Plimoth Plantation

     
     

 

The Fort at Plimoth Plantation

For the past few years now members of my family have been going back to Plimoth Plantation every fall right before Thanksgiving. Some years our visits have been colder than others, but it's the cold days that, I think, give you some small idea what the original settlers endured.

For me personally, visiting Plimoth Plantation isn't just the experience of walking through a recreation of the 1629 Plantation. There is also the added nostalgia of my childhood memories from my visits back in the early 1960's. The visitor center is much improved and the Native American village has been added, but the English village is still very much how I remember it from years ago. The fact that some of my ancestors came over on the original Mayflower gives even more meaning to the visit.

Those English 'Pilgrims' sailed thousands of miles from their familiar countryside to live in a strange land with a much different climate and landscape. Even with their cannon and stockade walls they certainly must have realized how precarious a situation they were in. If it wasn't for their diplomacy, the timing of their arrival and the aid of some Native Americans they would not have survived the experience.

(Re-posted, with some edits, from another of my Blogs).

Treasure Island

Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

      One of the greatest fictional adventure tales for young people is "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This classic story of a boy's coming-of-age in the midst of a life and death struggle over a buried treasure has inspired young people for many years. But it also the basis for much of the mythology that surrounds pirates in the public mind continuing to this day. Just as Hollywood's Western movies have their archetypes, so does the classic (and modern) Pirate movie. Stevenson's Long John Silver, Ben Gunn and Captain Flint provide those archetypes.

Reading Treasure Island again I was struck by this introduction by the author:

TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,

Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

If schooners, islands, and maroons,

And buccaneers, and buried gold,

And all the old romance, retold

Exactly in the ancient way,

Can please, as me they pleased of old,

The wiser youngsters of today:

--So be it, and fall on! If not,

If studious youth no longer crave,

His ancient appetites forgot,

Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,

Or Cooper of the wood and wave:

So be it, also! and may I

And all my pirates share the grave

Where these and their creations lie!