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Carolina Chronicles - Chronological Order #3
Rogue's Harbor
Rogue's Harbor in the Perquimans district of North Carolina was the Englishman's name for the harbor, much to the annoyance of the colonists. Rogue's Harbor tells the dramatic story of the attempts of these settlers to rid themselves of the many burdensome taxes imposed on their trade by the British Crown.
It was not the intention of these men in the early 18th century to break away from the mother country, but to effect a colonial administration sympathetic to their problems. They also wished to be allowed free trade with other colonies -- and with countries other than England.
These problems form the background of Rogue's Harbor, whose real story is the colonists' love of their new land and their realization that the wealth of their part of the New World was not in gold and silver but in the virgin land itself.
Into North Carolina has come the Willoughby family, the father Nathan, the mother Dorcas, their teenage children, three boys and a 17-year-old daughter. The Willoughbys are of good English stock, removed to America not because of religious persecution or intolerable servitude, but because of a love for land, new land. They are gentry in the true sense, with servants and a companion for their daughter.
Nathan and Dorcas Willoughby have prospered in the new world. They have a sturdy house, good harvests, and a healthy family. Except for the eldest, Robin, who has gone to sea with a captain who has agreed to help the colonists evade the tariff by mis-marking his cargoes, they are content. But conflict develops when Nathan joins with the settlers in opposing the colonial governor's rule in an insurrection-by-petition plan and when Dorcas finds that her daughter intends to marry a man she thinks is a poor Scottish schoolmaster. She feels that the girl can make a better marriage, one arranged on English soil.
Nathan's insurrection proves a success for him and his confreres. Their demands are favorably received in England and their rights are firmly established, enabling them to conduct local affairs in comparative freedom. The schoolmaster and the Willoughbys' daughter elope and eventually he reveals that he is no mere teacher but the heir of a wealthy Scottish clan
During a pirate raid the youngest Willoughby son is captured, leaving the family inconsolable. At the conclusion of Rogue's Harbor young Mathew has been re-captured by his brother Robin and the sea captain appears with them at a large banquet -- replete with bagpipes, tartans and kilts -- given by the Scotsman, Buchanan, and his bride.
Rogue's Harbor reflects both a time and a place in our history, the idealism of man in his search for freedom and dignity, and the grace and charm brought to the New World by the gentlewomen who were their wives and daughters.
It was not the intention of these men in the early 18th century to break away from the mother country, but to effect a colonial administration sympathetic to their problems. They also wished to be allowed free trade with other colonies -- and with countries other than England.
These problems form the background of Rogue's Harbor, whose real story is the colonists' love of their new land and their realization that the wealth of their part of the New World was not in gold and silver but in the virgin land itself.
Into North Carolina has come the Willoughby family, the father Nathan, the mother Dorcas, their teenage children, three boys and a 17-year-old daughter. The Willoughbys are of good English stock, removed to America not because of religious persecution or intolerable servitude, but because of a love for land, new land. They are gentry in the true sense, with servants and a companion for their daughter.
Nathan and Dorcas Willoughby have prospered in the new world. They have a sturdy house, good harvests, and a healthy family. Except for the eldest, Robin, who has gone to sea with a captain who has agreed to help the colonists evade the tariff by mis-marking his cargoes, they are content. But conflict develops when Nathan joins with the settlers in opposing the colonial governor's rule in an insurrection-by-petition plan and when Dorcas finds that her daughter intends to marry a man she thinks is a poor Scottish schoolmaster. She feels that the girl can make a better marriage, one arranged on English soil.
Nathan's insurrection proves a success for him and his confreres. Their demands are favorably received in England and their rights are firmly established, enabling them to conduct local affairs in comparative freedom. The schoolmaster and the Willoughbys' daughter elope and eventually he reveals that he is no mere teacher but the heir of a wealthy Scottish clan
During a pirate raid the youngest Willoughby son is captured, leaving the family inconsolable. At the conclusion of Rogue's Harbor young Mathew has been re-captured by his brother Robin and the sea captain appears with them at a large banquet -- replete with bagpipes, tartans and kilts -- given by the Scotsman, Buchanan, and his bride.
Rogue's Harbor reflects both a time and a place in our history, the idealism of man in his search for freedom and dignity, and the grace and charm brought to the New World by the gentlewomen who were their wives and daughters.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1964
51 people want to read
About the author
Inglis Fletcher
42 books29 followersInglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture.
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 16, 2014
Shallow. It's a brief book, with a large font and double-spaced leading, and its coverage of topics and characters is just as perfunctory. All the exciting events take place off-stage. As history it is uninformative, just lots of white male landowners sitting around talking and signing things, none of which is ever really clear in practical application. Nor is it especially good as romance, since much of the wooing takes place off-stage and all of the weddings.
The best I can say for this one is "inoffensive", and that's only if the reader doesn't mind a heaping helping of sexism, classism, racism, and stereotypes. What I can't abide is that there are incidents with pirates, but they're never given a scene. For those who care, there is a late-breaking show of Christian faith.
Library copy
[Just in case you were wondering, my grandmother's copies are a little too delicate for reading]
The best I can say for this one is "inoffensive", and that's only if the reader doesn't mind a heaping helping of sexism, classism, racism, and stereotypes. What I can't abide is that there are incidents with pirates, but they're never given a scene. For those who care, there is a late-breaking show of Christian faith.
Library copy
[Just in case you were wondering, my grandmother's copies are a little too delicate for reading]
May 4, 2015
Rating Clarification 1.5 Stars
Pretty derivative stuff from Fletcher. Hard to believe she bothered to write this.
Pretty derivative stuff from Fletcher. Hard to believe she bothered to write this.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews