the "What are you doing NOW" thread (part deux)

MOJOE do you ever cook (I should talk) or does the Royal do it all. :)

Gentlemen, gentlemen - Time to get thee to the kitchen!

Guess it's the retired chemist in me, but I handle 99% of the cooking here, truly one of my passions. And when I don't feel like cooking, I make the reservations.

I especially like going into catch/shoot/forage and cook mode. Must be some stimulation of the ancient hunter/gatherer DNA...
 
Reading up on Maine History, it's the state's 200th Statehood Anniversary... My area was crucial in settling and the keystone was cod...

But how to establish such a society on an unfamiliar continent?

Capt. John Smith, he of Pocahontas fame, gave him an answer: fish.

In 1614, Smith led an expedition to the Gulf of Maine, where he intended to hunt whales and mine gold from a rude base on Monhegan. Instead, he discovered the incredible bounty of the Gulf of Maine, particularly in the form of huge shoals of codfish, which could be split, cured and shipped back to ready markets in Europe. “Of all the foure parts of the world that I have seene not inhabited,” Smith wrote. “… I would rather live here than any where.” He named it New England.


The Gorges family coat of arms, which decorates the tomb of Sir Edmund Gorges, who died in 1512, and his wife, Lady Anne Howard, in All Saints Church, Wraxall, England. Photo from Wikipedia

On his return to England, Smith called on Gorges, now the leading figure in the entity that held the royal charter to the region. Gorges named him “admiral of New England” and dispatched him with two ships and 17 colonists to establish a permanent base on Monhegan. But his ship was dismasted in a violent storm and, on a second try, captured by French pirates. A third try involving three ships failed when adverse winds prevented the expedition from leaving port for months.

But other fishermen had been inspired by Smith’s accounts and at some point in the late 1610s established New England’s first permanent European settlements: year-round fishing stations on Monhegan, Damariscove, Pemaquid and Southport where men caught, processed and loaded cod. Soon Gorges’ hirelings were working the sites as his deputies collected rents from the other fishermen. Thus European Maine began in the pursuit of fish.

In 1618 and 1619, Gorges’ fishing agents reported that the indigenous people of New England had been wiped out by a terrible plague. European explorers, colonists and fishing crews had unknowingly transported Old World pathogens to the New World, and smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, measles and the bubonic plague spread rapidly among people who had no resistance to them. One traveler, Thomas Dermer, found Wabanaki lands “not long since populous, now utterly void,” the few survivors covered in plague sores.

The “Great Dying,” as the Wampanoag called it, killed 90 percent of New England’s Native Americans in just four years, leaving a post-apocalyptic landscape of abandoned villages, corpse-filled camps and overgrown fields. Before this, Gorges would have had little hope of realizing his vision, the Wabanaki and their neighbors being numerous and capable enough to repel incursions like the Popham Colony. But the plagues opened the door to full-scale colonization. The land, Gorges wrote, “was left a desert, without any to disturb or oppose our free and peaceable possession thereof.”

 
Eating breakfast
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back from Maryland - preparing for a trip to Richmond

88 year old mom in hospital with pneumonia brother down with the flu, brother-in-law down with bronchitis (why am I going again amidst a seeming plaque?) - gotta take care of mom.
 

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