“Where’s the great American adventure book for girls?” I said.
“Maybe you should write it,” my colleague responded.
At the time, I laughed. Becoming a writer hadn’t even occurred to me. I was a young mother and a recent graduate and a novice teacher, not a writer. More than ten years passed and a lot of life changes occurred, and the number of books featuring bold female characters has grown since then. But the voice of a spirited nineteenth-century girl had sprouted in my mind nonetheless, and I had to tell her story.
Though I am landlocked where I live in southern Minnesota, I am enamored of sea life, ocean travel, and the pioneer spirit, that desire inside people to leave one place in search of other opportunities. And though I am a fiction writer, my favorite genre to read is historical nonfiction. A few years ago, I picked up Nathaniel Philbrick’s book In the Heart of Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The book details the lengths to which a group of whalers went to survive when, in 1820, their ship was stove by a whale and sunk. The story of tragedy, endurance, and cannibalism captured the interest of the young nation when it first made American headlines. Herman Melville, too, found the tale irresistible, and out of it grew that great literary touchstone Moby-Dick, which I read next. Smitten by descriptions of life at sea, I then read Philbrick’s Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition 1838–1842, which chronicled the journey to discover Antarctica. It also introduced me to the story of the ship captain, naturalist, botanist, cartographer, possible thief, and sometime tyrant Charles Wilkes, whose collection of artifacts from around the world became the basis for what is now the Smithsonian Institution. Charles Wilkes very loosely morphed into my Charles Wonder, Hallelujah Wonder’s father.
The real Charles Wilkes set sail for Antarctica in 1838 to chart new hunting grounds for the whaling industry, to claim the discovery of Antarctica for America, and “to extend the bounds of science and to promote knowledge.” In 1840, the Wilkes Expedition did indeed penetrate the frozen waters around Antarctica and claim the discovery of the continent. While the expedition was highly successful in a number of scientific, nautical, and commercial ways, Wilkes rubbed a lot of his crew the wrong way. Some of the survivors of the excursion (twenty-eight of the crew members died) came back intent on ruining his reputation. They charged him with abuse and with stealing precious artifacts. His promotions were delayed, and he was court-martialed. Eventually, he was acquitted of all charges except excessive punishment of his sailors. Wilkes was undeterred. He continued to travel over water and land, pursue scientific endeavors, and participate in the Civil War, nearly starting a war between the United States and the United Kingdom when he ordered shots fired upon the Trent, a British steamer. Another court-martial followed. He was an interesting fellow, and I couldn’t shake him from my mind. He spun around up there, becoming fictionalized, until he came out as Hallelujah’s father.
I also spent time in New Bedford, Massachusetts, once the whaling capital of the world. Walking the haunt of Herman Melville, with its old streets, buildings, and distinct air, helped me create the New Bedford of Hallelujah’s world. At the same time, I was researching the Civil War for one of my adult books, Stillwater, and rereading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass for classes I was teaching. Mark Twain’s penchant for irony and humor emboldened me to tackle serious themes such as slavery, war, violence, and loss. The life of Frederick Douglass, an incredibly intelligent and articulate escaped slave who spent time in New Bedford, helped me round out Eustace, Hallelujah’s best and most trusted friend, her match in intelligence and her better in courage.
Hallelujah and Eustace’s relationship may seem unlikely, given that she is a white girl and he is a slave, but according to some narratives of the time, slave children played with white children, particularly the children of their masters. Older slave women were often put in charge of the care of the white children of their masters, along with the care of the black children whose parents went to the fields. Children, whose minds aren’t always settled on the prejudices and practices of their parents, made friends. I’ve included other seemingly unusual but nevertheless accurate details—not all slave owners owned enormous plantations, not all slave owners owned a lot of slaves, and not all slaves had quarters on their masters’ plantations. The country was spreading west at top speed. Each new state and territory adapted the laws to fit their needs.
Hallelujah and Eustace speak mostly in period-accurate dialect. I did take some liberties with anachronisms here and there, both to be sensitive to modern readers and to capture the essence of childhood in a manner recognizable to today’s readers. Many words to describe slaves and black people existed in the 1850s and were used liberally. Most of them are highly offensive. I chose not to use them. I use “Negro” occasionally but selected “black” in most cases, even though it probably wasn’t a descriptor widely used at the time. Other anachronisms, such as “kid” to describe a child, I chose because the tone more accurately describes the characters in this stage of their life.
While Tolerone is an invented town, some of the events in this book are based on real events in Lawrence, Kansas, in the mid-1850s. The tensions of the Civil War first manifested in Lawrence, where abolitionists and slave owners squared off to determine whether the territory would become a free or slave state. The conflict was known as “Bleeding Kansas,” a phrase coined by Horace Greeley, a prominent abolitionist.
Whaling ships of the period provided America with a wonderful example of how well diversity can work. The challenges of life at sea forced the captains and crewmen to view one another as human beings working together to survive harsh conditions, participate in dangerous employment, and succeed commercially. Skin color didn’t matter. Language barriers were overcome. And although it would have been challenging for women and children to be hired for work on a whaling ship, the practice was not unheard of. In fact, some captains chose to bring their wives and children along on voyages. The wives would cook and clean and mend, and the children would help.
Very early in the practice of whaling, some whalers noted what seemed like a leg bone within the bodies of the animals. So while the theory of “vestigial organs” wasn’t officially recorded until Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, certainly scientists and laymen were speculating about the use and origin and implication of these bones before then. In fact, the seeds of evolutionary theory predate Charles Darwin himself. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus, noted that life-forms change over time, but he couldn’t pin down what might be causing these changes. His ideas were published in the 1790s. For these reasons, it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch for Hallelujah’s father to have a theory about leg bones and the possibility that whales once walked on land.
All of these historical works and events, along with an imaginary but persistent voice of a girl in my head, came together to become Wonder at the Edge of the World. The book is a work of fiction, but it is inspired in part by real people, real events, and real books. Many thanks to Ben Davidson at New York University and Brian Fors at South Central College, who offered their insight to help make the book as historically accurate as necessary to tell Lu’s story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Faye Bender, Andrea Spooner, Deirdre Jones, Brian Fors, Ben Davidson, the staff of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Nathaniel Philbrick, L. Frank Baum, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicole Helget is the author of three adult novels: The Turtle Catcher, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, and Stillwater. She has also coauthored a middle grade novel, Horse Camp, with her husband. She lives in Minnesota.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapte
r 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Text copyright © 2015 by Nicole Helget
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Marcos Calo
Cover art © 2015 by Marcos Calo
Hand-lettering by Kate Forrester
Cover design by Tracy Shaw
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: April 2015
ISBN 978-0-316-24509-8
E3
Wonder at the Edge of the World Page 23