Читать книгу Captain Abby and Captain John: An Around-the-world Biography - Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Страница 3

Table of Contents

I have many people to thank for helping me make this book. Aunt Nell Pennell, while she lived; Mrs. Carroll Pennell; Andrew and Catherine Pennell, James’s grandchildren; Mrs. Helen Baxter, Charles’s daughter; Lucy Hinds, Lettice Hinds’s daughter; Mary Gilman, of the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick; Miss Alta Reed, Elias’s daughter; Emery Booker; Alice Furbish; Samuel Kamerling; my children, Margaret and Robert, who helped me with the diaries; and many others who assisted in one way or another. I thank them all now.

But it is to J. Fred Pennell, the son of Abby and John, that I owe the greatest gratitude. He trusted me with the best of family treasures, the log-books, diaries, account books, maps, and letters of his father, and the diaries and letters of his mother. He gave me the chance to erect this memorial to his mother and father. I shall always be grateful to him.

I am glad to publish this book, in addition to my poem, as my part in the celebration of the Bicentenary of Brunswick’s incorporation as a town, in this year 1939, as well as a thank-offering for the two decades of lovely living I have enjoyed in Pennellville—anciently Middle Bays—thanks to the builders of my house and the planters of my elms. I hope this book will excite others in Brunswick to do something similar for other people, other houses, other events that make up the whole and true history of the town of Brunswick. No real town history will be available until each section and each house have been explored with an eye not merely for facts but for human nature and the small but everlastingly enduring details of everyday living. And each historian must work by another lamp as well as the lamp of truth; he must work by the lamp of love.

I have taken the liberty to re-spell some of the less essential spellings of Abby and John Pennell. But I have kept the essential idioms as they spelt them. I have repunctuated, too, a bit, in order to make their words clearer to the modern reader. Especially I have put in exclamation points now and again. For both Abby and John, like many Yankees, were quiet and unexclamatory people.

All incidents and characters in this book are real, and every reference is to some actual person, living or dead. Every word within quotation marks was written or spoken.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin

Pennells’ Shipyard,

Pennellville, Brunswick, Maine,

July 19, 1939.