanrk (1800), in Poland in 1836 and even in Britain in 1863. Violence continued in France through the 1830’s. And in the United States, as previously mentioned, Ann Lee of the Shakers was arrested and charged for blasphemy in 1783. But she was released.
In the 1830s a prosecution was begun against a man (yes) in Tennessee. Even as recently as 1997 two Russian farmers killed a woman and injured members of her family for the use of folk magic against them.
Why am I blogging about witchcraft? Well, one of the comments about one of my earlier posts talked about the influence of one person in swaying a community to hunting a witch. No matter how you look at it, most of the motivations behind witch hunts show the worst of human nature. Readings I’ve done point to class warfare and gender conflict. And while it is true that in some European countries men have been accused, in most of Europe and the United States the ones hunted have been women. There are a variety of opinions: control of a woman’s sexuality for one. The control of women’s reproductive life (and the eradication of midwives) for another. Considering what is still happening here I believe it. But some of the other motivations are equally as unflattering: greed, malice, revenge.
With all of this bouncing around in my head, I’ve decided that my next Will Rees (after Death in Salem) will look at some of these themes. You heard it here first.
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.
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.
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.