Tag: The devil and the dark water

Madeira Mondays: Mercury 13

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‘Floating among the stars, that is my objective.’ – Wally Funk

I didn’t know about the Mercury 13 until recently, when I read the sci fi thriller Goldilocks and saw that the book was dedicated to them. I looked them up and learned that they were a group of 13 women in the 1960s who wanted to become astronauts. They aced the same grueling physical tests as the male astronauts, but their careers were cut short before they even began when it was decided (in the USA, at least) that women shouldn’t be astronauts at all. What a tragic story, and equally more tragic when I watched this documentary, Mercury 13, and saw how qualified, capable and enthusiastic these women were.

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Madeira Mondays: Why 18th century pockets were pretty great

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Lucy Locket lost her pocket

Kitty Fisher found it

not a penny was there in it

only ribbons round it.

When I first heard that nursery rhyme as a kid, I was confused. How could somebody lose a pocket? Aren’t they like…sewn inside your clothes? A pocket is not the sort of thing that could fall out of a pair of jeans.

It was only much later when I was researching 18th century women’s clothes that I discovered that women’s pockets of yesteryear were very different to the pockets that were sewn into my modern clothes. In the 18th century, women did have pockets, but they were separate pieces of clothing – they looked like little sacks that you tied around your waist with a bit of ribbon or string. Kind of hard to explain verbally, but it makes sense when you see them! Check out this image below.

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Madeira Mondays: The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton (Book Review)

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What if Sherlock Holmes boarded a 17th century ship? What if, on this ship, there was a series of dark and unexplained happenings: animals slaughtered, strange marks appearing, and, eventually, people murdered. How would Holmes go about solving these crimes and unmasking, as it were, the ‘devil’ lurking in the ‘dark water’?

While Stuart Turton’s novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, of course doesn’t actually feature Sherlock Holmes, it’s obvious that’s what he’s referencing with his central character of Samuel Pipps (who calls himself a ‘problematary’ because, as Turton clearly knows, the whole concept of ‘detective’ wasn’t around in the 17th century, when this book is set). Pipps, and the other characters in the novel, use deductive reasoning to solve the mysterious murders happening on their ship, as it travels from Batavia (present day Jakarta), in the Dutch East Indies, back to Amsterdam. They follow clues, they speak and think very much like Holmes himself. Continue reading →