finished a rough draft of the new first chapter

1 files changed, 62 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/lbh.txt b/lbh.txt
index f326e5c..3acff2c 100644
--- a/lbh.txt
+++ b/lbh.txt
@@ -67,9 +67,11 @@ Also needs to to introduce Lulu and Henri, Kobayashi, Tambo and his wife to be.
 
 """
 
-The smell of wet wood and salt. She smelled the world creeping into her hammock before she ever opened her eyes. For the first moment it was just the soft sweetness of wood too long at sea and the bright briny salt smell of the sea itself. She opened her eyes and looked up. The canvas of the hammock wrapped up around here, there was only a sliver of purple twilight. She craned her head back to look at the dark brown mast, crusted with salty white patterns that looked like the drawings of snowflakes in Papa's book, which was wrapped carefully in walrus leather and stored somewhere in the small hold below her. She did not know where. Neither did her sister. Neither did her brother. It was a mystery they worked on nearly every day they were at sea.
+## Chapter 1: On The Sea
 
-The wood creaked. Some of the salt blew loose. The water slapping the hull told her the waves were small. Her hammock, strung between mizzen mast and taffrail, swayed hardly at all. She lay without moving, trying to feel the boat as her father had taught her. She closed her eyes again. The boat was lifting and rolling slightly. They were moving with the current, but not as fast as the light swell rolling past them. At this latitude, this time of year, that would be south, as it had been for days now, although a swell moving south was called a northerly swell which always mixed her up. 
+The smell of wet wood and salt. The scent of the world crept into her hammock before she ever opened her eyes. For the first moment it was the soft sweetness of wood too long at sea and then the bright briny salt smell of the sea itself. She opened her eyes and looked up. A a sliver of purple twilight peaked through the canvas of the hammock, wrapped up around her. She craned her head back to look at the dark brown mast, crusted with salty white patterns that looked like the drawings of snowflakes in Papa's big book, which was wrapped carefully in walrus leather and stored somewhere in the small hold below her. She did not know where. Neither did her sister. Neither did her brother. It was a mystery they worked on nearly every day they were at sea.
+
+The wood creaked. Some of the salt blew loose. The water slapping the hull told her the waves were small. Her hammock, strung between mizzen mast and taffrail, swayed hardly at all. She lay without moving, trying to feel the boat as her father had taught her. She closed her eyes again. The boat was lifting and rolling slightly. They were moving with the current, but not as fast as the light swell rolling past them. At this latitude, this time of year, this close to shore, that would be south, as it had been for days now, although a swell moving south was called a northerly swell, which always mixed her up. 
 
 The sail snapped like a whipped wet towel. That meant the wind was light. She listened again to the sound of the water. It pulsed, rushing by the boat in surges, quiet, then loud. The boat was moving fast enough that the wind probably wasn't light she reasoned. That meant they were running before the wind, otherwise the sail wouldn't have snapped. 
 
@@ -149,11 +151,59 @@ I don't think they'll come at all. Not this year. They'll retake Nassau someday.
 
 "Have I ever steered us wrong before?
 
-"Yes" Tambo and Kobayashi spoke in chorus and Birdie laughed. Her father laughed as well. 
+"Yes" Tambo and Kobayashi spoke in chorus, which made Birdie laughed. She heard her father laugh too 
+
+"Okay. But on this one you'll have to trust me. No British warships coming to take Nassau this year." 
+
+Neither of the other men said anything. The silence stretch out until Henri came running from the bow, careening the length of the ship without ever touching a railing or handhold yet somehow never losing his footing. She watched him shove his hand in the basket, pull out a handful of now dried out rice, and then turn and run back the length of the ship, again without touching anything or seeming to stumble, and then disappear into the hold where he was playing with Lulu. She envied him, those sea legs. Even her father seemed somewhat taken aback by Henri's sea legs. But he usually just shrugged and said, "I guess that's how it is when you're born at sea".
+
+Henri's mother had given birth to Henri and died shortly thereafter on the short passage to London. Birdie had been two and half years old, she had a few fuzzy memories of Henri's mother. Dark hair leaning over her, the sunset in a window behind her. They had lived for a time on shore. Near the Thames. Her father worked on ships. It was here he had first met Tambo. A woman watched Birdie and her sister during the day. Sometimes her father would hire on a ship and be gone for several weeks. The last of these trips was nearly two months. Birdie remembered sitting under the table with Lulu, both of them crying, while the woman who watched them spoke to a harbor master about storms and her father's ship going down.
+
+Two night later, there had been a tap at the window and there he was.
+
+Neither she nor Lulu had any memories of their mother, save the stories she had heard her father tell, memories she inherited and clung too sometimes when she felt the tightness in her chest grow too much to bear.
+
+She was startled out of a midday drowse by Tambo's shout from the bow. "I see the bank." Birdie jumped up and ran the bow (grabbing the mizzen mast, rails, lines and other other holds, as normal people do on a ship), racing past Lulu and Henri coming out of the hold. She nearly slammed into a Tambo, but managed to hit the rail next to him instead. She followed his finger and saw the light green patch that marked the bank. It was high tide, still under water. The bank was a deposit of sand and silt that started a few hundred yards out from the north fork of the Edisto river and stretched between half a mile and mile out to sea, depending on the year. This year it looked to be shorter than usual. The bank was where they did most of the their fishing, and last year they'd even careened a very large ship on it. Birdie had not been allow to come on that ship, but she, her siblings, her cousins and some of the local kids had all sat on the end of the island and watched as three smaller ships careened a new ship, the largest ship Birdie had ever seen, a ship called Queen Anne's Revenge. 
+
+Birdie ran astern to tell her father what they had seen, but he was already standing on the Taffrail, glass to his eye. "Bit smaller this year, eh Birdie?"
+
+"I thought so, but I wasn't sure."
+
+"Must've 'ad some weather this summer." Her father hopped down. "Hope we're done with that," she heard him mutter to himself. He pointed to the wheel. "Bring us out a wee bit." Birdie turned the wheel a quarter to port and tk's nose edged out toward the open ocean, carving a wide berth around the bank. 
+
+Orange-headed gannets and brown pelicans dove at the outer edge of the bank, their sleek wings pulled back until they looked like harpoon tips thrown from some unseen ship sailing in the sky. The sliced through the air and hit the surface of the sea with such a quiet, tiny splash, transformed in an instant from bird to fish. And they surface, the Gannet's always with a fish in their beak. Birdie turned to her father, "Papa can we fish?" 
+
+"Sure, throw in a line, see if you can grab dinner for us."
+
+Birdie dashed forward and down in the hull. She fumbled around in the darkness near the stack of water barrels where she kept her line. She felt the iron hook and pulled it gently until the spool of catgut revealed itself. Next to it her fingers felt for the burlap she used to wrap her hand. Once she had everything, she grabbed a piece of dried fish hanging from a rafter, and climbed back up on deck.
+
+At the stern she baited the hook, tied it off on the rail, and threw it out. It jerked in her hands as skipped and then sank until the slack had all fed out. Before it had, she saw the tkfish coming for it. "Papa!" she squealed. He nodded, but turned back to watch the sea in front of them, hunting for the river mouth they would follow into the marshland, where they would secure the boat for the season. 
+
+Birdie pulled it in, Lulu held it for her while she cut its throat and tossed it in a bucket to let the blood drain out. She baited the hook and gain the tossed it out. This time, just as she was getting ready to bring her second fish on board, a gannet dove hard, the line jerked and her fish was gone. Birdie frantically pulled in the empty line and breathed a sigh of relief when she found the iron hook still there. I was, after the doll K had sewn her, her most prized possession. She took it as a sign, and began to coil up the line. It was far easier to fish from the smaller bateau she and her cousins rowed out to the bank. The slower boat meant their lines went deeper, the birds rarely had a chance to steal their catch.
+
+"Coming about," Her father yelled. Birdie instinctively ducked as the booms creaked and groaned and lines whirled and the ship pitched from starboard to port and pointed her nose at a sharper angle to shore.
+
+The tk was a lateen rigged Caraval with two masts and two triangular sails. She was light, fast and manuverable, but still had a relatively short keep that made it possible to bring her nearly a mile up the Edisto river if they had really wanted to. Their winter home was nowhere near that far, in fact it was on the island, but they kept the boat in the marsh, protected from storms by a massive stand of lobblolly pine that protected the marsh.
+
+The worst part of winter camp was arriving. Every year they had to somehow beat upwind, while fighting the current of the river, while constantly sounding to watch for shallows in the mudding brown river mouth. Even now, still a quarter mile off shore, Kobayashi and Tambo were hauling up the sounding lines while her father shortened the traveler so the tk could take faster and beat closer to the wind. All Birdie wanted was to get ashore and see Kadi, but she went below and stowed her fishing gear. She and Lulu climbed to the crows nest on the main mast and began watching for light patches of water that meant shallows.
+
+The tk tacked back and forth up and down the windward side of the island for most of the day, waiting for the tide to begin streaming in, since this would give them the added momentum the needed to make it into the river mouth where, for a time, it was too narrow to tack. Last year they had to run out the two oars that her father had carved from great thin, nearly perfectly straight tk pines and paddle with the current. This year though the gods smiled on them and the wind shifted to the north enough that they could swing out to see, and ride the wind west right into the mouth of the river where they dropped the main sail and landed just as the sun was disappearing in the trees that tangled up the western horizon. 
+
+Though it was very likely everyone on the island had seen them come in, they were still too deep in the marsh to make it to camp before dark. They made the last meal of the season on the ship with Birdie's fish and hatched plans to get tk unloaded the next morning. Birdie, Lulu, and Henri fell asleep making plans for what they would do when the saw their cousins again the next day.
+
+## Chapter 2
+
+
+
+
+
+Also the ring that functions as a traveler is on the transom. If you you try and haul on the mainsheet while too far forward you'll rip the bimini down.
+
+A flat boat is a fast boat.
+
+
 
-"Fair enough. Well, on this one you'll have to trust me. No British warships coming to take Nassau this year." 
 
-Neither of the other men said anything. 
 
 
 
@@ -466,7 +516,7 @@ She has dark hair, an easy smile. She laughs and dances when Papa plays the fidd
 How what of the cousins They live further up hte river with Cuthie I think, they come around sometimes, but there is a trail that that the kids take through the woods, or do they need the boat? I don't know, let's say they need the boat fthrough the marsh and then the trail? No the trail, no boat, the boat is Papa;s thing. So there's a trail that leads back through the woods, firstone to cuthie's how and one to their cousin's house.
 
 
-# Autumn
+# Spring
 
 ## Campfire Talk
 
@@ -691,9 +741,14 @@ Tamba asks them their names, asks if they can sail. They buy someone that can an
 
 # Glossary
 
+**Bow**: The front of a boat
+**Stern**: The back of a boat
+**Port**: The left side of a boat
+**Starboard**: The right side of a boat
 **Taffrail**: Rail round the stern of a ship 
 **Northerly swell**: a swell moving from north to south
 **Southerly swell**: a swell moving from south to north
 **Southerly wind**: a wind blowing from the south to the north
 **Northerly wind**: a wind blowing from the north to the south.
-
+**Lateen rigged**: One of the earliest triangular sail designs, this rig allows the tk to sail much closer to the wind (35 degrees to the wind with a skilled captain) than a square rigged ship of the line, which could only manage something like 50.
+**Caravel**: The ship that, for better or worse, brought Europe to the rest of the world. The Portuguese developed the Caravel off a fishing boat design in roughly 1451. It proved so successful that it dominated the spice trade for nearly 100 years, though it had a good bit of competition from the Carrack, which was square rigged in the fore and main, but still Lateen rigged on the Mizzen. The Carrack was somewhat stabler in heavy seas and could carry larger loads.