X marks the spot

The ‘Welcome Stranger’ was found by two men, named John Deason and Richard Oates, on Friday February 5, 1869

Whoa Nelly! 

I am rocking this Grand Cross-Aquarian Full Moon with exact Mars Return hitting a rich vein of ancestral gold.

I woke up this morning with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” running in my mind and the insight that my maternal grandmother named her eldest child and her youngest child after this author.

If I had known Granny was going to show up this morning ~ I woulda smudged the house last night!

I do like the divine download of the Grand Cross being a treasure map, that these aspects contain the potential of finding the pirated treasure ~ a Shaman motherload of kidnapped soul fragments.

My granny died 19 months before I was born. My mother sneakily named me after her in such a way that my father wouldn’t notice. 

Scooting over to New Moon Astrology, Robin Adams has some interesting insights and an image of Bad Spock to boot:

“Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” ~Buddha

Remember Mr. Spock from Star Trek? Leonard Nimoy’s character was conflicted most all the time due to his Mother’s human genes that filled him with emotion that conflicted with his Father’s logical Vulcan genes. Thus, he spent a great deal of time trying to balance the two. Much like us mere mortals right now traveling on Spaceship Earth. We seek to understand the “why, what and how” of life as it currently rushes by us. We are just “here.” [more]

And over at Lua Astrology is a piece about Bad Blood and with the Centaur Nessus conjuct my natal Midheaven, I have very much been engaged in an  energetic dialysis. 

I have been thinking about my maternal great-great grandmother, Sarah Boyd, who died from bronchitis in the stinking hold of the James  T Foord. If ever a ship had bad vibes, this one certainly did:

The barque “James Thomas Foord”, more commonly referred to in extant records as “James T. Foord”, was a converted whaling ship of some 790 tons, built in Quebec, Canada in 1844, by Thomas Hamilton Oliver, Shipbuilder, at his shipyard in the Seigniory of Saint Roch on the River Saint Charles.

Her length was 131 feet, breadth 29 feet (the widest part of the vessel from outside plank to outside plank above or below the water-line) and depth 22 feet (hold measured from tonnage deck to ceiling amidships). She was later sold to Halheads of Liverpool, England. Rated as A1 for five years by Lloyds, she had some damage repaired in 1848, when she was sheathed with yellow metal for speed.

The worst cholera ship afloat
The James T. Foord arrived in Port Phillip on 7th. November 1849 after a journey from England lasting four months. Of a total of 269 Bounty passengers (81 children) and a crew of 37 embarking from Plymouth, England on 17th. July 1849, 54 emigrants died on the voyage and were buried at sea, 23 of these being children.

It was a terrible voyage. The master of the ship, Charles Henry Elliott, had given the passengers bad food and cut their supplies of toiletries and water. Thirty-three passengers died of cholera alone, besides other deaths on the voyage to Australia. The “James T. Foord” initially left Gravesend, England on about the 7th. of July 1849, arriving at Plymouth, England on the 12th. July. She lay here at anchor for five days before sailing for Port Phillip Australia, arriving there on the 7th. of November, 1849.

Complaints about conditions on board led to a special Board of Enquiry being convened in Melbourne in 1849. The enquiry found that the master and the third officer were guilty of fraudulent and unfeeling conduct and in the case of the third officer of brutal conduct. It was said of the surgeon that while he apparently “carried out his duties with efficiency and humanity” during the epidemic, he was not blameless because he failed to “see the immigrants done justice to in the issue of their rations”.

Sarah would die-at-sea on 5 November 1852.  Her death the ‘ill-omen’ that would cast a long and deep shadow over her descendants. 

Moral of the story: never get on board a ship that leaves from Gravesend!

 Pocahontas (c1595-1617), the daughter of a Native American chief, was to become the first such American to visit England. After marrying a colonist in America, John Rolfe, she later sailed with him to England, with their infant son, Thomas, where she was received at the court in London by Queen Anne and was feted as a celebrity. On their return voyage, seven months later, she was taken ill and died ashore in Gravesend at the age of 22. She was then buried in the parish churchyard of St George’s; the exact location of her grave is unknown, due to a church fire and subsequent reconstruction in the early 18th century.