Kidnapped timeline: logic and problems
May. 12th, 2024 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeHere is the draft timeline, and here is the logic of how I worked it out and the problems encountered. It's a tricky one; as I remarked earlier, there are five exact dates in the book and every one of them is at least difficult to reconcile with other information given about the timeline, if not definitely contradictory. Again, I would much appreciate any thoughts you have here on the counting, reasoning, decisions made or anything else.
Chapter 1: The book opens on 'a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751'. Mr Campbell tells David that he can reach Cramond in 'two days of walk'. David is either sixteen or seventeen, depending on the edition. David's parents are recently deceased, and Mr Campbell refers to 'when your mother was gone, and your father… began to sicken'.
Chapter 2: David first sees Edinburgh 'on the forenoon of the second day'; he reaches Cramond in the evening, and 'night had begun to fall' by the time he gets to the house of Shaws.
Chapter 3: Takes place overnight to the next morning. Ebenezer says 'there's a fine moon', but David thinks there's none. David judges that the room where he sleeps has been neglected for 'ten years… or perhaps twenty'. Ebenezer's age is 'between fifty and seventy'. Alexander died 'three weeks' ago.
Chapter 4: Takes place the same day; David goes up the tower that night. Alexander is sufficiently older than Ebenezer to have written 'an excellent, clear, manly hand' at the time of Ebenezer's fifth birthday, but close enough in age that Ebenezer 'could read as soon as he could'.
Chapter 5: The next morning.
Chapter 6: The same day.
Chapter 7: David has 'no measure of time' during his ordeal in the ship's hold; but it seems not to have been a hugely long time, and I would guess that when he wakes in the forecastle the 'daylight' he sees is that of the next day. After that he remains in the forecastle for 'many days', interrupting our nice relative dating. Narrator!David refers to 'the rebellion of the colonies and the formation of the United States'.
Chapter 8: Begins 'one night, about X o'clock'—where X is either 'nine', 'eleven' or 'twelve' depending on the edition—with Ransome's murder and David's promotion to cabin boy. David speaks to Shuan about Ransome on his 'second day' in the round-house; after that 'the days came and went'.
Chapter 9: 'More than a week went by'; the collision takes place 'about ten at night' following 'the tenth afternoon' (after David's promotion to the round-house), and the rest of the chapter that same night.
Chapter 10: The siege of the round-house is the same night, and the chapter continues to the next morning: by the end of two three-hour watches it's 'broad day'.
Chapter 11: The same morning.
Chapter 12: The same day.
Chapter 13: Begins 'already late at night, and as dark as it ever would be at that season' the same day, after which the brig is wrecked and David swims to Earraid.
Chapter 14: David arrives on Earraid at 'half-past twelve in the morning'. He describes the first two days on Earraid; on the third day he sees the fishers; on the fourth day they come back, he learns the island is tidal and he crosses to Mull. Finally he confirms he was on Earraid for 'close upon one hundred hours'; he's overestimating—actually he was there for three full days, counting from midnight to midnight, and not more than sixteen hours of the fourth, which is 88 hours in total maximum—but it's not so far out as to suggest a problem with these dates.
Chapter 15: David gets to the house on Mull 'about five or six at night' the same day, and learns that Alan and the other survivors from the brig were there 'the day after' the shipwreck. David sets off 'near noon of the next day'; 'about eight at night' he reaches the house of the man with the financially flexible English, where he stays the night. The next morning they go to Hector Maclean's house and stay the rest of the day and night. David confirms that the next day is 'the fourth of my travels'; this day he breaks with his guide, meets the blind catechist and finally gets to Torosay, where he spends the night. Finally he confirms again that he took 'four days' to cross Mull (he starts counting the day he left Earraid).
Chapter 16: David crosses to Kinlochaline; there is a 'regular ferry'; he doesn't say how much time has passed before the next ferry, but I think we can assume it's the next day—see discussion below. He stays there that night, and the next day meets Mr Henderland and stays with him.
Chapter 17: The next day David crosses to Lettermore, witnesses the murder and reunites with Alan.
Chapter 18: Alan and David's conversation in the wood of Lettermore follows immediately; Alan describes how he got away from the sailors after the shipwreck. They set off for Aucharn.
Chapter 19: They reach Aucharn 'about half-past ten' at night, and set off again soon afterwards.
Chapter 20: David and Alan arrive in (what's probably) Glencoe around daybreak, stay on the rock until 2pm, leave after 'an hour or two', stop again at the burn, and finally set off again as night falls.
Chapter 21: It's now 'the beginning of July' and 'still dark' when they reach Corrynakiegh; here they stay 'five days'. Alan makes the message for John Breck on 'our first morning' and delivers it that night; John arrives 'about noon' the next day; he is 'three full days gone' and returns 'about five in the evening of the third', whereupon Alan and David set off again.
Chapter 22: After 'more than eleven hours' they reach the moor 'early in the morning' and begin crossing, stopping to sleep 'about noon'; David oversleeps, and they set off again that afternoon and into the night. It is 'still early in July'. Cluny's men ambush them the next morning.
Chapter 23: They reach Cluny's Cage the same day. The card game begins that day, and starts to go Cluny's way 'on the second day', when David is woken up 'about noon'; David then wakes again 'on the morning of the third day, when we had been forty-eight hours in the Cage', and their departure is planned for later that day. Narrator!David refers to Charles Edward Stuart in the present tense: 'the fault [alcoholism] that has since, by all accounts, made such a wreck of him…'
Chapter 24: David and Alan cross Loch Ericht 'under cover of night' and Loch Rannoch 'in the dusk of the next day'. They then go on travelling 'for the best part of three nights', and David reports their conversation on 'the second night, or rather the peep of the third day'; the final quarrel is on 'the third night'.
Chapter 25: David is in bed ill 'for no more than a week', and they leave Balquhidder 'before a month' is out. There's no statement of when during this time Robin Oig's visit happens, but David is still in bed when he arrives, suggesting it's during the first week.
Chapter 26. At the time they leave Balquhidder it's 'already far through August'; 'the first night' of the journey is followed by 'the twenty-first of the month', which they spend at Duncan's friend's house at Strathire (I've no idea why David suddenly starts giving us exact calendar dates in this passage; it's the only time in the book that he does); 'the twenty-second' they sleep on the hillside in Uam Var; 'that night' they reach Allan Water and Stirling, where they spend the next day on the islet; the failed attempt at crossing by the bridge is that night, and they then spend 'all night' walking east; 'about ten in the morning' they reach Limekilns and meet the lass at the change-house; they wait in the wood all day and 'past eleven' that night she ferries them across the Forth; they spend the rest of the night 'lying in a den on the seashore'.
Chapter 27: 'The next day' David goes to Queensferry. Mr Rankeillor tells us that 'the brig was lost on June the 27th… and we are now at August the 24th'. Mr Campbell visited Mr Rankeillor on the day of the shipwreck, and some time after that Hoseason returned to Queensferry with the news that David was drowned. David gives his date of birth as 12 March of either 1734 or 1733 depending on the edition; the former date would make him seventeen now, the latter eighteen.
Chapter 28: The visit to Mr Rankeillor continues the same day; David, Rankeillor and Torrance meet Alan and set off for the Shaws that evening. Ebenezer was old enough in 1715 to go and fight in the Jacobite rising of that year; the love triangle was in 'August, the same year I [Rankeillor] came from college'; Ebenezer has 'taken root' at Shaws for 'a quarter of a century'.
Chapter 29: Follows immediately; David, Alan, Rankeillor and Torrance all sleep that night at Shaws.
Chapter 30: The next morning.
All quotes are from the 1994 Penguin Classics edition; one thing I have not done is checked whether any of this information differs between editions, apart from the details I've already noted.
There are no days of the week in the book. I've obtained these from timeanddate.com (which, to anticipate one potential problem, does account for the calendar change in 1752). They both help to solve, and create, problems with the timeline for one major reason: with eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyterians who take the Sabbath seriously, we'd generally expect to know if it was Sunday. Maybe not on a random day when David is on the run, but if we see characters at work, the world in general seems to be doing everyday business and there's no mention of church services—especially when minister characters are involved—it's probably not Sunday.
Most of the book's events are clearly dated relative to each other. There are two definite exceptions:
1) In chapter 7, after the kidnapping and the sailing of the brig.
2) In chapter 25, following David and Alan's arrival in Balquhidder.
As mentioned above, it's possible that the relative dating also fails at the beginning of chapter 16, when David takes the ferry from Torosay to Kinlochaline. To begin with, I think this is unlikely simply because there's no explicit indication of more than one day passing here, and everywhere else in the book David either tells us exactly how much time has passed or makes it clear when an indefinite period of time passes. We'll assume for now that the departure from Torosay is the day after the arrival.
There are five exact, absolute calendar dates:
There are also some inexact absolute dates:
Unfortunately, these all get a bit difficult to reconcile with each other…
The two failures of relative dating split the present-day action of the book into three periods.
Part I. From the beginning of the book to the kidnapping.
Part II. From Ransome's murder to the arrival in Balquhidder.
Part III. From the departure from Balquhidder to the end of the book.
There's also the backstory, and the (surprisingly well-specified!) historical future from which David is narrating. Immediately we can see that none of our exact absolute dates fall in Part I; so we start working out absolute dates in Part II, using the one date there: 27 June for the shipwreck. Ransome's murder is eleven days before this, on 16 June; the arrival in Balquhidder is twenty-three days after, 20 July.
At this point several problems become apparent:
The first problem could be solved by introducing more time at Torosay—if the ferry was two days after David's arrival rather than one, then the murder would be on a Monday, etc. However, this would exacerbate the second two problems! With the relative dates given, it's impossible for the 'beginning of July' to be earlier than the 8th or 'still early in July' earlier than the 14th, and we want to avoid making those mismatches worse. There's one other option: the shipwreck took place around midnight, so it's just possible that 27 June might be the day following (when everyone washed up on shore and started talking about the shipwreck) rather than the day preceding it. However, this causes other problems later on.
Right, now we can return to Part I, given that Part II begins with Ransome's murder on 16 June.
Obviously the earliest possible date for day 1 of Part I is 1 June, which would place the kidnapping and sailing on 4 June and give twelve days from here to Ransome's murder. How few days can count as 'many days' is a perplexing question, but I think it's probably not much less than a week; that would make the latest feasible date for the kidnapping 9 June, and hence for day 1, 6 June.
I have not considered plausible amounts of time for the distance covered by the ship, which could help with this; if any more nautically knowledgeable fans would like to weigh in on this, please do.
Here we can use the Sabbatarian argument. 2 June 1751 was a Sunday; there's no indication that either day 1 or day 2 falls on a Sunday and Mr Campbell would have let us know if they did, so they probably don't. Therefore we can eliminate 1 and 2 June for day 1. This argument also applies to day 4—Mr Rankeillor and Captain Hoseason are at work and the inn is open—which eliminates 6 June for day 1, and places it more precisely between Monday 3rd and Wednesday 5th.
One more thing that might help is the moon in chapter 3. Ebenezer thinks there's plenty of moonlight but David says there is none, and if Ebenezer isn't talking total nonsense (a definite possibility, mind), the most likely explanation is that the moon is reasonably near the full but it's cloudy (David also says there's no starlight). Helpfully, timeanddate.com also gives phases of the moon; there was a full moon on 29 May and the following half moon was 5 June, so this would argue for an earlier date.
While I don't think we can be exactly sure, my best estimate for the date of the book's opening is therefore Monday 3 June.
Right, now let's look at Part III.
Here we have a wealth of dates—three whole numbers—and the only problem is that they're blatantly incompatible. The first day after David and Alan leave Balquhidder, when they sleep at Strathire, is 21 August, and David's conversation with Mr Rankeillor at Queensferry is 24 August, and yet these events are definitely four days apart, not three (Strathire, Uam Var, Allan Water/Stirling, Limekilns and Queensferry are all on different days).
Can this be resolved using the Sabbatarian argument?
No! Trying to work out the Sundays makes it even worse! 25 August 1751 was a Sunday, and depending on which of the contradictory dates we listen to this is either the day of David's meeting with Rankeillor or the next day, the last day of the book's action. Neither of those days makes much sense as a Sunday: on the first Rankeillor is doing his legal business—and before meeting him David describes early morning in Queensferry, the town waking up and beginning to go about its business, but not apparently to church—and on the second Rankeillor sends David to the bank in Edinburgh to get money to help Alan escape the country. I think if we have to choose, the second is more implausible—the bank just wouldn't be open on a Sunday, whereas Rankeillor might be willing to have an informal legal chat on a day when he wouldn't normally be working—but I don't like it.
Here we must also return to the problem of the 'beginning of July' being on the 8th and 'early in July' on the 14th. With the dates worked out above, the stay in Balquhidder lasts one day less than a month (21 July to 20 August; or to 19 August if we take the earlier, more problematic set of dates for Part III), and we know it's less than a month. This leaves no room to make previous events earlier—whether by supposing that 27 June is actually the day after the shipwreck, or by any other means. Therefore I think our only option at this point is to suppose that those 'beginning' and 'early' references were approximate and ignore them.
Two historical clues allow us to date the in-universe composition of the book. David refers in chapter 7 to the American War of Independence and 'the formation of the United States'; it's therefore certainly after the US declared independence, in 1776, and the definiteness of that latter statement means it's most probably after they won the war, in 1783. In chapter 23 he refers to Charles Edward Stuart in the present tense, implying that he's still alive; Charles died in January 1788. This dates the writing of Kidnapped fairly precisely to the mid-1780s, when David would be in his early fifties.
As for the backstory…
Alexander had grown-up-looking handwriting when Ebenezer was five, but learnt to read no sooner than Ebenezer (though the second fact comes only from Ebenezer's not necessarily reliable statement). I would estimate the age gap between them at four or five years. Ebenezer's being between fifty and seventy when David first meets him puts his date of birth sometime in the 1680s or 1690s. The earlier end of that range would make Alexander an unusually (though not implausibly) old first-time dad to David, born in 1733 or 1734; and Ebenezer's rash running off to join the Jacobites in the '15 seems like the behaviour of a very young man, so I would put Ebenezer's date of birth in the mid-late 1690s and Alexander's a few years earlier.
The latest possible date for the Grace affair, which came to a head in August some time before Grace and Alexander's marriage, would be the next year but one before David's birth in March, i.e. 1731 or 1732 depending on edition. The earliest possible date would presumably be 1716. Mr Rankeillor's statement that Ebenezer has been in charge at Shaws for 'a quarter of a century' if interpreted literally would put it comfortably in the middle of that range in 1726; it's clearly not a literally exact statement, but is as good an estimate as we get, and it corresponds fairly well with the other clues available. David guesses in chapter 3 that his room at Shaws has been neglected for ten or twenty years; presumably Ebenezer didn't make an immediate start on turning the house into a ruin, and it can't have been fewer years than David's age anyway. It would put the brothers in their late twenties-early thirties, and I think this also corresponds with Rankeillor's statement that it happened 'the year I came from college'; he would then be in his early twenties, and his being a few years younger than Ebenezer accords well with his description of his own envy of the handsome, dashing young Ebenezer.
David's date of birth is either 12 March 1733 or 12 March 1734 depending on the edition—though this contradicts his stated age in chapter 1, so in the editions where his age is given as sixteen you could argue that his date of birth should be 12 March 1735.
The only indication of Alan's age is his description in the government bill as 'thirty-five or thereby'. Historically, Allan Breck was about thirty at the time of the Appin murder; but that description is otherwise fairly closely based on real historical ones that describe him as about thirty, so I think Stevenson made a deliberate decision to make him five years older. Also the wording presumably came from James of the Glens, who would know exactly how old Alan is. This puts Alan's date of birth around 1716. I don't think anything else about Alan's backstory can be dated precisely, other than the obvious occurrence of the '45 in '45.
The Evidence, Chapter by Chapter
Chapter 1: The book opens on 'a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751'. Mr Campbell tells David that he can reach Cramond in 'two days of walk'. David is either sixteen or seventeen, depending on the edition. David's parents are recently deceased, and Mr Campbell refers to 'when your mother was gone, and your father… began to sicken'.
Chapter 2: David first sees Edinburgh 'on the forenoon of the second day'; he reaches Cramond in the evening, and 'night had begun to fall' by the time he gets to the house of Shaws.
Chapter 3: Takes place overnight to the next morning. Ebenezer says 'there's a fine moon', but David thinks there's none. David judges that the room where he sleeps has been neglected for 'ten years… or perhaps twenty'. Ebenezer's age is 'between fifty and seventy'. Alexander died 'three weeks' ago.
Chapter 4: Takes place the same day; David goes up the tower that night. Alexander is sufficiently older than Ebenezer to have written 'an excellent, clear, manly hand' at the time of Ebenezer's fifth birthday, but close enough in age that Ebenezer 'could read as soon as he could'.
Chapter 5: The next morning.
Chapter 6: The same day.
Chapter 7: David has 'no measure of time' during his ordeal in the ship's hold; but it seems not to have been a hugely long time, and I would guess that when he wakes in the forecastle the 'daylight' he sees is that of the next day. After that he remains in the forecastle for 'many days', interrupting our nice relative dating. Narrator!David refers to 'the rebellion of the colonies and the formation of the United States'.
Chapter 8: Begins 'one night, about X o'clock'—where X is either 'nine', 'eleven' or 'twelve' depending on the edition—with Ransome's murder and David's promotion to cabin boy. David speaks to Shuan about Ransome on his 'second day' in the round-house; after that 'the days came and went'.
Chapter 9: 'More than a week went by'; the collision takes place 'about ten at night' following 'the tenth afternoon' (after David's promotion to the round-house), and the rest of the chapter that same night.
Chapter 10: The siege of the round-house is the same night, and the chapter continues to the next morning: by the end of two three-hour watches it's 'broad day'.
Chapter 11: The same morning.
Chapter 12: The same day.
Chapter 13: Begins 'already late at night, and as dark as it ever would be at that season' the same day, after which the brig is wrecked and David swims to Earraid.
Chapter 14: David arrives on Earraid at 'half-past twelve in the morning'. He describes the first two days on Earraid; on the third day he sees the fishers; on the fourth day they come back, he learns the island is tidal and he crosses to Mull. Finally he confirms he was on Earraid for 'close upon one hundred hours'; he's overestimating—actually he was there for three full days, counting from midnight to midnight, and not more than sixteen hours of the fourth, which is 88 hours in total maximum—but it's not so far out as to suggest a problem with these dates.
Chapter 15: David gets to the house on Mull 'about five or six at night' the same day, and learns that Alan and the other survivors from the brig were there 'the day after' the shipwreck. David sets off 'near noon of the next day'; 'about eight at night' he reaches the house of the man with the financially flexible English, where he stays the night. The next morning they go to Hector Maclean's house and stay the rest of the day and night. David confirms that the next day is 'the fourth of my travels'; this day he breaks with his guide, meets the blind catechist and finally gets to Torosay, where he spends the night. Finally he confirms again that he took 'four days' to cross Mull (he starts counting the day he left Earraid).
Chapter 16: David crosses to Kinlochaline; there is a 'regular ferry'; he doesn't say how much time has passed before the next ferry, but I think we can assume it's the next day—see discussion below. He stays there that night, and the next day meets Mr Henderland and stays with him.
Chapter 17: The next day David crosses to Lettermore, witnesses the murder and reunites with Alan.
Chapter 18: Alan and David's conversation in the wood of Lettermore follows immediately; Alan describes how he got away from the sailors after the shipwreck. They set off for Aucharn.
Chapter 19: They reach Aucharn 'about half-past ten' at night, and set off again soon afterwards.
Chapter 20: David and Alan arrive in (what's probably) Glencoe around daybreak, stay on the rock until 2pm, leave after 'an hour or two', stop again at the burn, and finally set off again as night falls.
Chapter 21: It's now 'the beginning of July' and 'still dark' when they reach Corrynakiegh; here they stay 'five days'. Alan makes the message for John Breck on 'our first morning' and delivers it that night; John arrives 'about noon' the next day; he is 'three full days gone' and returns 'about five in the evening of the third', whereupon Alan and David set off again.
Chapter 22: After 'more than eleven hours' they reach the moor 'early in the morning' and begin crossing, stopping to sleep 'about noon'; David oversleeps, and they set off again that afternoon and into the night. It is 'still early in July'. Cluny's men ambush them the next morning.
Chapter 23: They reach Cluny's Cage the same day. The card game begins that day, and starts to go Cluny's way 'on the second day', when David is woken up 'about noon'; David then wakes again 'on the morning of the third day, when we had been forty-eight hours in the Cage', and their departure is planned for later that day. Narrator!David refers to Charles Edward Stuart in the present tense: 'the fault [alcoholism] that has since, by all accounts, made such a wreck of him…'
Chapter 24: David and Alan cross Loch Ericht 'under cover of night' and Loch Rannoch 'in the dusk of the next day'. They then go on travelling 'for the best part of three nights', and David reports their conversation on 'the second night, or rather the peep of the third day'; the final quarrel is on 'the third night'.
Chapter 25: David is in bed ill 'for no more than a week', and they leave Balquhidder 'before a month' is out. There's no statement of when during this time Robin Oig's visit happens, but David is still in bed when he arrives, suggesting it's during the first week.
Chapter 26. At the time they leave Balquhidder it's 'already far through August'; 'the first night' of the journey is followed by 'the twenty-first of the month', which they spend at Duncan's friend's house at Strathire (I've no idea why David suddenly starts giving us exact calendar dates in this passage; it's the only time in the book that he does); 'the twenty-second' they sleep on the hillside in Uam Var; 'that night' they reach Allan Water and Stirling, where they spend the next day on the islet; the failed attempt at crossing by the bridge is that night, and they then spend 'all night' walking east; 'about ten in the morning' they reach Limekilns and meet the lass at the change-house; they wait in the wood all day and 'past eleven' that night she ferries them across the Forth; they spend the rest of the night 'lying in a den on the seashore'.
Chapter 27: 'The next day' David goes to Queensferry. Mr Rankeillor tells us that 'the brig was lost on June the 27th… and we are now at August the 24th'. Mr Campbell visited Mr Rankeillor on the day of the shipwreck, and some time after that Hoseason returned to Queensferry with the news that David was drowned. David gives his date of birth as 12 March of either 1734 or 1733 depending on the edition; the former date would make him seventeen now, the latter eighteen.
Chapter 28: The visit to Mr Rankeillor continues the same day; David, Rankeillor and Torrance meet Alan and set off for the Shaws that evening. Ebenezer was old enough in 1715 to go and fight in the Jacobite rising of that year; the love triangle was in 'August, the same year I [Rankeillor] came from college'; Ebenezer has 'taken root' at Shaws for 'a quarter of a century'.
Chapter 29: Follows immediately; David, Alan, Rankeillor and Torrance all sleep that night at Shaws.
Chapter 30: The next morning.
All quotes are from the 1994 Penguin Classics edition; one thing I have not done is checked whether any of this information differs between editions, apart from the details I've already noted.
The Logic
There are no days of the week in the book. I've obtained these from timeanddate.com (which, to anticipate one potential problem, does account for the calendar change in 1752). They both help to solve, and create, problems with the timeline for one major reason: with eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyterians who take the Sabbath seriously, we'd generally expect to know if it was Sunday. Maybe not on a random day when David is on the run, but if we see characters at work, the world in general seems to be doing everyday business and there's no mention of church services—especially when minister characters are involved—it's probably not Sunday.
Most of the book's events are clearly dated relative to each other. There are two definite exceptions:
1) In chapter 7, after the kidnapping and the sailing of the brig.
2) In chapter 25, following David and Alan's arrival in Balquhidder.
As mentioned above, it's possible that the relative dating also fails at the beginning of chapter 16, when David takes the ferry from Torosay to Kinlochaline. To begin with, I think this is unlikely simply because there's no explicit indication of more than one day passing here, and everywhere else in the book David either tells us exactly how much time has passed or makes it clear when an indefinite period of time passes. We'll assume for now that the departure from Torosay is the day after the arrival.
There are five exact, absolute calendar dates:
- 12 March 1733 or 1734, David's date of birth.
- 27 June 1751, the shipwreck.
- 21 and 22 August, the first two days after Alan and David leave Balquhidder, spent resting at Strathire and Uam Var respectively.
- 24 August, David's conversation with Mr Rankeillor.
There are also some inexact absolute dates:
- Early June 1751, David's departure from Essendean.
- The beginning of July, David and Alan's arrival at Corrynakiegh.
- Early July, between the moor and Cluny's Cage.
- David and Alan spend less than a month in Balquhidder.
Unfortunately, these all get a bit difficult to reconcile with each other…
The two failures of relative dating split the present-day action of the book into three periods.
Part I. From the beginning of the book to the kidnapping.
Part II. From Ransome's murder to the arrival in Balquhidder.
Part III. From the departure from Balquhidder to the end of the book.
There's also the backstory, and the (surprisingly well-specified!) historical future from which David is narrating. Immediately we can see that none of our exact absolute dates fall in Part I; so we start working out absolute dates in Part II, using the one date there: 27 June for the shipwreck. Ransome's murder is eleven days before this, on 16 June; the arrival in Balquhidder is twenty-three days after, 20 July.
At this point several problems become apparent:
- Colin Campbell's murder now falls on 7 July, which was a Sunday. This seems unsatisfactory: Colin is travelling on business, after all, and Mr Henderland—whom David leaves that morning—says nothing about it being the Sabbath.
- The reference to 'the beginning of July' at Corrynakiegh falls on 8 or 9 July (depending on the time of night), which seems pretty late to describe as the beginning of the month.
- Similarly, it's 'still early in July' on the 14th, solidly in the middle of the month.
The first problem could be solved by introducing more time at Torosay—if the ferry was two days after David's arrival rather than one, then the murder would be on a Monday, etc. However, this would exacerbate the second two problems! With the relative dates given, it's impossible for the 'beginning of July' to be earlier than the 8th or 'still early in July' earlier than the 14th, and we want to avoid making those mismatches worse. There's one other option: the shipwreck took place around midnight, so it's just possible that 27 June might be the day following (when everyone washed up on shore and started talking about the shipwreck) rather than the day preceding it. However, this causes other problems later on.
Right, now we can return to Part I, given that Part II begins with Ransome's murder on 16 June.
Obviously the earliest possible date for day 1 of Part I is 1 June, which would place the kidnapping and sailing on 4 June and give twelve days from here to Ransome's murder. How few days can count as 'many days' is a perplexing question, but I think it's probably not much less than a week; that would make the latest feasible date for the kidnapping 9 June, and hence for day 1, 6 June.
I have not considered plausible amounts of time for the distance covered by the ship, which could help with this; if any more nautically knowledgeable fans would like to weigh in on this, please do.
Here we can use the Sabbatarian argument. 2 June 1751 was a Sunday; there's no indication that either day 1 or day 2 falls on a Sunday and Mr Campbell would have let us know if they did, so they probably don't. Therefore we can eliminate 1 and 2 June for day 1. This argument also applies to day 4—Mr Rankeillor and Captain Hoseason are at work and the inn is open—which eliminates 6 June for day 1, and places it more precisely between Monday 3rd and Wednesday 5th.
One more thing that might help is the moon in chapter 3. Ebenezer thinks there's plenty of moonlight but David says there is none, and if Ebenezer isn't talking total nonsense (a definite possibility, mind), the most likely explanation is that the moon is reasonably near the full but it's cloudy (David also says there's no starlight). Helpfully, timeanddate.com also gives phases of the moon; there was a full moon on 29 May and the following half moon was 5 June, so this would argue for an earlier date.
While I don't think we can be exactly sure, my best estimate for the date of the book's opening is therefore Monday 3 June.
Right, now let's look at Part III.
Here we have a wealth of dates—three whole numbers—and the only problem is that they're blatantly incompatible. The first day after David and Alan leave Balquhidder, when they sleep at Strathire, is 21 August, and David's conversation with Mr Rankeillor at Queensferry is 24 August, and yet these events are definitely four days apart, not three (Strathire, Uam Var, Allan Water/Stirling, Limekilns and Queensferry are all on different days).
Can this be resolved using the Sabbatarian argument?
No! Trying to work out the Sundays makes it even worse! 25 August 1751 was a Sunday, and depending on which of the contradictory dates we listen to this is either the day of David's meeting with Rankeillor or the next day, the last day of the book's action. Neither of those days makes much sense as a Sunday: on the first Rankeillor is doing his legal business—and before meeting him David describes early morning in Queensferry, the town waking up and beginning to go about its business, but not apparently to church—and on the second Rankeillor sends David to the bank in Edinburgh to get money to help Alan escape the country. I think if we have to choose, the second is more implausible—the bank just wouldn't be open on a Sunday, whereas Rankeillor might be willing to have an informal legal chat on a day when he wouldn't normally be working—but I don't like it.
Here we must also return to the problem of the 'beginning of July' being on the 8th and 'early in July' on the 14th. With the dates worked out above, the stay in Balquhidder lasts one day less than a month (21 July to 20 August; or to 19 August if we take the earlier, more problematic set of dates for Part III), and we know it's less than a month. This leaves no room to make previous events earlier—whether by supposing that 27 June is actually the day after the shipwreck, or by any other means. Therefore I think our only option at this point is to suppose that those 'beginning' and 'early' references were approximate and ignore them.
Two historical clues allow us to date the in-universe composition of the book. David refers in chapter 7 to the American War of Independence and 'the formation of the United States'; it's therefore certainly after the US declared independence, in 1776, and the definiteness of that latter statement means it's most probably after they won the war, in 1783. In chapter 23 he refers to Charles Edward Stuart in the present tense, implying that he's still alive; Charles died in January 1788. This dates the writing of Kidnapped fairly precisely to the mid-1780s, when David would be in his early fifties.
As for the backstory…
Alexander had grown-up-looking handwriting when Ebenezer was five, but learnt to read no sooner than Ebenezer (though the second fact comes only from Ebenezer's not necessarily reliable statement). I would estimate the age gap between them at four or five years. Ebenezer's being between fifty and seventy when David first meets him puts his date of birth sometime in the 1680s or 1690s. The earlier end of that range would make Alexander an unusually (though not implausibly) old first-time dad to David, born in 1733 or 1734; and Ebenezer's rash running off to join the Jacobites in the '15 seems like the behaviour of a very young man, so I would put Ebenezer's date of birth in the mid-late 1690s and Alexander's a few years earlier.
The latest possible date for the Grace affair, which came to a head in August some time before Grace and Alexander's marriage, would be the next year but one before David's birth in March, i.e. 1731 or 1732 depending on edition. The earliest possible date would presumably be 1716. Mr Rankeillor's statement that Ebenezer has been in charge at Shaws for 'a quarter of a century' if interpreted literally would put it comfortably in the middle of that range in 1726; it's clearly not a literally exact statement, but is as good an estimate as we get, and it corresponds fairly well with the other clues available. David guesses in chapter 3 that his room at Shaws has been neglected for ten or twenty years; presumably Ebenezer didn't make an immediate start on turning the house into a ruin, and it can't have been fewer years than David's age anyway. It would put the brothers in their late twenties-early thirties, and I think this also corresponds with Rankeillor's statement that it happened 'the year I came from college'; he would then be in his early twenties, and his being a few years younger than Ebenezer accords well with his description of his own envy of the handsome, dashing young Ebenezer.
David's date of birth is either 12 March 1733 or 12 March 1734 depending on the edition—though this contradicts his stated age in chapter 1, so in the editions where his age is given as sixteen you could argue that his date of birth should be 12 March 1735.
The only indication of Alan's age is his description in the government bill as 'thirty-five or thereby'. Historically, Allan Breck was about thirty at the time of the Appin murder; but that description is otherwise fairly closely based on real historical ones that describe him as about thirty, so I think Stevenson made a deliberate decision to make him five years older. Also the wording presumably came from James of the Glens, who would know exactly how old Alan is. This puts Alan's date of birth around 1716. I don't think anything else about Alan's backstory can be dated precisely, other than the obvious occurrence of the '45 in '45.
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Date: May. 13th, 2024 06:33 pm (UTC)So cool and interesting to read!
It reminds me of the Great Game. (I mean in the practice, in Holmes fandom, of supposing that since Holmes and Watson are clearly real people, then any inconsistencies in Watson's account of his own life cannot be mistakes, but must have some interesting explanation behind them--in the slash part of fandom, usually that he is fudging details to hide his relationship with Holmes. It makes for some great fic! So I can't help reading your details of Kidnapped timeline inconsistencies with the same fic-prompt-generating mindset :D )
the man with the financially flexible English
:D
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Date: May. 18th, 2024 06:50 am (UTC)