Fox

IIRC, this was one of the images:

Um, good question. There was a long thread about it on the old Pirate Brethren board in which some artists' impressions from a French book were posted. As I recall nobody was able to ascertain how extensive the attempt was - whether it was actually a uniform or whether it was more like the RN slops. Either way, it was all info found on the net.

The French Navy started experimenting with some uniformity for foremastmen in the 1690s, and adopted uniforms for officers in the early 18th (I forget the exact year, but pre-1720. The Royal Navy had uniformed slop clothing for sale to its foremastmen from at least 1663, but it was not required for seamen to buy or wear it. Officers in the RN didn't get a uniform until 1747, though there is slim evidence of some officers on the Gibraltar station adopting an unofficial uniform of a red coat with black tape in the 1720s. I don't know exactly when flintlock mechanisms were added to ships' guns, but it was after the 1730s The earliest evidence of a wheel on an English ship is 1713. Some French ships may have had them slightly earlier.

If you want to go with a historically accurate version then you basically need to be looking at 18th century Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife.

No, however if you go in a leather tricorn and bucket boots AS a scantily clad female pirate that will be fine.

As the current and final moderator of Twill, as well as ones of its oldest inhabitants, I'd like to thank everyone for all the awesome conversations over the last thirteen years. I know I've made a few good and long-term friends here. Here's to you all. You are all Captain Twill.

There are plenty of weird foreigners in the APLH group, but I understand what you mean. Still, it might be a case of beggars not being choosers. I hope you enjoy the documents. Volume II is in the works, but other projects keep getting in the way...

Discussions of any aspect of golden age pirate history are welcome and encouraged.

The whole of the Pub is being closed down, yes. There is a thread explaining HERE.

You think we don't already?

The character of Davy Jones as seen in the PotC franchise is basically an invention of Disney with a 'traditional' name tacked on, but Disney can't own the copyright on the name, so if you use their character you might run into trouble but it you create your own personification of Jones you should be ok. However, to my knowledge, Davy Jones, the Flying Dutchman, and Fiddlers' Green are all later than the GAoP in origin. The only post-mortem superstitions which seem prevalent amongst GAoP era pirates are essentially Christian notions of Heaven and Hell.

As we count down to the last days of Captain Twill thoughts turn to the future of historical pirate discussion. Facebook is not such a good medium as Twill has been over the years, but it's unlikely to go away any time soon, so may I extend an invitation to any denizens of Twill who are not already members to join the Authentic Pirate Living History group on Facebook.

It was written by a journalist (probably)

I dispute that you've worn them, please provide three independently verified pieces of evidence.

It was ever thus. The Pub was very much the love-child of No Quarter Given which, in its own day served as a hub for those of us who liked to play pirates. I was a subscriber and occasional author for NQG, but as the digital age loomed the print magazine fell overboard. Now the tight-bottomed social media has all but replaced forums (not for the better, IMHO) as the main means of communicating with our fellows. December 30th this year will be my own 13th anniversary as a member of the Pub. They've been thirteen good years and I'm grateful for the friends I've made here. That sounds very final and sad, but I'll see most of you over on Facebook.

Dammit, no "like" button here...

Yes, there's a wide gulf between liberal teddy-bear at one end and psychopath at the other. Pirates came in at various points on the scale in between, from Edward Low who was renowned for his brutality and Charles Vane who tortured children, to Howell Davis who was well-spoken of by his contemporaries but quite definitely in it for the profit. Somewhere in the middle were men like Richard Taylor who inspired good opinions, but could also fly off the handle and beat people on little provocation. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a serious historian who thought pirates were all bloodthirsty murderers, but since you asked for 'a historian who does not believe in the liberal nature of pirates,' the fullest rebuttal of the egalitarian pirate model is probably my own doctoral thesis, which can be found HERE. If you want something shorter then Crystal Williams, 'Nascent Socialists or Resourceful Criminals? A Reconsideration of Transatlantic Piracy, 1690-1726' in Paul A. Gilje and William Pencak (eds), Pirates, Jack Tar, and Memory: New Directions in American Maritime History (Mystic, 2007) would be a good start.

Pirates in Their Own Words is available HERE (link to hardcover, but softcover and eBook are also available). I believe Baer's four-volume tome is now out of print, so inter-library loan might be the only way to get it. There are lots of different sources available, but for the lives of common pirates the two best are the trial accounts to which Mission alluded, and even better, the pre-trial examinations. Several trial accounts are freely available: Kidd's trial has been published several times, Roberts' crew's trial can be found in Johnson's GHP, and I've seen the trials of Bonnet's crew and some of Every's crew online. There are three trials in Pirates in Their Own Words, and a couple reprinted in J.F. Jameson's Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, which is now freely available online. Many printed trial accounts can be found in Baer's collection - if you can get it. Pre-trial examinations are harder to access (but totally worth the effort!). Most have never been reprinted so are only available in the original manuscripts, most of which are held in the National Archives, Kew (HCA 1/51-53) and will involve a trip there and about two weeks at least to work through them properly. Quite a few (and most of the good ones) are reprinted in Pirates in Their Own Words, and there are some from American archives in Jameson's book mentioned above. Pirates in Their Own Words, Vol. ii is in the works and will hopefully be available before the end of the year, containing newspaper and pamphlet accounts. Of course, while doing your own primary source research is the best, it's not the only way to find out about the real lives of pirates. There are a handful of decent books (and piles and piles of less-decent books) available. The most recent social history of pirates of the 'golden age' is my own doctoral thesis, which is available free of charge from THIS LINK

Privateers were an interesting conundrum for the authorities at the time of the Revolution. Britain did not recognise that the US was a state with the authority to issue letters of marque, so American privateers were often referred to as pirates. However, Britain also recognised that in reality American privateers were belligerents rather than criminals so generally treated them as prisoners of war when they captured them.

The essential difference between pirates and privateers is that privateering was legal and piracy was not, though of course it goes deeper than that. Privateers were private individuals granted a commission, or "letter of marque" by a state, allowing them to prey on the commercial shipping of an enemy state during wartime. The three key points to bear in mind are: 1. They were legally sanctioned and even in wartime that legality was, on the whole, respected by other nations. 2. They limited their attacks to shipping specified by their commission. If they had, say, an English commission to attack French shipping then they confined themselves to only attacking French shipping. Exceeding the terms of their commission by, say, attacking a Dutch or other English ship, would have been piracy. (It was not unknown for privateers to do exactly that, but at that point they became pirates rather than privateers.) 3. They operated only during wartime. Mostly... A government could also grant a "letter of reprisal" to someone whose goods had been seized by another nation during peacetime, allowing them, legally, to attack shipping of that nation in order to gain restitution, but that was much less common than privateering with a letter of marque during wartime. Once a privateer had captured an enemy ship it then had to be taken to a friendly port where a Court of Vice-Admiralty would assess that it had been taken legally and "condemn" it, allowing the ship and cargo to be sold. The profits from the sale would then be divided between the crew of the privateer and the investors who had fitted out the privateer in the first place. Pirates, by contrast, had no legal authority and pretty much robbed whoever they liked, then kept all of the profits for themselves. So, they were similar to privateers inasmuch as they used violence to capture ships at sea for profit, but very different in other respects. There are loads of good books out there (and many many rubbish ones). I suspect a good one for you to start with would be David J. Starkey (ed.), Pirates and Privateers: New Perspectives on the War on Trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Exeter, 1997). If you want a much fuller list, I posted a fairly comprehensive bibliography HERE

That would be to whomever financed their shipping, but I must confess I don't know specifically who that was.

The amount varied from ship to ship, some going to the investors and some to the crew. Sometimes the profits were shared out after the investors had claimed their expenses, sometimes before. Often, members of the crew were also investors so took a slice from both pots. In general terms I'd say a 50/50 split between investors and crew was about usual, but variations were common. In the 17th century the crown, via the Admiralty, took a flat 10% of the profit before it was divvied up, but by 1716 that practice had ended. You mention Crown consortia, but I can't think off the top of my head of any monarch, at least any English/British monarch, who invested in privateering.

Sorry to disappoint. My stance is based on decades of my own original research, largely unswayed by the models of other historians, so while it is not immutable it is likely to take some effort to shake. Reverse that example. If a brigand who is more at home attacking cities and towns and fighting on land decides to take a ship when the opportunity presents itself, does he magically change his hat and become a pirate? Your argument, so far as I can make out, seems to be that we should consider the general rather than the details. In which case the question about Morgan (since he seems to be the example of choice) should be, was Morgan more at home fighting on land against towns or at sea? I'm troubled by your apparent belief that motivation makes a pirate. Yes, pirates sought wealth and social advancement, but so too did many other people - it doesn't make them pirates. Privateers who never broke a law in their life sought wealth and social advancement. The difference between an illegitimate pirate and a legitimate non-pirate lies in the legality of their actions. Can you point to any incident in which Morgan knowingly and willingly broke the the law? Yes, his motivation was similar to or the same as pirates, but if he sought on the whole to remain just the right side of legitimate then he wasn't a pirate. Pity. Historians recognise that it is through debate and discourse that study moves forward. Not at all, there have been several excellent discussions on 17th century buccaneers, and pirates from multiple periods here, though I will acknowledge that the general discussion is weighted more towards the 1690-1730 period.If you go back over the years (I don't necessarily recommend it, you can take my word for it) there was once a tendency here to conflate buccaneers with pirates of the period, and indeed pirates of other periods, until slowly but surely the realisation came over the course of several years and research by numerous people with varying degrees of academia in their background, that despite some similarities between pirates and buccaneers, there were significant social, legal, and operational differences between the two groups, enough for us to consider them different. So, while discussion on any or all of the various groups who get referred to as 'pirates' is welcome here, the idea that they were all basically the same is one that the users of this forum have long since discarded as an over-simplified error. Let me illustrate, if I may. In your original post you stated that you weren't looking for information on Barbary pirates, and you set a specific time-frame on your research. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that that is because you've identified enough differences between the Barbary pirates and the Euro-American pirates to consider them different (correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption). If someone brought a Barbary pirate into the discussion you might say something like, "Ah, but what applies to Barbary pirates doesn't necessarily apply to Atlantic pirates..." or words to that effect, am I right? Well, by the same process, we have come to the general conclusion on the whole that what applies to the Panama-raiding island-hopping Caribbean buccaneers of the second half of the seventeenth century doesn't necessarily apply to the deep-water pirates of the same period or the periods either side. Similarities, yes, but enough significant differences to consider them separately. Quibble away! I have never objected to quibbling. Every time my convictions are questioned it forces me to think about them in a new light, to reconsider them. By doing so my conclusions are either altered in the light of new ideas or strengthened by the effort, but either way I gain, as does anyone reading the discourse. By and large my conclusions are my own - even those not original to me have been formed by my own researches, if you see what I mean, and they have been formed over years, decades, of research and debate. They take some shaking, therefore, but as I said earlier, are not immutable. I think most average Joes, neophytes and hobbyists are already very happy to accept the conflation - see for example the pirates' code, laid down by Morgan and Bartholomew. Even amongst serious scholars the distinction is often unrealised, which is not surprising considering the relative newness of the idea. Although scholars have often concentrated on a narrow slice of the history (as they do in other periods and subjects), it is only in the last few years that the gulf of difference between, say, Morgan and Blackbeard, has received more attention than the peninsula of similarity. I am still very keen to know more though about your methodology for quantifying pirate activity to the degree that you can graph it in an reliable or meaningful way, how are you doing that? (Genuine question, not a snipe)

To be honest, the details of individual buccaneers is a bit outside my area of expertise, perhaps somebody else can answer. What I will say is that if he followed the usual pattern of buccaneering practice then he will most likely have sought a commission from somewhere.