How did it go? They kept playing the marches CD of skirling pipes usually played at funerals etc., written by Wilburforce the former slave runner in "Amazing Grace". I'm a fan of the 200 anniversary of the British outlawing slavery (1807) for what it was worth and for what it stopped, not much huh millions of Africans brought against their will to the Caribbean mostly and through Mexico to the US and even a ship built in Setauket the "Wanderer" a luxury yacht fitted with water tanks in Port Jefferson and boarded by a British Navy vessel in the blockade of slavers in 1858 or so thought that beautiful luxury ship couldn't be...it was and put into Jekyll Island, Georgia, where the captives were fed from a large cast iron pot there in the "playground of the rich" once upon a time and sold into slavery. One set of Doublemint twins are their descendants. It was built by Captain Brewster Hawkins in Setauket, captained by his son Thomas Hawkins for a year, then sold to a Louisiana cotton merchants broker. Very fast, it was used by both sides in the resulting Civil War and sank in a storm off Cape Masai (or Maysi named by Christopher Columbus) on the NE coast of Cuba, involved in the fruit trade in 1869 I read, not far from Guantanamo.
I did some archaeology on the Captain Brewster Hawkins House for a doctor and his wife. He taught psychopharmacology and was head of out-patient services at Stony Brook, a psychiatrist, of Massachusetts, his wife from Virginia. I dug a small unit that became their children's sandbox after a septic system was put in showing a lot of broken stuff from the earlier 1700s in the Brookhaven Town Historic District. "Down With Popery" was scrawled in an upstairs wall under the wall paper.
Captain Brewster Hawkins restarted shipbuilding in Setauket in the 1840s, earlier settled by Charles River, Massachusetts pioneers in the 1660s. It had been built there early in Poquot (where Sri Chinmoy lived who just died the peace activist and guru who broke many physical records) when Port Jefferson was more a "drowned meadow" later dredged out, earlier the focus was more in Setauket though later Port Jefferson built more ship tonnage up until about WWI, shipbuilder John T. Mather's hospital his legacy. Port Jeff even had "The Only" car company which came in second in an early Pike's Peak road race (where "America the Beautiful" is said to have been inspired) Zebulon Pike is buried near Watertown, NY. Welcome back!
I played my "Isle of Skye" CD. I also gave the "Highland Heritage" book by Grace Campbell, my mother's brother Vincent Urquhart brought back from Expo '67 in Montreal I reckon.
Strangely, Vivian started taking pictures with a digital camera and it disappeared. They think the pizza delivery boy took it.
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