Seconds With a Sailer

A Puritan’s life was centered around their relationship with God. They did everything with God in mind, hoping to receive salvation in return for devotedly following his will. This desire for Puritan’s to have God lead them through life and recreate them in accordance to His will is reflected in Edward Taylor’s poem, “Huswifery”, where the speaker prays to God to “Make me, O Lord, Thy spinning wheel complete” (Taylor 1) with the speaker comparing himself to an unfinished spinning wheel that needs God to do the finishing touches and mold him into the person He wants the speaker to be. This journey of depending on God to know what’s best for you and trusting him to lead your through the ups and downs of life can also be compared to sailing. However, instead of using a spinning wheel as a metaphor for a person, I would use a sailboat, with God as the captain. In an ideal situation where a Puritan has complete devotion to God, the captain puts coordinates into the boat and the vess...

If you ask the typical American elementary student, or even the average adult, "who sailed the ocean blue in 1492," they will probably say the name 'Christopher Columbus' right away. If you further question them, they may even go on to explain how Columbus discovered America, became BFFs with the Indians who willingly let him bring his European friends over to live in the New World and afterward everyone held hands and sang kumbaya. Not so. Many of these misconceptions surrounding Columbus and Native Americans are still widely believed by many people in the U.S. The common belief that Columbus 'found' America is false since Native Americans had already been living there. In fact, Columbus did not land in America but in the Caribbean islands. Since he thought he found the East Indies, Columbus incorrectly referred to the indigenous people as 'Indians'. Furthermore, he and his men enslaved the natives living in the area that is now Haiti and the Domini...