Perils of Detail

IN 1999 I wrote this sentence for a short story I was thinking about, called The Lime Tree:

“On the seventh day out from Portsmouth, in the brig of the prison hulk Wotworth, I began to forge the second coin from the handle of a spoon.”

I flat-out loved this sentence. It was a little magisterial, but I thought it had read-aloud rhythm. It had action, tension & the promise of more. It had neat words like hulk & brig, & strong verbs like forge. We were already set in a floating prison, which is a reliably dramatic, even melodramatic, setting. The fact that it’s a 2nd coin suggested there was a first forged coin, which a clever reader might suppose had something to do with the narrator being in a prison hulk now. These are things I only notice afterwards.
They seemed like honest virtues.

Better yet, it happened. A first fleet convict bound for New South Wales, a fellow named Thomas Barrett, did in fact forge coins from pewter spoons on board the ship. Maybe not on the Biblical seventh day, that I made up, though he could have. I switched it to the Second Fleet & a different forger. The Wotworth is a fictional ship. But the bones of it are real, which to me makes it stronger still.

Then I wrote some more, did some research & found things like this:

• Revision of the story required me to shift the forgery a few weeks into the journey. So I lost “the seventh day”.

• The 2nd fleet set sail from Stokes Bay, so I lost Portsmouth. (Only later did I realize that Stokes Bay is part of Portsmouth Harbor, so I got it back).

• A HULK is a floating prison, but not a sea-worthy vessel. Prisoners were kept in hulks in the harbour, but they were transported to NSW on ships called Transports. So I can’t use the word hulk.

• To call it a BRIG may not even be correct. These ships were converted to have cell decks or areas, but they didn’t tend to call them brigs. So brig was out, too.

• I found lots of interesting, incomprehensible slang words for coins: like George (the king, whose head was on coins), Brummagem button, or grunter. Forgers were called smashers or bit-culls.

• Look closely at those pewter spoons up there. Or any spoon. Which end would you use to forge a coin: the handle?? No reader has ever commented on that choice, yet once I noticed it, it had to go.

The technically corrected sentence would have nothing whatsoever going for it:

“A few weeks out from Stokes Bay, on the converted cell deck of the prison transport ship Wotworth, I began to forge the second Brummagem button from the nice, coin-like round part of a pewter spoon, as any sensible bit-cull would.”

So I had to cut it. What do they call that in school? “Kill your darlings.” In the end, it's better for everyone involved. Onward to greater struggles.