Salem Then and Now

Yesterday you wrote two formats. Today you cut to one. In pencil — but cut.

1. Look at your two formats from yesterday. Which one can you actually finish in two build days?
2. On MY COURSE: circle ONE person and ONE format. Pencil is fine. Blank is not.
3. Tomorrow is the trial run — you'll test-drive your format for real. Come in knowing which one you're testing.

Thursday's commitment form asks for your supply list. Start noticing what your format needs.

One sheet, folded like a book. Cover: your name, "Day 14," the date. Then:

Your second plain sheet is your world map — draw it rough, sideways: the Americas as one lumpy blob on the left, Europe-Africa in the middle, Asia on the right. Two blobs and a route line beat no map. Sailors sketched charts from memory all the time; today you're one of them.

Two weeks ago you stood on Derby Wharf. Built 1762. Almost half a mile of it. In the age of sail it was packed with masts, barrels, and rope. Cod and lumber went out. Sugar, molasses, and money came back.

Now look at the same water today.

1. Zoom out, slowly, until Boston appears. Watch the traffic thicken.
2. Find a big cargo vessel heading in or out. Click it: type, flag, where it's bound.
3. Ask the question backwards: what would a sailor from the age of sail still recognize here? What would stop them cold?

Salem got rich on the water. Cod and lumber sailed out to the Caribbean plantations. Sugar, molasses, and rum sailed back. Those plantations ran on the labor of enslaved people. That trade built the wharves you walked.

And the harder page of the ledger: after the Revolution, some Salem merchants sent slave ships of their own. The record survives. Named ships. Named owners. A historian who read those old papers called Salem the most active slave-trade port in Massachusetts in those years. That is our town's record. We read it straight, like historians.

Same waters, one more story. Philip Ashton, a young fisherman from Marblehead, the next town over. June 1722: pirates seize his fishing boat off Nova Scotia. Not Bellamy. A crueler captain named Ned Low. Ashton refuses to turn pirate. They hold him anyway. Months later he slips away on an island off Honduras and survives there almost two years, alone. In 1725 a ship out of Salem finds him and carries him home. His parents thought he was dead. He wrote the whole story down. You can still read it.

1. Find one named Salem ship from the slave-trade record. Write its name.
2. Find one Ashton fact this page did not give you. Write it.

The machine from 1717 never shut down. It got bigger, faster, and harder to see. Proof? You are wearing some of its cargo right now.

1. Pick one thing you own or wear today. Shoe, hoodie, backpack, water bottle, pencil case.
2. Find the label. "Made in ___." Check the collar, the waistband, the shoe tongue, the bottle base. No label? Pick another item.
3. Map it. On the world sheet: a dot where it was made. A dot on Salem. Now draw its probable route by sea. Almost everything heavy crosses by ship, not by plane.
4. Name the ship. For almost everything you own: a container ship. Steel boxes, thousands of them per ship.
5. Name the squeeze points. Yesterday's list: Suez, Malacca, Panama, the Red Sea. Made in East Asia? It likely rode through Malacca, then Suez, or across the Pacific and through Panama. Made in Europe? Straight across the Atlantic. Not sure? Check the live map and follow the traffic.

Now hold your item and think about your triangle map from Day 4. Your object rode the same machine the Whydah did. Different engine. Same machine: set routes, narrow squeezes, somebody profits, somebody works out of sight.

Fast finishers: trace a second item from a different continent. Or ask the harder question: who touched your item between the factory and you? List every pair of hands you can imagine.

You have met real artifacts in this unit. The bell that named the ship. The silver that paid the crew. A boy's shoe behind glass. Paper records called people cargo. Objects tell it differently.

Fast circle before the log. Around the ring: name one thing you are wearing or carrying that crossed an ocean. Repeats allowed. Speed matters. Stuck? Check a tag.

Your adopted ship is out on the water right now, riding the same machine you just mapped.

You cut to one this morning. Before you leave, test the sound of it.

1. Check your circles: ONE person, ONE format. Still in pencil, but circled.
2. Draft your one-line pitch: "I am telling ___'s story as a ___ because ___."
3. Say it to your first mate. Out loud. Once. Then hear theirs back.

Tomorrow you test-drive your format for real — and write your full supply list. Thursday you claim it in ink.

What's still happening today that started in 1717?

You drew part of the answer on your map sheet. Say it in one sentence at the door.