why bother with the ingot?


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Posted by Ed Kiser on October 11, 2012 at 18:32:18 user Kisered.

In Pigeon Post, the purpose of their venture
was to have something of value to show
Captain Flint when he returned to Beckfoot,
hopefully something of interest that would
keep him around, rather than traipsing about
all over the world looking for something. If
that something could be shown to be right
there at home, then he would not need to be
away so much.

In their prospecting, they came upon some
quartz which glinted of some metal that they
thought was gold. Crushing and panning, they
were able to get a cocoa tin with a
considerable amount of this glittering metal.

It would seem to serve their objective if
they could just show Captain Flint that tin
of golden particles. That would prove what
was local and available, that hopefully would
negate his need to go travelling and
searching elsewhere.

But somehow, they got the idea that instead
of showing him those tiny particles of
glittering metal, they wanted to produce an
INGOT. Fear that Slater Bob had become in
cahoots with Squashy meant they could not ask
the adult professional miner how to convert
the dust into an ingot, so they resolved to
do it themselves. This resulted in the need
to produce charcoal to be used as fuel in a
furnace that would be hot enough to melt the
particles into a solid chunk and produce the
desired ingot. That was a lot of work, a lot
of night time missing out on sleep - all of
which turned out to be futile, as the
crucible fractured and the "gold" was lost
inside the furnace.

What I never understood about all this is,
why did they feel that the cocoa tin of
glittering particles was not good enough to
show Captain Flint? Why did they have to go
on to this amazing effort to convert that
into a nugget? It seems that showing him
that cocoa tin would be enough to satisfy
their objective, and a whole lot of less
work.

In the end, with the loss of the dust in the
furnace, what they wound up with was just a
little of the particles there in Captain
Flint's den, with the testing with aqua
regia. Those particles Dick brought with him
to that lab was what was shown to Captain
Flint, and he was delighted with the find, as
that was what he was looking for.

They had in that cocoa tin plenty of proof as
to what they had found. What was the purpose
of trying to perform additional steps that
required such efforts with the charcoal and
furnace cooking?

Of course, stopping with that tin of
glittering particles would have negated the
need for the last third of the book, as they
could have just stopped right there, and
simply waited for Captain Flint to return.

But why try for an ingot?

Actually, the crushing and panning were quite
unnecessary as well, as Dick had with him
several chunks of that quartz with the
glittering metal as a streak in the stone,
and Dick did show those pieces to Captain
Flint. Just his seeing those rocks would
have served their purpose, and simplified
much of the work and effort they put into
their project, an effort that in the end was
essentially a wasted struggle.

But that would have made a much shorter book,
without the cliff-hanger building up to the
climax, as shattering as that turned out to
be.

Ed Kiser, Kentucky




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