What an amazing book, one I feel really proud to have finished and that I really learned from. Chesapeake is the story of Cheseapeake Bay on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, a spit of land split between the states of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. The narrative is filtered through the lens of the progress of the fictional town of Patamoke on the Choptank River and the rise of major immigrant families: first the wily watermen Turlocks, the Quaker Paxmores and the Catholic Steeds, joined later by the ex-slave Caters, immigrants Irish Caveneys and German Pflaums . Michener splits his tale into fourteen journeys, boat journeys that are taken by people relevant to the narrative. These take place in 1583, 1608, 1636, 1661, 1701, 1773, 1811, 1822, 1832, 1837, 1886, 1938, 1976 and 1978. In the first we see the Suquehanna Native American Pentaquod come to among the marshes of the Eastern Shore and Michener takes us through the next 400 years until the funeral journey of a son of the area disgraced by his involvement in the Watergate scandal. In this way Michener narrates the coming of Europe's persecuted to the area, Quakers, Catholics, Irish, and the rise and fall of slavery. National and world events are touched on but only with relevance to personal history, from resistance in the American War of Independece, fighting in the American Civil War to the north, helping and pursuing runaway slaves on the Underground Railway reach Pennsylvania and the effect of Vietnam and Korea in showing the sons of the area the value of their homeland. The number of years that Michener places between Journeys allows for history to pass but each new set of people either features an older version of a character seen in a previous Journey or they are still within living memory, allowing the great sweep of years to remain personalised.
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