From Pocahontas to Appomattox: A personal adventure in ten battlegrounds and several detours

By Jeremy Poulter

A road journey to visit the American Civil War and take in Southern culture and hospitality, as well as history. Written at a key moment in modern history, the two travellers, one English, one American, find inspiration and optimism in looking at the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9783748215066

Book preview

1. Wise man from the East (actually, Southeast). England

Like most young boys of my generation I was a great collector. It seems different now. I collected model soldiers, of course, but I was obsessive about their accuracy. The crusaders lived well apart from the Romans. Cowboys lived separate lives from the Indians. They were called that in those days. Crucially, I had a drawer full of dark blue and another drawer full of grey. I thought of them of light blue -whichever way, my young life was full of historical colour. I had plastic models of Second World War aeroplanes, carefully painted, but my shelf boasted Henry VIII and Richard the Lionheart. Ships sailed along that shelf, the Santa Maria, Victory, Bismarck, The Mayflower. Imagine my excitement when, much later on, I had a Miss Messerschmitt and a Miss Dornier sitting in my English class.

Gradually, Europe was emerging from the darkness and chaos. The Ideal Homes Exhibition each year in London was to inspire us all with new furniture, new fabrics, new gadgets. It inspired me with free miniature bottles of various fascinating coloured liquids. Now you have to buy them! But my collection included cherry brandies and advokaat, apricot and peach colours, ouzo with no colour, probably gins and whiskies and certainly rum. Exotic names from exotic places. I was fascinated with the history of Chartreuse and Benedictine. The pride of my collection was Freezomint. I tested and sampled at the age of ten or eleven, my mum probably stopped me drinking the whole lot and I could never stand the idea of finishing a bottle anyway, because then I would have to throw it away. So, collection number two introduced me to far away places and the enduring and medicinal benefit of alcohol. Collection number one was rapidly giving me history and a certain obsession with accuracy.

At this point I should introduce my home town, on the mouth of the Thames and romantically named Gravesend. It gave me thick black mud to learn to swim in. Well, actually to learn how not to get sucked under. Therefore, I learned how to get really filthy. You couldn't use the river to get clean, because eventually you had to sink back into the mud. So cold water and mud were second nature to me, and my Boon-docking later in life was no shock. I lived in two shacks, so I was better prepared for life than Daniel Boone, who only had one. He got quite a long way. We all believe that the town’s name came from the London Great Plague, which we all knew had been 1665, and twenty-five miles out marked the edge of the gigantic cemetery. I knew the town was older than that so my own explanation was the Black Death. I was certainly learning about death. And actually the town was famous for two, very dead, people. General Gordon, killed at Khartoum by the Mahdi – pretty exotic. But far more exotic, deeply fascinating, Pocahontas. I knew long before Disney that she had come to the English Court, had been introduced in London, but on the way back home had fallen sick on her boat. She was buried in that very insignificant town, and now in the last few years has once again inspired millions of children, as she inspired me.

My dreams of the wide world were taking shape, as I watched boats ply the Thames. My friends in my cricket team were employed by Customs and Excise, checking on exotic imports and really not exotic exports. Or they were river pilots. I thought that was beyond excitement. The big ships could not navigate the complex channels of the river on the London side of Gravesend, and they took on a pilot to see them safely home. This is the world of Dickens, of marshes and eerie landscapes, of escaped convicts and desperate bids for freedom. Not too far around the coast, and I could imagine I could see the coast of France on a clear day. A Tale of Two Cities, then. Yes I knew about revolution and Napoleon and early attempts to build a tunnel. Early attempts to invade. Caesar landed probably at Pegwell Bay. I didn’t care for the Normans because that was in Sussex. My skies were Kentish, as opposed to the skies of Kent. My grandparents had been married next to Dover Castle. I went on boats that had been to Dunkirk. My skies once had been filled with Spitfires and Hurricanes, and Messerschmitts. There were tales of lost planes, even lost treasure in the woods. Hard though we looked, we didn’t find jewels. We did find hundreds of bullets, even live ones, bits of grenade, all kinds of stuff which we never should have been touching.

So, my dreams were full of exotic trading boats, foreign coasts, remote places. While I was supposed to be learning maths, probably, I was away in remote times. And again, like most of my generation, our fantasies were stoked by reading. At this point I return to my third collection. I had books on cricket, books on all kinds of sport, books of facts, of stories for boys, war stories, history books. Later on I had collections of French books and German books. My shelf of Henry VIII was competing with Walter Scott, Dickens, even Chaucer. Canterbury was after all not far away, the home of my county cricket team, complete with tree on the pitch. I thought nothing of that. I was playing on a village pitch, with a road sign on it and sometimes sheep on it! But I was only about ten, I wasn’t reading Chaucer, I was reading the best collection in the world:

Classics Illustrated.

I recently discussed these with a friend in West Virginia, so I know they were well known beyond Gravesend. I collected them, read them avidly, studied the pictures, but above all I kept them. Collectors will understand that having them together on the shelf is even better than reading them. And I was ten, so I could understand witches and magic in Macbeth. I knew A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I knew Hamlet, even what Elsinore