Eclipse of the Midnight Sun by Timothy Kestrel

Author:Timothy Kestrel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: colonial times, action novel, war novel, rangers, romance action, historical war, frontiersmen, frontier lore, rogers rangers, adventure tale
Publisher: Timothy Kestrel

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The old man at the Catskill Mountain House handed his empty glass to Henry Raymond, who quickly reached over and grabbed the bottle from a side table.

“Long break between the drinks in this place,” the old man said, and when Raymond handed his filled glass back he continued, “I learned only later that much to our misery it seemed we had arrived in a hornet’s nest instead of a paradise. In America, the British colonies wanted to expand west and began to run afoul of French claims to the Mississippi River Valley. In retaliation, the French began to create a chain of forts along the frontier, and the British efforts to remove them led to open hostilities. The aggressions caused all sorts of anger on both sides, but there were conflicts also within alliances! It was about values that clashed under particular and abnormal conditions. The kind of values that is most difficult to reconcile, because there simply is no clear right or wrong. There is only a series of wicked choices!

“The British often regarded their subjects in America with scorn, and their arrogance towards the natives was well known. They neglected the American colonies but then some aristocrats in Britain realized that the Colonies could pay off the British war debts by taxes! But that was not enough, and the Colonials were also progressively divided among themselves, too! Traditionally they supported the Crown as Loyalists, but then new, rebellious ideas of democracy and such started circulating in secret. The Colonials were used to the raiding parties from various tribes for more than a century; outlying farms were attacked and farmers killed or captured. They often sent their own war parties on reprisal attacks and to obtain new land. Moreover, the Colonials could not accept the fact that women were roughly equivalent to the men in the Iroquois nation. Different nations had been at war for ages with their natural enemies among other tribes. There were also deep divisions within the Iroquois Nation, and brother was pitted against brother when they had to choose between the British and French sides.

“I learned later that the gentleman in the Governor's Island harbor was John Morton. He was in his mid-twenties at that time, a self-educated jurist who was elected to the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. He was involved in civic and church affairs and regarded as a caring husband and father, and eventually he had a family of nine children. He was a land surveyor for many years, and was chosen to be the next justice of the peace or a sheriff. His father passed away before he was born, and John Morton was full of pride of his family heritage, especially of his grandfather who had arrived in New Sweden on the Eagle in 1654 and was among the New Freemen swearing loyalty to Governor Rising at Tinicum Island. John Morton was a man of grit and resolve, an open-minded and permissive thinker, and a strong supporter of democracy, which was a new way of thinking considered treasonous by many.

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