Cindy Vallar's Blog - Posts Tagged "chesapeake-bay"

Vital Spark by Leah Devlin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Having secured a new job as a fisheries biologist at a marine station in the Upper Chesapeake Bay, Alexandra Allaway finally comes home to her grandfather and his best friend – the two men who’ve raised her since she was a baby. Instead of a happy reunion, the friend has vanished and her grandfather has been murdered. Clutched in Randy Allaway’s hand is an old gold coin. She also finds an old map with three dots and a message to tell no one and that someone named JAllaway might come.

Unable to stay in the house, Alex bunks in her grandfather’s tugboat, Vital Spark. Her companion is a misbehaving, over-exuberant nuisance, a dog whom she calls “Water Boy.” Long after Alex falls asleep, a noise awakens her. Emerging from the cabin, she sees a slender woman dressed in white whispering to Water Boy. When the intruder spots Alex, she dives overboard and vanishes.

Once the police arrive, Alex heeds the warning to keep silent. Detective Jay Braden leads the investigation, but personal problems at home soon require more of his attention and his partner, Detective Will Jenkins, must spend more time with Alex. She’s uncertain how she feels about this, since her acquaintanceship with Will dates back to their high school days. On one hand – the one that dropped the eraser down the back of her jeans – he’s a jerk; on the other, he’s attractive and she remembers the one night they spent together a long time ago.

Each year around this time, her hometown of River Glen stages its annual pirate festival. According to legend, the infamous pirate Giles Blood-hand sailed up the Chesapeake and buried his treasure here. As far as Alex knows, no one has ever found the legendary gold, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still looking for it. Against her better judgment, but at a friend’s urging, Alex dons pirate regalia and attends the festival. While there, she meets Carly, Will’s five-year-old daughter. Carly is the only good thing to come out of his relationship with his manipulative ex-wife. Carly loves playing “pirate” and innocently remarks that Alex looks just like Giles Blood-hand’s sister.

Alex works to puzzle out the clues left to her while the police investigate not only her grandfather’s death and friend’s disappearance, but also the murder of another woman bearing a marked resemblance to Alex. Disparate threads unravel to reveal an intricately interconnected web whose origins date back to Giles Blood-hand, and with ties to a twenty-six-year-old unsolved murder.

The first entry in the Chesapeake Tugboat Murders series, Vital Sparks keeps you guessing until the very end. The book is populated with a host of characters similar to a circus sideshow, enriching the story and making your visit to River Glen memorable. Devlin deftly weaves science, history, pirate lore, romance, and mystery into a remarkable tale with serpentine twists and a final showdown that promises more puzzling mysteries to come. Her Giles Blood-hand Wikipedia entry seems authentic, but it’s as much a figment of her imagination as this delightful cast of characters and thrilling romantic suspense.




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Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars by Jamie L. H. Goodall

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Sometimes people turn to piracy strictly because they want easy money. Other times they are driven to piracy. The latter is what happened to the first documented pirate of the Chesapeake Bay, a man named William Claiborne. His felonious activities occurred during the 1630s and are discussed in the introduction to Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay. Contrary to what this title suggests, Goodall describes her book as “a collection of stories that follow some of the Chesapeake’s most notorious pirates and valiant privateers and the local residents, merchants and government officials who aided, abetted and sometimes captured them.” (23) Her goals in bringing these individuals together in a single volume are to (a) identify who took part in these piratical acts and what role did they play; (b) locate where the nefarious exploits occurred; (c) explain why the Chesapeake Bay was both a haven and a target of piracy; and (d) identify what caused the depredations in this 200-mile region that extends from Havre de Grace, Maryland to Virginia Beach, Virginia to be suppressed. Of course, this supposes that all the depredations described within are acts of piracy. In actuality, they are not.

To achieve these objectives, she divides the book into five time periods: colonial (1630-1750), the Revolutionary War (1754-1783), the War of 1812 (1805-1815), the Civil War (1860-1865), and the Oyster Wars (1865-1959). (The latter is really about poaching, rather than piracy, although contemporary newspapers referred to those involved as “pirates.”) The majority of people mentioned will be unknown to most readers: Richard Ingle, Joseph Wheland Jr., George Little, John Yates Beall, and William Frank Whitehouse, among many others. A few – Lionel Delawafer (better known as Lionel Wafer, the pirate surgeon), William Kidd, Sam Bellamy, and Thomas Boyle, for example – are often discussed in books about pirates and privateers. Readers will also find a timeline of major conflicts, maps, pictures, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index.

This is an interesting summary of piratical and privateering activity in a vital, but often overlooked, region that introduces readers to individuals rarely discussed in other maritime history books. That said, some missteps call into question this historian’s research. For example, on page 36, the vivid description of a body gibbeted in May 1699 in the Thames River is identified as being that of Captain Kidd. Four pages later, the text reads, “On May 23, 1701, Kidd ultimately met his fate at the end of the hangman’s noose.” (In 1699, Kidd was in American colonial waters trying to clear his name after sailing the Quedah Merchant to the West Indies.) On page 45, Sam Bellamy’s first victim is identified as the Whidah. He had already captured at least two vessels the previous year after going on the account. In fact, when he captured the Whidah, he was aboard the Sultana, which he had taken in December 1716. Nor did the pirates run Whidah aground, as stated on page 47. A severe nor’easter drove her ashore. The final paragraph states: “Sam Bellamy and his few surviving crewmembers were imprisoned, condemned and executed for piracy. They met their makers at the end of the hangman’s noose.” While several members of Bellamy’s crew were hanged, Bellamy was not one of them and they weren’t aboard Whidah at the time that she sank. He died in the shipwreck. Only two men survived Whidah’s sinking; Thomas Davis was acquitted while John Julian was sold into slavery.




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