(DOWNLOAD) "Cap'n Hathorne: Hawthorne's Reconnection to Ancient Deeds During Bowdoin's Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Its First Graduating Class" by Nathaniel Hawthorne Review * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cap'n Hathorne: Hawthorne's Reconnection to Ancient Deeds During Bowdoin's Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of Its First Graduating Class
- Author : Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 77 KB
Description
This article aims to connect Hawthorne's encounter with sea captains in Bath, Maine, in 1852 to his knowledge of Maine descendants of Col. John Hathorne, Salem's infamous witch trial judge. In his notebook entry for Monday, 30 August 1852, Hawthorne records: "Left Concord at 1/4 9 A.M. Rainy all day. Staid in Boston 1/2 past 2; took cars for Portland, where (being delayed several hours at Kennebunk) arrived at about eleven P.M. Next day, at about one, left for Brunswick. In the evening, went to Bath to get a bed. September 1st, to Brunswick again; left for Portland at 1/2 past six; ..." (AN, CE 8:511) He does not mention the reason for his trip to Brunswick, namely his invitation to attend Bowdoin's semicentennial celebration on August 31 (Letters, CE 16:379). He is similarly silent about what Sophia, in a letter to her mother, calls his "funny adventure" in Bath, where "some old sea-captains, insist[ed] upon considering him a brother, and calling him all the time 'Cap'n Hathorne'" (19 Sept. 1852, qtd. in Lathrop 203). Hawthorne's biographers generally neglect that serendipitous interlude in Bath or only touch on it in passing, as does Arlin Turner (247). Edwin Haviland Miller is an exception: "At a tavern frequented by sailors he had what Sophia termed a 'funny adventure.' Some old sea captains, perhaps in their cups, insisted on calling him 'Cap'n Hathorne.' Forty-four years after the father's death sailors observed the son's resemblance, and such a boozy intimacy was established that Hawthorne was called 'brother,' the handsome, fastidious recluse being able to adapt readily to the jocular but short-lived intimacy of a rough-and-ready male society" (386). Miller is surely correct about Hawthorne's having a drink or two with, in his eyes, interesting strangers; but Miller, I suggest, is too unequivocal in his assumption that the mariners recognized Hawthorne's resemblance to his father who had died more than four decades earlier and whose seafaring career had been in Salem's East India trade. They more likely responded to Hawthorne's family name, (1) because they either knew or knew of living sea-captains by that name from the Kennebec River ports of Bath as well as nearby Richmond where two Hathorn brothers owned a shipyard and, in 1851, had the "monumental" four-story "Hathorn Block" built at the waterfront (Petroski xiii). Moreover, just a little further downeast, captains by the same name lived in ports on the St. George River, including Thomaston which in the first half of the nineteenth century rivaled Bath as a busy harbor and thriving shipbuilding town (see Captain's Index, Maine Maritime Museum; Owen, Bath; Eaton, Thomaston).