Fox

That would be David Rickman, artist and clothing historian who, whether you agree with his conclusions or not, has certainly done more original research into pirate (and other historical) clothing that all but a few other people, and who thus probably deserves to be called by his proper name. And when you say "far from perfect", I presume that what you actually mean is that it doesn't accord with your own opinions - which is not the same thing at all. I don't agree with all of the interpretations on the Konstam/Rickman book, not by a long way, but I struggle to find anything proveably 'wrong' with the stuff I've seen.

For sale, a Cold Steel 18th century small sword. These are £300+ new. Some slight marks on scabbard (see photo). Asking £190 (including postage). Anyone who's ever handled one of these will tell you what a beautiful sword it is. When they first came out there was a review that said "This isn't a replica sword. This is a sword." That about sums it up. Also, is makes a Zorro movie-style swishing noise when you swing it through the air...

Before I get accused of racism, let me say that I have no axe to grind regarding black pirates. Undoubtedly there were some free black pirates who were valued members of the company, bore arms, and shared in the plunder. But now we've got that out of the way, I'm going to question the 'officer' status of both John Julian and Caesar. The sum of evidence that Caesar was an officer is that he was apparently the one entrusted to blow up the Revenge in the event of Blackbeard's defeat. There's no evidence that I recall that he was an officer - that is, had command over other pirates in the company - or even that he wasn't a slave like the rest of the black men on Blackbeard's ship. The fact that he and a handful of other black men were still aboard at the time of the final battle suggests that they may have been more highly respected than the ones Blackbeard and his company sold, but it might just mean that they were the ones owned by other members of the company also still aboard. John Julian's 'officer' status is also far from clear. He is described somewhere as the Whydah's pilot, but the word 'pilot' had two distinct meanings in the GAoP. It could refer to the officer in charge of navigation, and this is the sense in which it is usually applied to John Julian, but it is important to note that Ken Kinkor is John Julian's greatest champion, and coincidentally the author most strongly connected with the idea of pirate racial tolerance. On the other hand, 'pilot' could also mean a local expert who had the task of navigating a ship in a particular locale, like a modern port pilot does, rather than an officer with any actual authority. Now, in the trial of the Whydah survivors it was specifically testified that John Julian was pilot because he was born at Cape Cod and knew those waters, which suggests that he was a pilot in the local temporary sense rather than a permanent ship's officer.

These things get around quickly don't they! That's a c+p of Cuisto Mako's post on this very forum from 9 May: http://pyracy.com/index.php?/topic/14147-interesting-period-descriptions/page__st__40

The thing with African or other black 'pirates' is that in many cases it's impossible to tell whether they were actually pirates or were kept as slaves on board a pirate ship - if you appreciate the difference. For example, much has been made of the fact that when Blackbeard left Topsail inlet on the Revenge he had a 'crew' consisting of 40 white men and 60 black men. In fact, though, a variety of sources make it clear that the black men were slaves in every sense of the word. I don't recall any definite evidence one way or another regarding the status of the black men in Roberts crew, except that many of them did not speak English, so it's unlikely that they were fully integrated into the predominantly Anglophone company.

The big problem with all the stuff in this illustration is that nobody seems to know where the illustration came from...

For what it's worth, Marcus Rediker's analysis of pirate nationalities is probably the best you're going to get. He admits it's not perfect, but it is based on a range of sources from 1715-1725 which list pirates' nationalities. He reckoned, during that period: English - 47.4% Irish - 9.8% Scottish - 6.3% Welsh - 4% "American" (including West Indies) - approx 25% Other (Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish, Belgian, Swedish, African) - 6.9%

Lookg back I'm sure we'd have done it differently if we'd thought, but the trouble (or one of them) with the pirate nationalities thread is that it was never classified by time period. Not all of the names listed in it are from the GAoP.

I doubt anyone will ever find out, since 200 year old hard tack would be too valuable to eat. However, I suspect that it would probably taste much the same after 200 years as it does after 2 years. I have a few pieces of ten year old hard tack which I use for education work, and which is just as edible now as it was when I made it. Since the very old surviving hard-tack looks the same as it did when it was fresh baked, I imagine that it tastes much the same too. If it survives going mouldy in the first month it'd probably last forever.

See my quote from Cesar de Saussure, above. If the hard tack you ate was tasteless, impervious to liquid, and too hard for someone with healthy teeth to eat, then it probably wasn't right.

Yes

If you want to talk about actual tactics rather than theoretical ranges, then a lot of accounts of combat involving pirate ships talks about broadsides being fired 'within pistol shot', that is to say, less than 50 metres or so.

Fly was a pirate that operated at the same time as some of Low's company, but was he really a 'member of' the early 18th century pirate frenzy? It's a rhetorical question really. The point I'm trying to make is that what is important about the 'Golden Age' of piracy is not so much when it was, as what it was.

Ah, but what makes Fly a 'Golden Age' pirate? What makes him different from, say, Richard Coyle, who was hanged in 1738? La Buse was certainly a Golden Age pirate, but since he was basically insignificant after Taylor's departure from the Indian Ocean in 1722, is he enough to justify the subsequent period being labelled the GAoP?

I don't think it was from Hamilton, I'm pretty sure it was Spriggs' crew involved in the incident, and they never went near the East Indies where Hamilton was. [Edit] It was Spriggs, and it's from Johnson: "Within two or three days they took a ship coming from Rhode Island to St. Christophers, loaden with provisions and some horses and rid them about the deck backwards and forwards a full gallop, like madmen at Newmarket, cursing, swearing, and hallowing each other at such a rate, that made the creatures wild. At length two or three of them throwing their riders, they fell upon the ship's crew, and whipp'd, cut, and beat them in a barbarous manner, telling them, it was for bringing horses without boots and spurs, for want of which they were not able to ride like gentlemen." I'm pretty sure Johnson got the story from a newspaper, but it's late so I'm not going to look now [/edit]

No, but you did say: (And in case anyone is in doubt, those dates are real, you can check 'em)

The reason, I suspect, that nobody can really reach a consensus over when the Golden Age of Piracy (hereafter GAoP) was, is that there's no real consensus over what the GAoP was. Usually, if pressed for a reason, people say something inane and meaningless about the number of pirates active, or the 'best known' pirates being around. To be honest, they might as well say 'when pirates wore tricorns'. Accepting for a moment that we're talking about Anglo-American pirates (as the Anglo-American authors who tend to use the phrase generally are), then the number of pirates active is not the best definition, because there were probably just as many, possibly more, English pirates active in the second decade of the 17th century as there were in the early 18th century. Neither does it really make sense, to me, to define it by the best known pirates being active because then there are problems with cause and effect: is it the GAoP because those pirates were active, or are they the best known because they were active in the GAoP? At it's widest the GAoP is sometimes defined as beginning with Drake and co in the late 16th century and ending with Blackbeard and co in the early 18th. At its narrowest, the GAoP is defined as encapsulating only the decade from around 1715-1725. Whatever the time-frame, all are agreed at the the GAoP includes those pirates active in the 17teens and early 1720s, so in order to define the GAoP I think it's best to start by examining what it was about that period that was different from other periods when piracy flourished. If we can establish what marks those years out then we can see how far those criteria can be stretched in either direction. ("Truly, you have a dizzying intellect." "Wait till I get going!") So, just for the fun of it, here's a few considerations which I think mark the GAoP apart from other periods when piracy flourished. 1. Pirates of the GAoP identified themselves as pirates. This sounds banal, but it isn't. The buccaneers of Morgan's day, for example, made every effort to appear to be legitimate privateers - they would take commissions from foreign powers, even forge them if they had to, but they generally made sure that there was some veneer of legitimacy. So too did many or most of the pirates active in the early 19th century, manyof whom allied themselves with the South American states in rebellion against the Spanish Empire. But, people like Bart Roberts, Blackbeard and Edward Low made no pretence about being pirates. 2. Pirates of the GAoP operated in bands, loosely connected to one another, forming a pirate 'community'. They were not the first or the last to do it, but the scale of it was truly staggering. Rediker (love him or hate him) has shown quite conclusively that around 90% of all the Anglophone pirate companies active in 1715-1725 belonged to one of two bands who all, to some extent, knew one another. Moreover, it is clear they felt a genuine bond existed between them: Blackbeard burned all Boston ships he came across because of Bostonians hanging men from Bellamy's crew; Roberts attacked the Leeward Islands because they were holding some pirates in prison there; Spriggs vowed to hunt down Walter Moore for finishing off Lowther's company, etc. 3. Pirates of the GAoP presented a major and genuine threat to legitimate trade. This is partly linked to the cohesion of the pirate community mentioned in point 2, and partly to do with numbers, but during the GAoP pirates were more of a threat to legitimate shipping than any other danger of the sea. More anti-pirate legislation was enacted between 1715 and 1725 than at any other time, and pirate activity made a definite impact on maritime insurance rates. 4. Pirates of the GAoP were not tied to any particular port or area for their sustenance. Some pirates of the GAoP remained at sea for years at a time without putting into the same port more than once or twice. If we take Anstis' company as an example, some of them had been at sea from 1718 to 1723 without ever having a safe base. Conversely... 5. Pirates of the GAoP established bases which were more or less entirely populated by pirates or their supporters. Principally I'm thinking of New Providence here, which from 1716-1718 was held by pirates. Anyone who didn't like living with pirates left. So, IF we accept those things as being defining characteristics of the GAoP (and of course, others may not agree with me) then I think we can discount the buccaneers since they, at best, meet only criterion 2. The pirates of the early 17th century meet 1 and 2, and maybe 3. Most pirates of the 19th century meet only criteria 1 or 5. Pirates of the 16th century meet none of the criteria. However, many of the pirates involved in the 'Pirate Round' of the 1690s meet all five criteria, and for that reason I think that they should be included in any definition of the GAoP. Moreover, many people, like William, generalise and say late17th-early18th centuries. That being the case, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we can actually pinpoint the dates of the beginning and end of the GAoP. 13 October 1691. The Bachelor's Delight, commanded by George Raynor, arrived at St. Mary's Island, Madagascar, and became the first pirate ship to resupply at Adam Baldridge's trading post which had been set up in May 1691. Baldridge's trading post enabled pirates sailing from America and England to remain in the Indian Ocean and plunder shipping in the Red Sea indefinitely, until they'd made enough money to make it worth going home and retiring from piracy: Robert Culliford stayed in the East for nearly ten years. Because they no longer needed to return home between cruises the Indian Ocean pirates were able to throw off the pretence of being privateers, and their perpetual presence in the Eastern seas not only made it extremely dangerous for legitimate shipping, but also aroused the ire of the Indian merchants against English-speaking traders to the point that they nearly ejected them from India twice in the 1690s. Baldridge's trading post also offered a communal base where pirates from different crews could meet and mix, and so a community was formed: John Ireland, for example, sailed under or alongside Henry Every, Thomas Tew, Robert Culliford and Richard Shivers - four of the most prolific pirates of the 17th century - and spent some time at Baldridge's place. The end of the GAoP is a little harder to define so precisely, but if pressed I'd say the beginning of the end occurred on 9 February 1722, on which day Bartholomew Roberts band was destroyed by HMS Swallow. Certainly, there were pirates active after that date, and in fact the Lowther-Low group hadn't even begin operations then, but the Lowther-Low group of pirates never really made the same impact on trade that the earlier pirates had, and there was never more than three of them operating at once. The last pirates active with any link to the great days of Roberts and Blackbeard were the company commanded by John Philips (who had sailed under Anstis) and his quartermaster John Rose Archer (who had sailed under Blackbeard). Their effective end came at about 11.15 am, 18 April 1724. Is that precise enough for you William? Yours etc, J.R. Moore. Um, I mean, Foxe. (And, FWIW, there were more pirate captains active in the GAoP who are not covered by Johnson than there were whom he did cover.)

Possibly, except that the pirates being hanged in 1725 that I quoted above were from John Gow's company, and he has a chapter in the GHoP. I can't remember if there's a thread already about defining the 'Golden Age' here...

William Fly and his company were hanged in 1726, and John Upton went to the gallows in 1728 eating a biscuit. And there was a pirate crew hanged in Williamsburg VA in 1729. There were also lots of pirate executions outside the GAoP If memory serves a bunch of people were hanged for piracy in London in the 1730s too.

No, only the executions and the person crushed to death are from the hanging, the others are just 'accidental' deaths also recorded in the same paper. I believe 'overlaid' is knocked down by a horse or wagon.

Not strictly on-topic, but this amused me. It was customary for a number of newspaper to print summaries of the births and deaths that occurred, and this one made me chuckle: "Drowned accidentally in the River of Thames, 3 Executed, 3 [all pirates] Kill'd, 2 Overlaid, 1 Press'd to death by the Crowd of People, at the Execution of the Pirates, 1" From Parker's Penny Post, 18 June, 1725.

I'm not deliberately witholding anything relating to clothing, but there's so much of it I can't recall what I've posted and what I haven't, let alone what's been posted by other people. I have dozens of probate inventories, for example, but I haven't a clue which ones I've transcribed for the forum. So I'm happy to share the info when it's relevant to a question or point that's been raised, but I couldn't possibly post everything I haven't already shared, even if I wanted to.

Accepting that this may not be the best place to discuss the authorship debate, I'd like to add a little to BP's post. (Besides, it's a long time since the question came up...) When Moore put forward his theory that Defoe wrote the GHP in the 1930s it was widely accepted for two reasons: 1. Moore was the world's leading Defoe scholar (so he must have been right, huh?), and 2. there was no other candidate proposed. However, Moore's theory was entirely based on his the fact that he could instinctively recognise Defoe's hand, and the GHP showed similarities with other works that Moore believed were written by Defoe. He also produced some circumstantial evidence that supported his idea, such as the fact that Defoe worked for John Applebee, who specialised in true crime publications and apparently had special access to criminals locked up in Newgate. Furbank and Owens, in the 1980s, debunked the Defoe idea, by pointing out that it was Moore himself who had identified Defoe as the author of works with similarities to the GHP, and that in fact the same similarities in style could be found in books known to have been written by other authors - ie, those styles highlighted by Moore should be considered traits of early 18th century writers in general, not Defoe specifically. More recently, they have published papers debunking the idea that Defoe worked for Applebee - another "fact" that Moore first hypothesised. To that I would add that whether Defoe worked for Applebee or not is irrelevant since anyone had access to Newgate if they wanted it and most pirates were incarcerated in the Marshalsea prison anyway. Bialuschewski, when readdressing the question of the GHP, pointed out that not one single piece of documentary evidence links Defoe with the GHP, but that three independent documents name Mist: the entry in the Stationer's Register, a note from the Secretary of State, and a satire linking Mist and "Johnson". He also pointed out lots of circumstantial evidence that supports the Mist theory, such as Mist being a sailor and, more pertinently, Mist being a Jacobite. In several places the GHP contains subtle Jacobite references, and Defoe was NOT a Jacobite. Also, several references to the GHP in Mist's newspaper. Since Bialuschewski published, yours truly uncovered a fourth piece of documentary evidence: when the GHP was published it was serialised in several newspapers, without the permission of the author. One, Parker's London News, prefaced the first installment with an apology to "Mr Mist" for stealing his work. Thus, four pieces of documentary evidence name Mist as the man behind the book, and not a single other document has been found suggesting anybody else, including Defoe. So here's my question: If, in 1930, John Robert Moore had published a theory that Mist was the author of the GHP, based on four independent pieces of documentary evidence, plus a whole load of circumstantial evidence, what would have been the reaction if Bialuschwski (or anyone else) had later published a paper saying it was Defoe, based on nothing more than their instinct? Would we even be having this debate? I doubt it.

Grymm, as a moderator I'm going to have to come down on this, sorry. In this day and age it does the forum no good to be seen to condone smoking, and the illustration of smoking paraphernalia is definitely verboten. I shall therefore have to confiscate your alligator thingumy and send you to the back of the class.

They didn't really care who wrote the GHP per se, but they did care about Nathaniel Mist's activities since he was a notorious Jacobite subversive, and thus kept track of his activities as far as they could. Also, all published works are entered in the Stationer's Register - much like in America all new books today get entered in the Library of Congress catalogue - and in the case of the GHP it was entered by Mist's foreman. Yes and no. In 1724, it was known that Johnson was a pen name, but there was no authorship question, it was public knowledge it was Mist.