July Tea Party - MaryLu Tyndall, Gabrielle Meyer, and Rebecca DeMarino on a Pirate Ship!!!

WELCOME to Nassau harbor!!! This lovely island is one of the settings for The Reckoning, MaryLu Tyndall's latest exciting release!  This is a time travel book, so there are both contemporary and historical elements plus even an alternate reality section--it really showcases MaryLu's considerable skills as an author!

A modern day miss is transported back in time when she finds this amulet aboard ship during a modern-day Tall Ships festival in coastal California! And it plays a part in the story line, of course, for the ending because there has to be a "portal" when you have a time travel novel.

Hero Captain Dutton's ship, "The Reckoning"!

Come on into the Captain's cabin and have some refreshments!

Also, be sure to stop by our Facebook party, during which the authors will be chatting with our guests. The FB party event page is the place to show off your clothing for this event!

The Reckoning, by MaryLu Tyndall

Isn't this a gorgeous cover? Love it!
Available for purchase online at Amazon. (click here)
(For Barnes and Noble, click on the cover image!)

Giveaways: In addition to a copy of her book, MaryLu has a nice ocean bath gift basket that contains Bubble bath, bath salts, shower gel, and  body lotion. 

We're serving an assortment of teas, lemonade and Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. 

Desserts:  Plum-Duff pudding, Shrewsbury Cakes

Snacks/ meal:  Goose and Truffle Pie, Lobscouse, Breadfruit biscuit, and an assortment of toasted cheese.

 * * * *

A Groom for Josette is the second story we're celebrating during our July Tea Party! This story, by Gabrielle Meyer, is a novella in The Convenient Bride Collection from Barbour Publishers.

Once you step off Captain Dutton's ship, The Reckoning, be sure to board Itasca, a Mississippi steamboat traveling from St. Louis to Minneapolis in 1855.

This is the ship our heroine, Josette LeBlanc, takes from St. Louis to Minnesota Territory in hopes of finding a husband. She goes after seeing this ad: Wanted: good-looking women for the town of Little Falls, Minnesota Territory. We guarantee a hundred eligible bachelors for every single lady. If interested, please inquire with Philip Sommers at the company store.



Josette LeBlanc, the daughter of a French Fur Trader
and a Chippewa mother

Josette must find a husband within three weeks, or her father's shipping empire will fall into the hands of her incompetent half-brother, and she'll be cast out on the street.


Little Falls, Minnesota

When Josette arrives in Little Falls, she reserves a sitting room at the Northern Hotel to conduct interviews with prospective grooms. However, when the appointed hour arrives, the hotel proprietor doesn't bring her to the sitting room...he brings her to the ballroom, where over a hundred eligible men stand waiting!

But only one man catches Josette's eye. His name is Alexandre Dugas and he's traveling up the Mississippi from New Orleans to pastor a small church just north of Little Falls.

The only problem is, he isn't looking for a wife.
 



Reverend Alexandre Dugas

When Alexandre meets Josette, he feels compelled to marry her...but a misunderstanding threatens both their plans. Will they find their happily-ever-after, or have they made the biggest mistake of their lives?

The Convenient Bride Collection is available for purchase online at Amazon. (Click here.)

Visit Gabrielle's author Facebook page here.

Gabrielle is offering a copy of The Convenient Bride Collection to one lucky winner!

****

Step into the 17th Century with a chance to win a copy of To Capture Her Heart 

by Rebecca DeMarino!

And sail on The Swallow from Nassau 

to Southold, Long Island, NY

Mayhap the Captain of The Reckoning will toss us a breadfruit biscuit! Or better still, we'll walk the plank and join the party with a plate of Mary Horton's Ginger Cakes! 

Captain Horton's The Swallow

It is 1653 and Heather Flower, a princess of the Montaukett tribe, is celebrating her wedding feast when a rival tribe attacks, killing the groom and kidnapping her.  Though her ransom is paid by an Englishman, she is bound by her captors and left to die—until she finds herself rescued by handsome Dutch Lieutenant Dirk Van Buren.

Still tender from her loss, Heather Flower begins to heal in the home of the Hortons, English friends of her people. Torn between her affection for Dirk and her longtime friendship with Ben Horton, Heather Flower must make a difficult choice—stay true to her friend or follow her heart. 

Giveaway: A Copy of To Capture Her Heart

Rebecca DeMarino writes love, legends and lore as a historical romance author and lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. She inherited her love of baking and gardening from her mother, a love of horses, reading and writing from her dad, and the wanderlust gene from both parents. Her travels have taken her from Alaska to Nebraska and Florida, from Long Island to England and Italy, and from Washington DC to Texas, California and Guam. 

Note:
Our wonderful Facebook Party Event page was taken down--we don't know why.  But here is the link to the new page (click here) where you can chat live with authors from 5:45 to 9:00 PM Eastern Time.  

Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

Book Review by Lisa Norato

PIRATE HUNTERS
Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
by Robert Kurson 
Random House © June 2015

Recently, I had the opportunity to read this remarkable true account of a pirate who, as incredible as his story was, I had never heard of before and the search to find his sunken ship, the Golden Fleece.  I wanted to share it here because I feel it is a must-read for both fans and writers of historical seafaring and/or pirate adventure.

In 1686, Joseph Bannister, a wealthy, successful and respected merchant sea captain turned pirate for no apparent reason and led the Royal Navy on a chase that is the stuff of novels, except it was all true. Three hundred years later, John Chatterton and John Mattera, both experienced divers and treasure hunters, set out to find the illusive wreck and unlock the mystery of the pirate Bannister. This book is the story of all three mens’ adventures. And what adventures they are!

If, like me, you’re lured by the mystique of the sea in your reading or have an interest in pirates, wooden sailing ships, treasure or history, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. Within its pages, learn about about what life was like for seafarers and why men turned to piracy. Experience the times and dangers of the age of piracy. Or if you’re simply looking for an exciting read−fascinating but true−you will enjoy this book. I could not stop turning pages, hungry for any details about John Bannister and would still be thinking about the story after I put the book down, anxious to get back to it. This book is the closest one can come to diving beneath the sea in a search for treasure without getting out of your chair.

This is a truly awesome read that satisfied my desire for suspense, adventure, romance and mystery, and at its conclusion it impressed me as an inspiring story about never, never giving up.

 

Lisa Norato is the author of the seafaring inspirational suspense novels Prize of My Heart and The Promise Keeper.

Pirates and Their Weapons

Susan F. Craft
Author, The Xanthakos Family Trilogy

        I'm sharing some of the history about pirate weapons I found while researching for my novel, Cassia, which takes place in the NC Outer Banks and along the Atlantic Coast in 1799.
        Contrary to what we have seen in movies, for real fighting pirate captains big floppy boots, belts with huge buckles, and long swords would have been nuisances. Instead of long swords, they used curved cutlasses that wouldn’t interfere with their mobility in climbing tangled ropes and boarding other ships.

        They wanted to be able to shoot often, so they carried multiple smaller pistols. The infamous pirate, Blackbeard, was known to carry as many as eight pistols attached to his clothing with fabric hooks.

Two images of Blackbeard



   Long distance weapons, though rare, included six-foot spears called boarding spikes. Boarding axes were used to cut netting strung to make it harder to board. These axes were also used to break down doors once the pirates were aboard.

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Here’s another weapon that’s yucky, but interesting—caltrop.

        In the 1700s, pirates would sometimes toss caltrops onto the decks of the ships they wanted to capture. These diabolical little antipersonnel weapons remind me of current-day jacks from the game Ball and Jacks (well, sort of). About an inch tall, they were fashioned out of iron or steel with four barbed-wire like points, constructed in such a way that, no matter how they landed, one point was always sticking up.

        The reason behind this weapon? Eighteenth century sailors went barefoot, mostly for comfort, but also because it made it easier to climb up into the sail rigging. So, if you stepped on a caltrop, it was mighty painful and would delay you from fighting back as pirates boarded your ship.
        Barbaric -- you think?

Susan F. Craft is the author of The Xanthakos Family Trilogy, historic romantic suspense: The Chamomile (Revolutionary War and winner of the SIBA Okra Pick, re-released in April 2015); Laurel (post-Revolutionary War, released in January 2015); and Cassia (1799-1836) to be released September 2015--publisher is Heritage Beacon imprint of Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas. 

Colonial Steamed Brown Bread

Colonial Steamed Brown Bread

A big part of writing historical fiction is research. If you don’t do the history well – it’s just fiction. And trust me, you’re going to honk off a bunch of history geeks in the process. Having been that honked off history geek a time or two, I know what I’m talking about.

I love to cook and bake. Always have. It’s another creative outlet for me. Combining my love of history with my love of cooking and baking was a no-brainer. So researching colonial-era cooking for my book? That was fun!

My grandma used to make what she called Boston Brown Bread. I discovered that the Colonial Steamed Brown Bread is very close to what grandma made. I think hers was considered “Boston” because it was served with baked beans.

Tweet this: #Colonial Steamed Brown Bread #recipe on the #ColonialQuills 

Home ovens were rare in Colonial times. The fort or settlement would have one oven, maybe two, that were shared. Yeast breads were baked only when the oven was available and heated.

Steaming breads was something that could be done in the hearth over an open fire. The bread – not a yeast bread, but more like our modern-day quick breads – was poured into a bowl of some sort, placed into a Dutch Oven with water about half-way up the sides of the bowl, covered with a lid, and swung over the fire to steam for anywhere from one to three hours, depending on the size of the bowl.

Wash 3 soup cans (roughly 15 oz size) grease well, prepare your steamer, get the water boiling.

Mix together:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup rye flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. cooking oil (lard or bacon grease would be more authentic)
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup milk
1 teas. salt
1 teas. baking soda

Divide into the 3 greased cans (cans will be just over 1/2 full to allow the bread to rise). Top each can with a square of aluminium foil. Secure with a rubber band or string. Set cans into the steamer. Steam for 1 hour. Remove to a rack to cool. Immediately remove foil. Cool 10 minutes. Remove bread from cans. The texture is like a moist cornbread, but the flavor is unique. Wonderful served warm with butter and jam, or for the “Boston” variety, smothered with some rich and tasty baked beans.

Colonial Steamed Brown Bread smothered in beans and sausage

~ Pegg Thomas

Georgia - A Charity Case

by Roseanna M. White

I learned a lot this year, teaching my kids early American history--and one of the things I'd never known before was about how the colony of Georgia came to be.

James Oglethorpe

It began in the mind of General James Oglethorpe, who was greatly disturbed by all the poor he saw in London--and the drunkeness. He as his friends had been discussing the woeful situation for quite a while, with no ready solution coming to mind. Then one day they saw a map of North America, and they noticed a large swath of land still unclaimed on the Eastern seaboard, between English South Carolina and Spanish Florida.

In their minds, claiming this land as a charity colony would solve two problems at once--form a barricade between Spanish lands and the rest of the English colonies, and give them a place to send some of London's poor. It was, they determined, a brilliant idea! In short order, they had it all planned out: they would set up silk farms in this colony, which would enable Britain to get its silks from an English-held source instead of foreign countries. They were absolutely sure they could plant mulberry trees in Georgia and introduce silk worms onto them.

The silkworm

By the numbers given by Sir Thomas Lombe--silk expert--the men estimated that they could employ 40,000 in this pursuit, thereby giving livelihoods and means to the poor. They would soon be providing all of England's silk needs. Then selling it to the rest of the world! Certain of the beauty of this plan, they proposed naming the colony Georgia after the reigning King George II--and the king, liking what he heard, heartily agreed and granted a charter.

Now comes the but...

But this was all theory. None of these men had ever gone to Georgia, certainly not with any notoriously finicky silkworms. These creatures are strange and delicate, feeding exclusively on the leaves of white mulberry trees.

A black mulberry tree

And the mulberry trees growing in Georgia? Black. Black mulberry trees, and the silkworms wouldn't have anything to do with them.

The founders of Georgia had already advertised for the most "distressed, virtuous, and industrious" of London's poor, and they'd made them sign contracts committing to planting X-amount of mulberry trees. These contracts stipulated that the people didn't own the land...or the tools...or the clothing...or the food.

Reality, of course, was far different from this utopia envision by Oglethorpe and his friends. The first group of settlers arrived in 1732 and were promptly scorched by heat far worse than to what they were accustomed. And when the silk crop failed, the settlers were blamed, not helped to find other crops. By the time of the Revolution, Georgia was the most sparsely populated and poorest colony in the Americas. A wonderful vision, poorly executed.

~*~

Roseanna M. White pens her novels beneath her Betsy Ross flag, with her Jane Austen action figure watching over her. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two children, editing and designing, and pretending her house will clean itself. The Lost Heiress is Roseanna’s tenth published book. Her novels range from biblical fiction to American-set romances to her new British series. She lives with her family in West Virginia. Learn more at www.RoseannaMWhite.com