‘We are all so glad the Chase’s have made harbor, as they are a jolly family and love their children” says the Wife’s Log from of Australia by Mrs. Captain I forget just now. You wouldn’t know it from Annie. Annie always told us that the boredom was the worst part. If you already hate every minute, then dead boredom lives up to its name. Boredom is so very painful. You could hear it when she told us that all she was allowed to do was sew and read the bible.
Mrs. Captain Chase was strict, I keeping wanting to forget, and perhaps not a natural teacher. Annie’s samplers weren’t of whaling, she didn’t write poetry like she may have been allowed to read in the psalms. Revelations had never been revelatory, more hunts, more storms. She’d walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death so often that her feet were permanently numb. She feared all evil, for the whip and the lance did not comfort her, and she knew that she would dwell in the belly of the whaler forever.
Idle hands do the devil’s work. An unruly mind was far more dangerous. Unlike her brother, she wasn’t to learn the stars from the sextant and the sextant from the stars. A bent toward taxidermy or parfumerie, despite having all the raw materials, would have been bent right back. Nor could she whittle, or scrimshaw, or play quoits or whatever the heck she didn’t get to do back then. There have been miniature books since books. What price a teeny set of all the greats? (Or just one volume of Dickinson but it was not in reach. She had written them in time, but published them until far too late.) And surely there was the library of the gams (five years before they are overdue)? Perhaps none of that would have mattered, for, like the men, all she really wanted to do was eat fresh things from own garden. Still, you get my drift.
She knew a lot, as the other side of the fountain shows. What if she was being tested in school today? Could she prepare for a life-science test a little faster than I could? Would geography, having had its way with her, finally pay off? Would a state-test’s third grade reading on the whales’ northern/southern hemispheric migration ring true...wouldn’t she know much better and get it wrong? I think so.
You can try it for yourself by writing your own family’s stories (or those of any family or every family you want) and seeing how it goes to find practice-test questions on tests you have to take.