Posts
We're all
very connected electronically these days, almost to the point of obsession. Well, at least a lot of us are. My sister hasn't quite caught the bug, but at
least she has a new computer now, and I keep promising her that she'll hear
from me a lot more often by email than she ever has by phone.
But we
writers are online all the time—not only emails, but blogs (see, you're looking
at one), loops, lists, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Walk down any street anywhere these days and
you find half the people staring at their cell phone, texting someone. As a dinosaur, I keep wondering what is so
important that it can't wait a few minutes, but apparently I'm in the minority.
But all
this has started me thinking about how people did it in the Olden Days. You know, pre-electricity. Pre-post office. How did people communicate?
As I may
have mentioned, I've done a lot of genealogy over the past couple of decades,
so I can point to a couple of noteworthy examples.
Take, for
instance, an event that most Americans are probably familiar with: the battle of Lexington and Concord in
Massachusetts, that served as a catalyst for the Revolutionary War. I've spent a lot of time in the area, and I
know where those towns lie in relation to Boston, where the Redcoats began
their march, and also their relation to the Massachusetts towns that mustered
their militias to head for the battle.
We've all
heard of Paul Revere's ride, triggered by the signal in the tower of the Old
North Church, as described by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. You know, "one if by land, and two if by
sea"? When Revere saw the signal,
he rowed across the Charles River, and, according to Longfellow, reached
Medford at midnight, Lexington by one, and Concord by two. The distance between
Medford and Lexington is maybe nine miles, between Lexington and Concord,
another seven. The redcoats arrived at
Lexington at sunrise. The word spread surprisingly fast: the alarm went out
late on April 18th (Patriots' Day, a Massachusetts state holiday),
and the colonial militias were in place, armed and ready to fight, on the
morning of the 19th.
It was a
network that accomplished this: as Revere rode along, avoiding British patrols,
he alerted other riders who fanned out to tell other towns. Longfellow kind of
skips over the part where Revere and his colleagues William Dawes and Samuel
Prescott were stopped by one of those patrols in Lincoln, on the way to
Concord—and took Revere's horse, so he walked back to Lexington. But in any
case, my point is that there was a system in place for spreading the word, and
it worked. Who needs Twitter?
I can cite
another case of early communications from one of my ancestors: Phineas Pratt, who arrived in the colonies in
1622 and settled in Wessagusset (now Weymouth, Massachusetts). Phineas is perhaps best known for his account
of rescuing the Plymouth Colony from an Indian attack—which he wrote himself
(which might account for a few of the heroic details). The document survives and was summarized by
William Bradford (Of Plymouth Plantation
1620-1647, published by Samuel Eliot Morrison in 1952).
According to
Bradford, "In ye meane time, came one of them [that would be Phineas] from
ye Massachucts with a small pack at his back, and though he knew not a foot of
ye way yet he got safe hither, but lost his way, which was well for him for he
was pursued, and so was mist. He could them hear, how all things stood amongst
them, and that he durst stay no longer, he apprehended they would be all knokt
in ye head shortly."
In other
words, Phineas overheard some Indians plotting against the Plymouth settlement,
and set out to warn them. He left about
three o'clock in the afternoon, running through unfamiliar woods, in the snow,
chased by wolves. He stopped after dark
and built a fire, then resumed the next morning and arrived in Plymouth in time
to warn the settlers there (who immediately headed north to attack the Indians
at Wessagussett). Distance between
modern day Weymouth and Plymouth? About 30 miles. He may not have taken the
most direct route: as Bradford points
out, Phineas got lost along the way, which is why the Indians didn't stop him.
The Plymouth
Colony survived because one man overheard something and took it upon himself to
tell the colonists. If he hadn't done
that, things could have ended quite differently for our colonial settlements.
How do we compare this with our obsession with communicating to hundreds of
"friends" every tiny detail of our lives? Does the important stuff
get lost in the blizzard of posts and tweets?
Or is that important stuff still communicated face to face? And can we
tell the difference?
