Character Portrayal In L.A. Meyer’s Novel Bloody Jack
APPENDICES Biography of L.A. Meyer
Louis A. Meyer is best known as the author of the Bloody Jack seafaring novels. And also a painter. L.A. Meyer was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1942 and spent the next thirteen years as an Army brat, living in Germany and up and down the east coast of the U.S. Meyer liked being an Army kid, despite all the constant moving – his mother informs him and they moved twenty six times and went to twelve different schools before got out of high school. After his father retired, he went to high school in Conemaugh, Pennsylvania, and Fort Myers, Florida, and college at the University of Florida in Gainesville. At that college he meets his future wife, Annetje Lawrence.
Upon graduation with a degree in English Lit, he bid the aforementioned Ms Lawrence goodbye forever and put in a summer as a floor sweeper in Chicago and then hitchhiked around Mexico and the Southern U.S. Being imminently draftable and it being in the Vietnam war era, and may not wanting to have my throat cut in some hot and bug infested foxhole, he joined the Navy and four months later he was a spanking new officer in the U.S. Navy.
L.A Meyer and his wife got married in 1966. They have two sons, Matthew and Nathaniel. He and his wife have owned an art gallery called Claire de Loon in Bar Harbor, where they sell matted and framed prints of his artwork. His sons just like him, both them are painters.
During the Vietnam War, Meyer joined the U.S. Navy. He has said he did it to avoid death in a foxhole. He became an officer after four months, assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet. He saw no combat during his tour of duty, which included ports of call in Italy, France, Spain, and Malta.
After his release from the service, they did their year in New York City where he worked as a social worker and took graduate art courses at Columbia University.
Then they relocated to Scituate, Massachusetts, and he enrolled in Boston University’s Master of Fine Arts program, receiving his MFA in Painting in 1973.
While at Boston University, he published two children’s picture books with Little, Brown, and Company. He taught high school art for seven years at Rockland High School in Rockland, Massachusetts.
He and his wife left teaching in 1981 to set up a silk screen printing and design shop on Fort Myers Beach, Florida. And while there they lived on a forty-foot houseboat moored in Matanzas Pass. They soon had retail shops both on Fort Myers Beach and in Bar Harbor, Maine. They had purchase land on the Downeast coast of Maine in 1971, build a house and have summered there ever since. In 1998, they closed up the Florida operation and moved to Maine full time, and they now have the Claire de Loon Gallery in Bar Harbor. They live in the small fishing village of Corea.
Bloody Jack is a historical novel by L.A. Meyer. It is centered on an orphan
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girl in London in the early 19 century. The main character in this novel is Mary Faber who came from the second class family in London. Mary has a younger sister, Penny, who seven years younger than Mary. After describing the death of the family and her entrance into a gang, the action starts out with the main character, Mary Faber, struggling to survive on the streets ofwith the other orphaned children. Their leader is a clever adolescent named Rooster Charlie whom Mary learns to love asand as a leader. The gang's life is rough as they try to survive each day on the streets of 18th-century London. When Charlie is murdered by a corpse seller named Muck, Mary takes Charlie's clothes and the name "Jack" to hide her identity as a girl. She quickly finds a position as a ship's boy.
Mary Faber is an orphan in a gang on the streets of Cheapside, London, during the late 18th century. After the death of the gang's leader, she dons boy's clothing and goes to the docks, where she attempts to obtain a position as one of six ship's boys on the British warship H.M.S. Dolphin. Her endeavor is successful due to her ability to read, and she is signed under the alias Jack "Jacky" Faber. After boarding the ship, she meets the other ship's boys, named Tink, Willy, Benjy, Davy, and Jaimy.
Jacky and the other ship's boys gain their sea legs and begin their duties on the ship. Jacky meets a seaman, Liam Delaney, who becomes her sea dad. Liam teaches her the ways of the ship and how to play the pennywhistle. After some time on the ship,
Jacky finds that she's grown, and needing some new clothes, she makes her own. Jacky's new outfit catches the Captain's eye and is asked to sew up more for the others. As the plot develops, a pirate ship is spotted and a battle begins. The crew boards the enemy ship, and Jacky acquires a pistol from a dead pirate. She sees another pirate preparing to kill one of the ships boys, Jaimy, whom Jacky is starting to have feelings for. Then she shoots the pirate, who is carrying a chest of money, and thus gets the nickname "Bloody Jack". It is in this battle that Benjy, a ship's boy in The Brotherhood, (what Jacky and the other ship's boys call themselves), is killed. The ship heads for Palma to get there ship repaired after the battle. At about this time, Jacky first menstruates, and her upbringing having left her unaware of the details of female physical maturation, she believes that she is ill and about to die.
After the ship lands at the ship's boys go to get a tattoo to show their brotherhood. Jacky then goes to a brothel to find a woman to ask 'for a friend' why she had bled before, where the madam quickly sees through her disguise and informs Jacky of the details of female bodies. The rest of the ship's boys consider Jack a rake after this, as they only know one nominal reason for a visit to a brothel.
Then the ship heads for the While Jacky is in the schoolroom, a sailor aboard the ship called Midshipman Bliffil starts to beat Jacky up, and only stops when the teacher yells at him. Jacky is put in the sick ward for her injuries. She convinces Midshipman Jenkins to stand up to Bliffil and teaches him some fighting moves. A crew member Bill Sloat threatens Jacky and her sea dad Liam Delaney tries to protect her, which causes some problems. When Bliffil attacks Jacky again,
Jenkins stands up to him. Jacky begins to sleep in the rope locker because The Brotherhood's friendship is strained after recent events, and this is when Sloat tries to sexually assault her. Jacky tries to protect herself by stabbing him with her shiv, but she injures him more than she had meant to, and ends up stabbing him in the stomach and he stumbles overboard. Liam is put on trial for the murder and he is going to be hanged. Jacky intervenes and confesses to stabbing Sloat. She is put in confinement and thinks that she will be hanged instead, but she is set free because she had acted in self-defense.
After that she is welcomed back by into the Brotherhood but the feeling is still weird. Jaimy admits to her that he has strange feelings for her, and that is when Jacky asks him to hold up a dress so she can mark it, and Jaimy learns that she is really a girl and that she has feelings for him.
Soon after they arrive i Jacky and Jaimy go out on the streets, and Jacky wears a dress that she bought. They eat at a café, and Davy and Tink see them. Davy and Tink do not know that the girl Jaimy is eating with is Jacky, and she leaves and changes back into her ship boy clothing. The group then finds a piercing shop, where they all get a gold hoop earring. Jacky and Jaimy exchange rings. Then they set sail again to hunt for the pirates.
They soon encounter the pirate LeFievre ("The Fever") at sea. There is a battle, but LeFievre gets away, and the Dolphin is damaged and in the process of sinking. Men are at the bilge pumps trying to keep the ship afloat when land is sighted, and the ship and crew stop for rest and repairs. Davy learns of Jacky's true identity when he discovers her and Jaimy curled up in a hammock together. Soon after, Mr. Tilden the teacher wants to put Jacky on a kite and fly her up so she can see more land, but the winds were blowing so hard that the tree she is tied to is ripped out of the ground and after many hours of flying she lands on an unknown island. She stays there for a few days and uses smoke signals to try to get the attention of HMS Dolphin. A boat crew from the Dolphin comes to rescue her and she finds out that LeFievre and his pirates are on the island with her and waiting to ambush the rescue crew. She tries to lead the rescue crew away but the pirates catch her and hold her for hanging and money. She is hanged, but is so scrawny and skinny that she just hangs there choking. The HMS Dolphin rescue crew lands, Jaimy quickly cuts the rope around her neck, and Jacky survives.
Jacky is finally discovered to be a girl. She is guarded by someone everywhere she goes. She is confined from almost everyone on board, including her old mates, but they secretly sneak over to the grating above her room to talk to her. She is told by the captain that she will be enrolled in Lawson Peabody's School for Girls i and then the book concludes with her stepping off the ship.