My Science School

Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson crusoe, published in 1719, was based on the true story of a Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk. After a quarrel at sea, he was left, at his own request, on the island of Juan Fernandez, Chile. He was rescued four years later.

Crusoe is the novel’s narrator. He describes how, as a headstrong young man, he ignored his family’s advice and left his comfortable middle-class home in England to go to sea. His first experience on a ship nearly kills him, but he perseveres, and a voyage to Guinea “made me both a Sailor and a Merchant,” Crusoe explains. Now several hundred pounds richer, he sails again for Africa but is captured by pirates and sold into slavery. He escapes and ends up in Brazil, where he acquires a plantation and prospers. Ambitious for more wealth, Crusoe makes a deal with merchants and other plantation owners to sail to Guinea, buy slaves, and return with them to Brazil. But he encounters a storm in the Caribbean, and his ship is nearly destroyed. Crusoe is the only survivor, washed up onto a desolate shore. He salvages what he can from the wreck and establishes a life on the island that consists of spiritual reflection and practical measures to survive. He carefully documents in a journal everything he does and experiences.

After many years, Crusoe discovers a human footprint, and he eventually encounters a group of native peoples—the “Savages,” as he calls them—who bring captives to the island so as to kill and eat them. One of the group’s captives escapes, and Crusoe shoots those who pursue him, effectively freeing the captive. 

Defoe probably based part of Robinson Crusoe on the real-life experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who at his own request was put ashore on an uninhabited island in 1704 after a quarrel with his captain and stayed there until 1709. But Defoe took his novel far beyond Selkirk’s story by blending the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of human beings as social creatures. He also deployed components of travel literature and adventure stories, both of which boosted the novel’s popularity. From this mixture emerged Defoe’s major accomplishment in Robinson Crusoe: the invention of a modern myth. The novel is both a gripping tale and a sober wide-ranging reflection on ambition, self-reliance, civilization, and power.

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This legendary hero was said to have lived in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire during the reign or Richard I who was King from 1189-1199.

During this time, Richard the Lionheart was away from England on crusades in the holy land and neglected his duties as King. He left his brother Prince John in charge of the country who, together with the Sheriff of Nottingham, declared Robin Hood an outlaw.

According to legend, Robin then became the leader of an outlaw band dressed in Lincoln green and armed with longbow, who robbed the rich to help the poor.

From the 14th century onward, tales and ballads of this popular hero began to appear, but no one has really been able to prove that Robin Hood existed.

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Julius Caesar (102-44BC) was a Roman statesman and a general who conquered Gaul (now France and Belgium), and invaded Britain in 55BC.

He became the sole ruler and dictator of the Roman Empire, but was never the emperor.

He was stabbed to death in the Senate House by enemies who believed that he had too much power.

Caesar changed the course of the history of the Greco-Roman world decisively and irreversibly. The Greco-Roman society has been extinct for so long that most of the names of its great men mean little to the average, educated modern person. But Caesar’s name, like Alexander’s, is still on people’s lips throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds. Even people who know nothing of Caesar as a historic personality are familiar with his family name as a title signifying a ruler who is in some sense uniquely supreme or paramount—the meaning of Kaiser in German, tsar in the Slavonic languages, and qaysar in the languages of the Islamic world.

Caesar’s gens (clan) name, Julius (Iulius), is also familiar in the Christian world, for in Caesar’s lifetime the Roman month Quintilis, in which he was born, was renamed “July” in his honour. This name has survived, as has Caesar’s reform of the calendar. The old Roman calendar was inaccurate and manipulated for political purposes. Caesar’s calendar, the Julian calendar, is still partially in force in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries, and the Gregorian calendar, now in use in the West, is the Julian, slightly corrected by Pope Gregory XIII.

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In 1284 the town of Hamelin in Germany was plagued by rats.

One day an odd looking piper appeared offering to rid the town of rats, and the Mayor gladly agreed to pay him. As he played his pipe the rats followed the stranger towards the river, where they fell in and drowned.

When the Piper asked for his fee, the Mayor refused. As the piper played once more, all the children of the town followed him, dancing towards Koppelberg mountain. An enormous cavern opened up, the children ran inside and were never seen again!

The Pied Piper of Hamelin plays out in the Germanic town of Hamelin (now called Hameln) in 1284. The town had been suffering from a severe rat infestation when a man arrived carrying a musical pipe and wearing 'pied' or multicoloured clothing. He promised the mayor to rid the town of its rats in exchange for a fee.

The music he played on his pipe attracted all the town's rats towards him, after which, he led the entranced animals to the Weser River nearby, where they all dove in and drowned.

However, the mayor refused to pay the piper and he went away planning revenge. On June 26, the day of St John and also of St Paul, the piper returned, dressed as a hunter and wearing a red hat. He was playing a different tune.

This time, all the town's children followed him hypnotised. The piper led them to a mountain cave, and the children were never heard from again. The story notes that the mayor's grown up daughter was among the children who were lost.

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The American writer's real name was Samuel L. Clemens. For a time he worked on a Mississippi steamboat as a river pilot. The boatmen shouted 'mark twain' (second mark) as they measured the shallow water to a depth of two fathoms (3.6m or 12ft).

Best known of his humorous books are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry finn.

After a brief two weeks as a Confederate enlistee, he joined his brother Orion in Nevada Territory where Orion served as secretary to the governor. He tried mining but failed and instead took up as a journalist for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. This is when he began to use the pen name of Mark Twain. The original user of the pseudonym died in 1869.

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain says: "I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands—a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say."

Further, in his autobiography, Clemens noted that he wrote several satires of the original pilot's postings that were published and caused embarrassment. As a result, Isaiah Sellers stopped publishing his reports. Clemens was penitent for this later in life.

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The puzzle of this strange writing was solved in 1799 when a large black stone was discovered near Rosetta in Egypt. It told the same story repeated in hieroglyphics, ancient Greek and demotic. It was finally deciphered in 1822 by Jean Champollion when the riddle of the Rosetta Stone was solved.

In 1801 the English, who were at war with France, captured the Rosetta Stone and brought it to the British Museum in England. Egyptologists, people who study the culture of ancient Egypt, traveled to the British Museum to try to crack the code of the Rosetta Stone, pieces of which had cracked off and been lost. A well-known and gifted English doctor named Thomas Young (1773–1829) was the first to try. He translated the Greek and then tried to match patterns in that language to patterns in the two lost Egyptian languages. He discovered a great deal about how the languages worked. For example, he learned that the symbols stood for sounds and that the demotic script was closely related to the hieroglyphs. But he couldn't quite make the languages match up.

Beginning in 1807 a Frenchman named Jean François Champollion began to study the Rosetta Stone. For fifteen years he tried to break the code, racing against Young to see who would succeed first. Finally in 1822 Champollion made a breakthrough. He understood that the pictures didn't stand for the single sounds of individual letters but for more complex sounds. For example, he discovered that the hieroglyph of a bird known as an ibis stood for the Egyptian god Thoth. He substituted the sound "thoth" for the bird picture and did the same with other sounds. His plan worked. He had cracked the code of the Rosetta Stone, and people could finally understand Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Champollion traveled to Egypt to confirm his discovery. He visited vast temples whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs, and he poured over ancient scrolls of papyrus, a form of ancient paper. He was the first man to "read" the history of ancient Egypt in well over a thousand years. Champollion made a translation dictionary and explained the grammar of Egyptian writing. Soon others learned to read the lost languages. Today we know a great deal about ancient Egypt thanks to the work of the scholars who discovered the secrets of the hieroglyphs.

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Late one night on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron suggested his friends wrote ghost stories. So Mary Shelley, wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, created the frightening monster Frankenstein - she was just 19.

Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818, revised 1831), a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human being. (The man-made monster in this novel inspired a similar creature in numerous American horror films.) She wrote several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837); The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.

Late 20th-century publications of her casual writings include The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844 (1987), edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, and Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1995), edited by Betty T. Bennett.

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He is thought to have been a slave who lived in Asia Minor in the 6th century BC. He is remembered for the stories that he wrote and collected.

One tradition holds that he came from Thrace, while a later one styles him a Phrygian. Other sources supposed that he was Ethiopian. An Egyptian biography of the 1st century CE places him on the island of Samos as a slave who gained his freedom from his master, thence going to Babylon as riddle solver to King Lycurgus and, finally, meeting his death at Delphi. The probability is that Aesop was no more than a name invented to provide an author for fables centring on beasts, so that “a story of Aesop” became synonymous with “fable.” The importance of fables lay not so much in the story told as in the moral derived from it.

The first known collection of the fables ascribed to Aesop was produced by Demetrius Phalareus in the 4th century BCE, but it did not survive beyond the 9th century CE. A collection of fables that relied heavily on the Aesop corpus was that of Phaedrus, which was produced at Rome in the 1st century CE. Phaedrus’s treatment of them greatly influenced the way in which they were used by later writers, notably by the 17th-century French poet and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine.

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The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm, two language professors, collected old folk tales told in Germany. They published them as a collection of fairy tales. Snow white, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel were just a few.

The Brothers Grimm didn't actually write any of the stories their name has become synonymous with. Instead, these stories existed as part of a longstanding oral tradition in Germany and had been passed down from one generation to another for many years.

The Brothers Grimm interviewed friends and relatives, writing down these stories to save them from extinction. Eventually, they published their collection of folklore and fairy tales as Children's and Household Tales in 1812.

In addition to the famous tales mentioned previously, the collection contained many other famous tales, including The Frog Prince, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel. The collection, which would over time become known as Grimm's Fairy Tales, was republished many times, eventually growing from an initial collection of 86 stories to over 200 stories in the seventh edition.

To date, the fables and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm have been translated into more than 160 different languages. The stories are so timeless and popular that one language can have many versions. In the United States, for example, you can find more than 120 different editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

The enduring popularity of these stories can be seen in the number of the stories that have been made into movies. Even though many people would consider these popular fairy tales to be children's stories, they weren't originally meant for kids.

The earliest editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales did not contain illustrations and were targeted at adults. Many of the stories contained violence and other dark content not meant for children. Over time, many of the stories were modified to resemble to the tales we know today.

Although the Brothers Grimm published many other works, including books about mythology, linguistics, and medieval studies, Grimm's Fairy Tales was their enduring, signature work. It was a bestseller during their lifetimes and has maintained its popularity throughout the ages.

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Sitting on a rock in Copenhagen harbour is a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid. She is the heroine of one of Hans Christian Andersen's best known fairy tales.

The sculpture was inspired by ballerina Ellen Price, who in 1909 danced the lead role in the ballet The Little Mermaid at the Royal Theatre.

However, Ellen Price would not model in the nude for sculptor Edvard Eriksen. Thus Eriksen’s wife, Eline Eriksen, posed for the sculpture of The Little Mermaid.

The little mermaid has several times been the victim of vandalism. Twice she has lost her head, once the arm was sawn off, and several times she has had paint poured on her.

But every time she is rescued and restored, so she can stay in her place by the water and bid travelers welcome to Copenhagen harbor.

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Although pirate captains could be very cruel-often torturing and killing their victims making you walk the plank seems to be a myth!

Pirates did make people walk the plank every now and then, but historical records seem to indicate the practice was extremely rare. In fact, pirates preferred not to kill their victims. If they gained a reputation for killing everyone on board of every ship they took, crew members would simply fight to the death every time a group of pirates hopped on deck. That would be an awful lot of work for the pirates, who usually just wanted to take the gold and run. If they did need to get rid of someone, it was much faster to simply push them overboard rather than set up a plank and have them do it themselves.

That being said, there are known instances of pirates having people walk the plank, with the generally accepted reason behind this practice simply being that the pirates did it to amuses themselves on those rare occasions there actually was time for it. Another theory as to the reason for making people walk the plank was that people were forced to do this so that the pirates couldn’t be tried for murder—after all, the people walked off the plank themselves. This latter reason is considered somewhat unlikely, however, because pillaging and piracy were generally hanging offenses anyway; if they were caught, a murder charge on top of everything else wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

But the more bloodthirsty pirates loved the psychological torture inflicted on their victims before making them walk the plank, right? Not exactly. Black Bart—also known as Bartholomew Roberts—was a pirate captain known for his somewhat psychotic tendencies. He was an incredibly successful pirate who is reported to have taken over 400 ships and accumulated some £50 million in stolen goods. He also had a reputation for being violent and torturing his victims; yet Black Bart is only known to have made one person walk the plank in all his years of pirating.

As to some specific other examples of pirates having people walk the plank, one of the more well-known cases was on board the Dutch ship Vhan Fredericka. In 1829, pirates boarded the ship near the Virgin Islands and murdered almost every crew member by tying cannonballs to their feet and having them walk overboard. However, all in all, there are only about five cases of “walking the plank” that can be definitively proven by historical records. It’s possible that other instances occurred that were not recorded or whose records have been lost to time, but most likely the practice wasn’t nearly as commonplace as fiction would lead you to believe.

The phrase itself, “walking the plank”, dates back to 1769, with the first documented reference being when a seaman named George Wood confessed to a chaplain that he had made several men “walk the plank.” However, while the confession certainly took place, whether or not Wood actually made people walk the plank is still open to debate, owing to the lack of direct evidence.

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The blackest rogue of all-Captain Hook! He had a mean scowling face with dark eyes that glowed when he used his hook, for Peter Pan had chopped off his hand and thrown it to a passing crocodile.

Captain Hook is the main antagonist of Disney's 1953 animated feature film, Peter Pan. He is a bloodthirsty pirate that commands The Jolly Roger. Hook has long since abandoned sailing the high seas in favor of having revenge on Peter Pan for cutting off his left hand and feeding it to a crocodile, who has since been in constant pursuit of the captain. While a worthy opponent for Peter, Hook is destined to fail—sometimes because of Peter Pan's ability to fly, but more often through the bumbling incompetence of his first mate, Mr. Smee.

Hook's frustrations are understandable; he lost a hand to his opponent, is constantly pursued by the crocodile, and is unable to fly. These factors arguably make him one of the most sympathetic Disney villains. His antics with the crocodile are considered by many to be the funniest animated scenes ever created by Disney, according to Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in the book The Disney Villain.

As one of the most recognizable and popular villains in Disney's animated library, Captain Hook is also a primary member of the Disney Villains franchise.

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On December 27th 1904, a new play for children opened in London. It was J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the boy from Never Never Land who wouldn't grow up, together with Wendy, the Lost Boys and the evil Captain Hook. It became the most famous play ever written for children.

The play's title character is a boy who does not grow up. He lives on the island of Never Land where he is the leader of a group of other boys known as the Lost Boys. He is able to fly and has many adventures. Peter Pan often flies to London. He stops outside the window of the bedroom that Wendy Darling shares with her younger brothers John and Michael to listen to the stories that their mother tells them. He goes inside their bedroom one evening and leaves his shadow behind. When Peter returns to retrieve the shadow, he accidentally wakes up Wendy. When Wendy tells Peter Pan that she knows lots of stories, he asks her to come back to Never Land with him. She agrees to go on the condition that her brothers can go with her. As well as Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, Never Land is home to fairies, mermaids, a tribe of Native Americans led by the chief Great Big Little Panther and his daughter Tiger Lily, wild animals and a pirate crew led by the fearsome Captain Hook. In Never Land, Wendy acts as mother to the Lost Boys, Peter Pan and her own brothers John and Michael. Wendy, John and Michael live happily in Never Land for some time. When Peter Pan leads them to believe that their parents have forgotten about them, however, Wendy, John and Michael decide that it is time to return home.

Many people are likely to be offended by the manner in which Native Americans are depicted in Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up as J.M. Barrie originally wrote it. The Native American characters are referred to as "Redskins" and "Piccaninnies". They communicate with each other in grunts and pidgin English and call Peter Pan the "Great White Father". In modern productions of the play, especially ones in North America, steps may be taken to avoid presenting characters who are racist stereotypes. For example, when the British director Tim Carroll staged the play in Stratford, Ontario, Canada in 2010, he chose to change Tiger Lily's tribe into a tribe of Amazons, the warrior women from Greek mythology.

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Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella were all written in France by Charles Perrault in the 18th century.

The Grimm Brothers from Germany took many common tales only known in oral tradition and published them in 1812 in their book Grimm's Fairy Tales. Cinderella was one of these stories, but known in the German language as Ashenputtel.
In this version, Ashenputtel plants a Hazel twig and it grows with the water of her tears. A white bird roosts in the tree, which she believes is her deceased mother. The bird then is the bearer of the white gown and silk shoes to go to the ball. She eludes the prince as he chases here home but drops one of her golden slippers.

The Prince searches the kingdom for the owner, but her stepsisters try on the shoe first. Each sister cuts off a part of their foot to fit into the slipper. After all Princesses do not need to walk anywhere after they marry? The shoe still does not fit and the Prince notices the blood pouring from the shoe. Once the Prince places the shoe on Cinderella, he recognizes her and he takes her away from her evil stepmother and her limping stepsisters.

Scholars who study folklore have isolated at least 345 variants of Cinderella in Europe. Most of the tales have a wicked female relative who persecutes her. Most of the stories also have a ball, a ball gown that appears with magic and a built in curfew when the magic wears off. In some stories there are magic birds who provide and others have a fairy godmother that is kindness personified that enables her to attend the party.

Once she gets tired she runs away but leaves an article of her clothing behind. In some stories it is jewelry that she loses and in another story she loses a squirrel slipper as found in the Russian version. Hundreds of books, films, plays, ballets and television shows have been based upon this tale. From the Muppets portrayal with Miss Piggy as Cinderella and Sesame Street's Cinderelmo there is a vast contrast to the Russian National ballet performing the Sergei Radchenko version of the fairy tale.

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Don’t go, Fred!

Even though I have read the Harry Potter series many times over, I have always more or less lumped Fred and George together in my mind as two parts of a single character. I am not the only one who feels this way. Their own mother and Harry too get the same feeling. And I feel this viewpoint seems to be true for J. K Rowling herself.

What makes me saddest is the thought of George being left behind after Fred's death. Of course the twins are an inseparable duo, but even more that they were a duo for whom Fred provided much of the humour and the fun.

Fred and George are far more alike than they are different - both are funny and goofy, both care deeply about Harry, and in the end, their family as well. Both really did complement each other perfectly. They brought smiles to our hearts even in the darkest of times.

Imagine life for George after Fred's death. How he would have struggled to live alone.

I think everyone would be happy if Fred had lived and enjoyed the glory of the trick shop he opened with George. So, if I could change anything about my favourite book, this would be it.

My favourite book is J.K.Rowling's 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'. One thing I would like to change about it is the fate of the Weasley twin Fred. No matter how much I think about it. Fred Weasley should not die. I don't see how George is supposed to live without him. Albus Dumbledore once quoted, "Do not pity the dead, pity the living". I totally agree with this. Fred and George are inseparable. They should not be separated. Lots of other characters have breathed their last in this book as well. Little Teddy will have to grow up without his parents. But in my point of view, Fred's death is the most consequential as I'm sure that George will never be able to get over the passing of his twin brother.

A happy ending

The Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi has been my favourite book series for years. However, if I could change one thing about the last book of the series, The Oath of the Vayuputras, it would be Sati's death. The book culminates in the use of the Pashupatiastra by Shiva, which decimates the city of Meluha after an intense fight between the Egyptian warriors and Sati's army. Shiva's wife ultimately succumbs to multiple injuries, her death leaving her husband and two sons devastated. I would have the book end with victory for Mahadev and his followers, but with Sati at his side.

An ending filled with laughter

If given the chance, I would like to change one scene from the book Swami and Friends written by RK Narayanan. In the last scene of the story, Rajam, one of Swami's friends, boards a train to move to another city, as his father had got a job transfer. The story, after going on in such a humorous pace, enters a state of overwhelming sadness. So, to keep up the humour, I will have converted this into a joke played by Mani. Swami's other friend, who informs Swami of Rajam's departure. I would have liked to see Swami wait for a long time in the station waiting for Rajam and his family. But since they never came, Swami would have nun to Rajam's home, and be surprised to find the big house occupied by Rajam and his family as usual. If the last scene would have been like this, the story would have ended with a positive and funny note, and it would have left the readers rolling with laughter. The story would then stay in the readers' minds, and whenever they talk to someone about the story, they'd say "The story ended with such a funny little prank! I loved it, instead of them saying I was so sorry for poor Swami. How disappointed and lonely he would have felt after parting with his best friend.

The power of magic

I have a list of favourite books and if ever I could change one thing about my favourite book then it would be the ending of Harry Potter. It is such a good book and I like everything in the book, but I think that when Harry Potter defeats Lord Voldemort and frees Hogwarts from evil, he must have brought his parents back to life by the power of magic. And I think that no other changes in this book would be better than this one.

The Bridge Home

There are two sisters in the story The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman - Viji and Rukku. Their father was a very cruel person. He ill-treated them so much that they left home and after wandering a lot, they finally ended up below a bridge. There they met two homeless boys named Arul and Muthu and befriended them. As they did not have a shelter they lived in a graveyard. Rukku and Muthu fell ill and were taken to hospital. The doctor examined them and said that they had dengue but Rukku had pneumonia too. When Viji and Arul found them, it was too late. Though Muthu survived, Rukku had passed away. Viji cried inconsolably at the loss of her younger sister. Her father came back for Viji as a changed man to take her back home. It was so touching and moving that it brought tears to my eyes.

If I could change one thing in this book it would be that Rukku's father had come to the hospital much earlier as a changed man and looking at her father as a kind person Rukku recovered and went home with him and Viji and lived happily ever after.

A 'key' problem

My favourite book is 'Long Haul in the series Diary of the Wimpy Kid' by Jeff Kinney. The story has an abrupt ending and it leaves you wanting more. In the story Greg and his family are out on a road trip. A significant part of the story deals with a lost key to a locker where they had stored all their valuables. Many misadventures follow in trying to retrieve the key or the valuables. Greg ends up finding that the lost key was in his pocket all along. The book ends at this point, but it would have been good to have extended the fun with how Greg would now deal with this new problem.

The Last of the Mohicans

The last of the Mohicans is a heart-stopping novel about Red Indians and their wars. This is a story which follows the journey of the last of the Mohicans, a father and son, as they try to rescue a colonel's daughters who are kidnapped by the Iroquois, a dangerous Red Indian tribe. The Mohicans finally kill the chief and rescue the daughters.

The one thing that I would like to change in the book is the death of the son. In the end of the novel the son dies, which shows the end of the Mohicans. It would have been great if the son was alive, because it shows that the end of the Mohicans is near As the son was also a brave warrior, his death was very sad to read. But the author shows the fragility of life here.

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