-Poul Anderson, "ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 325.
"Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him."
-Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller's Wife (London, 2005), Prologue, p. 1.
This is all that I have time for in what is left of this evening but it is something. On p.1, the time traveller's wife compares him to a seafarer and that comparison was made in a very different context by Poul Anderson.
Time and the sea are very different but what have they in common?
6 comments:
Both time and the sea separate you from home and family, and left you often among not simply strangers, but deeply foreign people.
Being a sailor, military or civil was always an unusual occupation. Sailor's wives, when they had them, had to be self-sufficient and look after things on their own for long periods. If you were on an East Indiaman, a single voyage to Asia might take a year or better.
And in the old days, merchant sailors had to be ready to fight too, given the ubiquity of pirates.
My father's family comes from Newfoundland, and started out there in 1800 -- the first Newfoundland Stirling was from County Antrim, a RN ship's surgeon left ashore with the wounded after a British frigate had a brush with a French privateer in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Then the Royal Navy apparently forgot about them somehow, and never got in contact again.
So they healed (or didn't) and settled down and married locally. Newfoundland was very sea-oriented anyway; most people were fishermen, not farmers, because it's mostly just too rocky and cold to grow crops.
I'll get in first (but I mean it): fascinating. Especially the wounded being forgotten and starting new families in Newfoundland.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha, Paul beat mw to it, fascinating! And rather amusing, that the RN forgot about your ancestor and his patients. True, the wars with Revolutionary/Napoleonic France would take up almost all the Navy's attention and resources.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul/Sean: well, the RN bureaucracy wasn't as modern then.
And especially since there was an enormous expansion going on then, and personnel turnover was extremely high anyway -- press gangs, desertions, frequent actions (particularly for frigates and sloops) and a fairly high rate of mortal sickness.
Plus ships often just disappeared, 'lost at sea' due to storms, wrecks, and so forth. I don't know for sure that the frigate my ancestor sailed on made it back to England.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I did wonder about that Navy frigate--whose captain must have recorded in the log what he did with that surgeon and the wounded. If the frigate was lost at sea that means the log was also lost. Making it easy to understand why your ancestor was "overlooked."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that's a distinct possibility.
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