"The Difference", a novel: In 1908, a Canadian woman on a clipper ship in the south Pacific buys a small boy for four pounds of tobacco

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Endicott, Marina

• SSHRC IG awarded 2013: Over the next three years, I will research the first draft of a new novel. The Difference will examine the actions of a Canadian woman in 1908, wife of a clipper ship captain, who buys a small Tongan boy for four pounds of tobacco. The research required for The Difference is not only historical and physical, not only to determine how water tasted twenty days out at sea, how salt pork rotted, or how Mrs. Ladd laced her stays. Although these are necessary questions, a vital part of this research is cultural and philosophical: to investigate and understand how it could be possible-not only possible, but considered an act of goodness- to take a child. To understand what the weight of our assumptions of cultural and moral superiority does to those who do not question those assumptions until it is too late, until the child is dead.

• Date created

  2012-10-13

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Child
  • Literature
  • Book
  • Insight Grant
  • Historical Novel
  • Research-Creation
  • Pacific
  • Human Trafficking
  • Sailing
  • Tonga
  • Fiction
  • Boy
  • IG
  • CanLit
  • Successful SSHRC Grant
  • Colonialism
  • Clipper Ship
  • Novel
  • 20th Century
  • Canada
  • Tonga
  • Pacific

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3PR7N499

• License

  © Marina Endicott. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2020.