The Very First Timemaster Script

Broadcast: 10/26/96

© 1996 David Minor / Eagles Byte dminor@eznet.net

Welcome to Timemaster

This is David Minor, and in the weeks to come we’ll be time tripping, poking our metaphoric noses into the crannies and nooks of our planet’s ­busy history, seeing what and who we can turn up.

This week, let’s go back 172 years, to 1824, and see what writers were up to.

A number of authors entered the world this year, unnoticed by that same world, as all but royalty usually is.

In London, novelist Arthur Wilkie Collins, author of some of the earliest detective novels such as The Moonstone and The Woman in White, made his appearance. In an opposite corner of Europe, Serbian poet Branko Radicevic entered the world.

And in another Balkan nation, George Gordon Noel Byron, the poet Lord Byron, died in Missolonghi, where he had gone to lend his support to the Greeks fighting for independence from their Turkish overlords.

Those writers not making earthly entrances and exits were also keeping themselves quite busy.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was entering Connecticut’s Hartford Female Seminary, which had been founded by her older sister Catherine. Washington Irving was publishing his Tales of a Traveler, Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet was in the hands of his publisher.

But no one seems to have been so busy as U. S. novelist James Cooper. (He’d formally add the Fenimore to his name two years later, fulfilling a pledge made to his mother). In January, this former merchant seaman and three-year Great Lakes naval midshipman, having read Walter Scott’s sea romance The Pirate, he decided he’d show the reading public what an authentic and accurate sea story should be. He published The Pilot, a tale of the American Revolution, with daring naval exploits off the enemy coast of England (and in its manor houses). Four months later, in May, he was changing his New York City residence, heading northward — as has befitted Manhattan’s up-and coming, until recent decades — moving from 3 Beach Street to 345 Greenwich Street. In August he received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Columbia University.

Shortly afterwards he took a trip back upstate, escorting four English noblemen, one of whom, Edward Stanley, would become Prime Minister in the 1850s, on a tour of the area around the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains. It was while the party was visiting Glens Falls that Cooper looked at the cataract there and said to himself, “I must place one of my old Indians here.” He did. The Indian’s name was Chingachgook, and the result was The Last of the Mohicans.

[ The falls have changed since then ]