It started raining last night in Massachusettes and was still pouring when we got up this morning. We waited to see what the weather was going to do and what our ride route would be today. Since it was pouring rain, Hard6 washed his clothes - which was greatly appreciated espcially when I am riding behind him. Went over to a Denny's for a late breakfast. Food was good, but man was the service ever slooooooow.
We decided, hey we are gonna get wet and Hard6 was finished with his laundry, we sailed out of Danvers, Mass at about 10:30 or so this morning. History Note: Salem (what is know as Salem today) was known as Salem Towne where Danvers (where we stayed last night) was known as Salem Village.
Salem is actually a very beautiful town!
We rode around Salem and stopped by the square and went and checked out the Witch History Musuem (so I could learn more about the history of my ex wife).
We learned some stuff but it was way cheesy tourist, so we split instead of going to the other two that we had bought combination tickets to. Beautiful old captain's homes in Salem.
This is Salem Bay....
History Lesson: The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings before local magistrates followed by county court trials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in Essex, Suffolk and Middlesex counties of colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned, with even more accused but not formally pursued by the authorities. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man (Giles Corey) who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so. At least five more of the accused died in prison.
Despite being generally known as the "Salem" witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province: Salem Village, Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town. The best-known trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town. All twenty-six who went to trial before this court were convicted. The four sessions of the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693, held in Salem Village, but also in Ipswich, Boston and Charlestown, produced only three convictions in the thirty-one witchcraft trials it conducted.
In Salem Village in 1692, Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, the daughter and niece (respectively) of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have fits described as "beyond the power of Epileptic Fits or natural disease to effect" by John Hale, minister in nearby Beverly. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions, according to the eyewitness account of Rev. Deodat Lawson, a former minister in the town. The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. Other young women in the village began to exhibit similar behaviors. When Lawson preached in the Salem Village meetinghouse, he was interrupted several times by outbursts of the afflicted.
The first three people accused and arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, 12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., and Elizabeth Hubbard were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Sarah Good was poor and known to beg for food or shelter from neighbors. Sarah Osborne had sex with her indentured servant and rarely attended church meetings. Tituba, as a slave of a different ethnicity than the Puritans, was an obvious target for accusations. All of these women fit the description of the "usual suspects" for witchcraft accusations, and no one stood up for them. These women were brought before the local magistrates on the complaint of witchcraft and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692, then sent to jail .
Other accusations followed in March: Martha Corey, Dorothy Good (mistakenly called Dorcas Good in her arrest warrant) and Rebecca Nurse in Salem Village, and Rachel Clinton in nearby Ipswich. Martha Corey had voiced skepticism about the credibility of the girls' accusations, drawing attention to herself. The charges against her and Rebecca Nurse greatly concerned the community because Martha Corey was a full covenanted member of the Church in Salem Village, as was Rebecca Nurse in the Church in Salem Town. If such upstanding people could be witches, then anybody could be a witch, and church membership was no protection from accusation. Dorothy Good, the daughter of Sarah Good, was only 4 years old, and when questioned by the magistrates her answers were construed as a confession, implicating her mother. In Ipswich, Rachel Clinton was arrested for witchcraft at the end of March on charges unrelated to the afflictions of the girls in Salem Village.
After someone concluded that a loss, illness or death had been caused by witchcraft, the accuser would enter a complaint against the alleged witch with the local magistrates.
If the complaint was deemed credible, the magistrates would have the person arrested and brought in for a public examination, essentially an interrogation, where the magistrates pressed the accused to confess.
If the magistrates at this local level were satisfied that the complaint was well-founded, the prisoner was handed over to be dealt with by a superior court. In 1692, the magistrates opted to wait for the arrival of the new charter and governor, who would establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle these cases.
The next step, at the superior court level, was to summon witnesses before a grand jury.
A person could be indicted on charges of afflicting with witchcraft, or for making an unlawful covenant with the Devil Once indicted, the defendant went to trial, sometimes on the same day, as in the case of the first person indicted and tried on June 2, Bridget Bishop, who was executed on June 10, 1692.
There were four execution dates, with one person executed on June 10, 1692, five executed on July 19, 1692 (Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How & Sarah Wildes) another five executed on August 19, 1692 (Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, Sr., and John Proctor), and eight on September 22, 1692 (Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott). Several others, including Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor and Abigail Faulkner, were convicted but given temporary reprieves because they were pregnant. Though convicted, they would not be hanged until they had given birth. Five other women were convicted in 1692, but sentence was never carried out: Ann Foster (who later died in prison), her daughter Mary Lacy Sr., Abigail Hobbs, Dorcas Hoar, and Mary Bradbury.
Giles Cory was pressed to death during the Salem witch trials in the 1690sGiles Corey, an 80-year-old farmer from the southeast end of Salem (called Salem Farms), refused to enter a plea when he came to trial in September. The judges applied an archaic form of punishment called peine forte et dure, in which stones were piled on his chest until he could no longer breathe. (British law had, in reality, abolished this practice twenty years earlier.) After two days of peine fort et dure, Corey died without entering a plea.[24] His refusal to plead has sometimes been explained as a way of preventing his estate from being confiscated by the Crown, but according to historian Chadwick Hansen, much of Corey's property had already been seized, and he had made a will in prison: "His death was a protest... against the methods of the court". This echoes the perspective of a contemporary critic of the trials, Robert Calef, who claimed, "Giles Corey pleaded not Guilty to his Indictment, but would not put himself upon Tryal by the Jury (they having cleared none upon Tryal) and knowing there would be the same Witnesses against him, rather chose to undergo what Death they would put him to."
Not even in death were the accused witches granted peace or respect. As convicted witches, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey had been excommunicated from their churches and none was given proper burial. As soon as the bodies of the accused were cut down from the trees, they were thrown into a shallow grave and the crowd would disperse. Oral history claims that the families of the dead reclaimed their bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on family property. The record books of the time do not mention the deaths of any of those executed.
Then we took 1A up through Ipswitch and got back in I-95. Rode in the mist up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire where we got really rained on. Bought some smokes since this is the first time since we crossed the Mason Dixon that we were not paying $9+ a pack.
Took off again and we finally reached one of our WAY POINTS!!!!!!!
We heard that there was some nuclear waste from 3-mile Island or something that had morphed crawdads into MONSTER MUDBUGS up here.
First we found a place to land and boy did we find a doozey!!!! The Mic Mac Motel in York, Maine. Their website said the rooms were $95 - $130, but we got it for $70. Nice little hotel with the old type BIG hotel rooms (only 10 rooms in the motel) and pink tiles in the bathroom. CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!!!
Then we got to tour York, Maine for awhile. What a place ya'll !!!!!! Beautiful little town! Houses are unreal and scenery is Atlantic Maine!
History Lesson: York, Maine - The area was first called Agamenticus, meaning "beyond-the-hill-little-cove," the Abenaki name for the York River. In 1638, settlers changed the name to Bristol after Bristol, England, from which they had immigrated. Envisioning a great city arising from the wilderness, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Proprietor of Maine under the Plymouth patent, named the capital of his province Gorgeana. In 1642, by charter of King Charles I, Gorgeana became the first incorporated city in America. John P. McKenna was one of the towns earlier watchmen; he would look out from high trees for indian attacks.
Following Gorges' death, however, the Massachusetts Bay Company claimed his dominion. In 1652, York, Massachusetts was incorporated from a portion of Gorgeana, making it the second oldest town in Maine after Kittery, incorporated two days earlier. It was named for York, England, site of the defeat of Oliver Cromwell. But control of the region was contested between New England and New France, which incited Native Americans to attack English settlements throughout the French and Indian Wars. During King William's War, York was destroyed in the Candlemas Massacre of 1692. The final local Indian attack occurred at the Cape Neddick area during Dummer's War in 1723. Hostilities diminished with the French defeat at the 1745 Battle of Louisburg, and ceased altogether with the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Several famous American authors have be known to spend their summer months in York, including Mark Twain.
THEN IT WAS TIME TO FIND THE MONSTER MUDBUG!!!!!!
We rode out to the coast and found this place......
We stolled inside and informed the cute little waitress that we had ridden bikes all the way from Louisiana and we wanted to see a MONSTER MUDBUG.
Sure she said, but first she started us out with a seafood chowder - man!!! OH MAN!!!!!!!!
FIrst time JP ever had chowder and he was a happy little cajun.....
THEN SHE BROUGHT OUT THE MONSTER MUDBUG AND MAN, was it a MONSTER - biggest crawfish JP and I had ever seen - bar none!
People in the place looked at us kind of funny when Hard6 sucked the crawfish head. There was a lot of goodie in there too let me tell ya!!!!
We told the little girl to suggest desert and she brought out a HUNK of peanut butter pie!!! BOY HOWDY!!!!!
Well, we were stuffed and rode around a little more checking out the town.....
TP, you had wanted JP to post, he wanted me to tell you, "MAN Cher, Dat was ONE BIG CRAWFISH YEAH!!!!!"
Well, we found the MONSTER MUDBUG AND MONSTER IT WAS!!!!!
So, we are in York, Maine and still having a BALL YA'LL !!!!!!!!
