Summary of Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The men in the canoes were skilled, but they knew disaster was just a moment away. They were navigating among the islands of wôbanakik, a beautiful but dangerous edge of the world.
#2 The Wapánahki were not a unified people. The languages spoken by those living far away were similar but subtly different from those of Ktə̀hαnəto and his relatives. They knew that they inhabited the most beautiful part of the world, and they felt slightly superior to all other people.
#3 The people were able to hunt and gather wôbanakik, which provided them with food in the spring. The summers were also good, with little frosts that lasted only a short time.
#4 The canoes carrying Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions rounded the last of the small islands, facing the swells again. The strange vessel was clearly visible, sitting quietly in a natural harbor among several islands, its trees bare of skins, the figures of men silhouetted against the sky.

Sujets

• Central
• South

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669367222
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The men in the canoes were skilled, but they knew disaster was just a moment away. They were navigating among the islands of wôbanakik, a beautiful but dangerous edge of the world.

#2

The Wapánahki were not a unified people. The languages spoken by those living far away were similar but subtly different from those of Ktə̀hαnəto and his relatives. They knew that they inhabited the most beautiful part of the world, and they felt slightly superior to all other people.

#3

The people were able to hunt and gather wôbanakik, which provided them with food in the spring. The summers were also good, with little frosts that lasted only a short time.

#4

The canoes carrying Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions rounded the last of the small islands, facing the swells again. The strange vessel was clearly visible, sitting quietly in a natural harbor among several islands, its trees bare of skins, the figures of men silhouetted against the sky.

#5

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European explorers such as Samuel de Champlain and George Waymouth were just beginning to map the crenellated shoreline of what is now Maine. Yet Norse vessels had reached the region roughly six hundred years earlier, and Native inhabitants of the Northeast had been in contact with Old World fishermen and whalers for hundreds of years.

#6

In 1602, English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold and about thirty men sailed down the southern New England coast to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, looking for a place to establish a trading post. They found the colony abandoned, with no clues as to their fate except for the word Croatoan carved on a post.

#7

Waymouth and his crew landed in what is now known as the Georges Islands, near the mouth of Muscongus Bay. They spent a week and a half digging wells, cutting new yards for the ship, and laying in firewood. They built a long, narrow sailing boat called a pinnace, which they used to explore the surrounding coast.

#8

The Wapánahkis were friendly towards the Englishmen, and they liked raisins and candy. They showed a particular fondness for the boiled dried peas and weevilly ship biscuit that formed a staple of naval cuisine.

#9

The Wapánahkis were very friendly and eager to trade, but they were very suspicious of the Englishmen’s motives. They insisted that the English go to their King, who lived along the coast to the northeast somewhere.

#10

The Wapánahki and their neighbors to the north, along the Maritime coast, knew that such visitors would be short, ugly men. They knew that their wigwaol, when approached from downwind, would be rank with their unwashed stink.

#11

The Wapánahki knew that they would have goods to trade with the Englishmen. They had information that was worth more than beaver pelts or smooth tobacco. They had encountered a race of quick-witted people, and the Englishmen immediately understood that the intelligence and knowledge of a few Salvages would be priceless to their venture.

#12

Eirik the Red was a Norwegian Viking who was banished from his country for murder. He sailed to Greenland and founded a new colony there. The Vikings tried to colonize Vinland, but the skræling attacks forced them out.

#13

When Europeans started exploring North America, the Native Americans they encountered were not friendly. The Basques, Portuguese, and Breton fishermen, who had been going to North American waters for years, were unimpressed with the Spanish colonization efforts.

#14

The contact between northeastern tribes and Europeans left a mark on them. The Indians that sailed with Samuel de Champlain in 1608 were able to speak French, and the Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot visited New France in 1606 and reported seeing a chaloupe manned by two Indians who had painted a moose on the ship’s sail.

#15

The crew landed on the island, and while they were waiting for the third Indian to come back, they kidnapped two Wapánahkis. The three who came aboard the ship willingly were already safely stowed below. The last Indian, who slipped away, was stranded on the island without a canoe but managed to stay out of sight for three days.

#16

The Archangell returned to England, and Rosier spent time with the Wapánahki Indians. He claimed that four of the five prisoners adapted quickly to their situation: they were called Tehánedo (Ktə̀hαnəto), Amóret, Skicowáros, and Maneddo.

#17

The five Wapánahki were taken in by Sir John Popham, England’s lord chief justice and a keen advocate of colonization of the New World. They were pumped for information, which Gorges compiled into a book, The Description of the Countrey of Mawooshen, Discovered by the English, in the Yeere 1602.

#18

The Indians who crossed the Atlantic were not mindless cargo. They were people who reacted to their circumstances in different ways. Some even went willingly, such as Essomericq, the son of a Guarani chief from Brazil, who was baptized during the voyage and eventually married a Frenchman’s daughter.

#19

The Europeans saw the Salvages as crucial pawns in their imperial plans, and many of the Indians who made first contact along the eastern seaboard saw the newcomers as a means to enhance the positions of their own people.

#20

The five captives that Waymouth took back to England were unusual in that most eventually made it back home. However, the route was sometimes difficult and painful.

#21

The last of the five Waymouth captives, Skicowáros, came home in 1607, when the ships Gifte of God and Mary and John disgorged more than a hundred Englishmen at the mouth of the Kennebec River to start a colony at Sagadahoc, which stands with Jamestown as the oldest English attempt to settle the New World.

#22

The land that became the First Frontier was a dangerous place, characterized by shifting allegiances and opaque motives, great opportunity and sudden death. It was a place that would become increasingly treacherous for both Natives and Europeans to navigate as their worlds drew more and more intertwined.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The Wapánahki came into the world when Kəlóskαpe and Malsom, the great chief, shot arrows into the bark of the ash trees, creating beautiful human beings. They spread out across wôbanakik and have lived there ever since, closest of all human beings to the rising sun.

#2

The story that is emerging is that humans arrived in the New World by whatever means and journeys, and eventually resulted in a staggering diversity of cultures that occupied every corner of the Americas.

#3

The first incontrovertible sign of these Paleolithic hunters in North America was the discovery of stone spear points mingled with the bones of extinct bison. The Clovis people, who were masters at flintknapping, created these points.

#4

The Clovis First hypothesis fits nicely into the larger framework of human migration, but there have always been anomalies that Clovis couldn’t explain. For example, Clovis points don’t really resemble the oldest stone tools found in Alaska, which date from about the same time as Clovis.

#5

The idea that the first Americans were Asian has gained ground among archaeologists in recent years, based on discoveries such as 12,500-year-old stone tools and bones in the Channel Islands of California. But many archaeologists are skeptical, because there have been some discoveries that are difficult to explain with a single migration of northern Asians through Beringia.

#6

The controversy surrounding the discovery of Kennewick Man grew from the fact that the skull showed Caucasian features, which are typically found in populations in northern Africa and Europe.

#7

The debate over the origins of Kennewick Man has at times taken on surreal tones. Some believe that his skeletal features resemble those of the Ainu, a non-Japanese culture of Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin in Russia. But other remains resemble those of modern American Indians.

#8