In 1853, American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne crossed paths with the infamous clipper transport ship The Yorkshire. While the man and the ship led separate lives, each was entwined with the sea and their fates were destined to meet again years later in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s final hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. This is that story.
Imagine you lived in Victorian era Concord and you heard a knock on the door. Grasping the door’s handle, you open it and see a hopeful suitor standing on the granite doorstep, handing you a small bouquet with a red rose in the center and tied with a piece of lace. If you reached out with your right hand, took the bouquet, and pressed it to your heart, it meant you were saying “Yes, I accept your affections!” If you took the nosegay and held it upside down by your side it meant, “I’ll keep the flowers, but it’s a hard ‘no’ from me and you can move along.” And if you took the nosegay, admired it, and both the flower and you instantly started shriveling and disintegrating into dust, it meant you were likely a character in a Nathaniel Hawthorne story.
In the wild places of Concord linger old Puritan superstitions and Transcendental possibilities. We begin in the year 1620 when, bearing sea-weary Puritan separatists, the Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod’s coast revealing what Pilgrim leader William Bradford noted as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts.”
To the Puritans, the Wilderness was the devil’s territory. Satan would not linger in the exposed coastal regions where the Puritans first settled and kept him at bay with devout prayer, but he was always there, in the wild forests, the swamps, the unexplored places, tempting them to leave the seaside settlements of early Massachusetts and stray from righteousness.
In 2020 or early 2021, did you try to visit Concord, or leave it to go anywhere? If yes, you might have experienced global variants of fate cannonballing you into history’s category of “people who tried to go somewhere and couldn’t quite make it.” And in this category, you would find First Lieutenant and Adjutant Welch Fusilier Frederick Mackenzie whose miserable attempted journey to Concord started in 1773, and like a stretching pandemic, never seemed to get better.
