Explore "James Cook: Circumnavigator" by George Griffith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and colliers.
The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson, and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for the benefit of apprentices.