Fox

Fine, to be going on with: Fancy, Henry Every, Adventure Galley, Kidd, Speaker, John Bowen Mocha, Robert Culliford Golden Fleece, Joseph Bannister Rising Sun, Thomas Cocklyn Bird/Wyndham Galley, Thomas Cocklyn Whydah, Sam Bellamy Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard King James, Howell Davis Ormonde, Howell Davis New King James, Howell Davis Royal Fortune (several of), Bart Roberts Fancy, Edward England King James, Edward England Flying King, Edward England Victory, John Taylor Cassandra, John Taylor Nuestra Senora del Cabo, Oliver la Buse Eagle Galley, Richard Worley Merry Christmas, Ned Low Bonetta, Major Penner I think the question of preponderance is related to the pirates' location. Pirates in the Caribbean and on the American seaboard sometimes chose sloops because of their sailing qualities and shallow draft which was useful in the various keys and inlets. However, I think it was more to do with the fact that sloops were pretty common in that area anyway. If you cross the Atlantic to the African coast, or go further and into the Indian Ocean, there were fewer sloops operating in general and more large ships such as slavers and Indiamen. The pirates in these regions followed the general trend and chose ships over sloops. I think there are two reasons for this. Firstly, it's a simple matter of what was available: in the Americas there were some ships and loads of sloops, elsewhere there were more ships than sloops. Secondly, if the merchant ships you (as a pirate) are hunting are likely to be small sloops with a couple of guns then using a large sloop with eight guns puts you at an advantage, but once you cross the Atlantic and start trying to capture large square riggers with 20 guns, your sloop starts to look a bit small and vulnerable...

Yup, the only way for a ship to disappear without trace is for everyone on board to be killed and the ship sunk, AND for all the pirates (including forced men etc) to keep their mouths shut. There may well have been incidents of that happening, but in general it was just not the way pirates operated. Mostly ships were taken, rifled for anything worth keeping, and then set free. Sometimes the crew were set free in a different ship if the pirates decided to keep theirs. At the very least, survivors from a pirate attack would have known to report it to the ship's owners or whoever employed them, and there are lots of examples of seamen just going to the first 'authorities' they find to report pirate attacks. I'm very tempted to spend an hour this evening enumerating the different sources of information on pirates, partly for my own amusement and partly to show how 'spotty' the information isn't. It used to be quite a common argument round here that "we don't really know what pirates did so we might as well make it up"...

Off the top of my head... not many at all.

And I might add that I think our information about pirates is as good or better than our information about any other comparable group.

Since you press me, Sawbridge's ship was captured by John Hoar. However, his ship's doctor, Henry Watson, wrote a long and detailed report to the EIC about the incident and his subsequent incarceration, but didn't mention the lip stitching and claimed to have been treated very couteously by the pirates, so Hamilton's in doubt again.

I haven't done any real analysis, but the proportion of large ships was much bigger than is generally reckoned. Cordingly has done an analysis of ships used in pirate attacks which shows just over half sloops, but only just under half square rigged ships. The method used by Cordingly meant that a lot of pirate vessels were omitted from the analysis, probably including some sloops or similar, but certainly missing the big ships commanded by Kidd, Every, and John Bowen, who were too early to fit his criteria; Roberts' later ships, three of Edward England's ships, two of Thomas Cocklyn's, John Taylor's Victory and the three-decker commanded by la Buse were omitted because they sailed on the wrong side of the Atlantic (or indeed, not in the Atlantic at all), and Major Penner's 36-gun Bonetta because it was not recorded in an attack. The interesting thing (for me) about Cordingly's analysis is that it concentrated specifically on the area where sloops were the most common vessels afloat in general, and still failed to show an overwhelming preponderance of sloops.

The tale of it being a Scottish highlander with a broadsword comes from the report in the Boston News Letter, 23/2/1719. There is no mention at all in any of the official reports as to who actually gave the final blow to Blackbeard or with what weapon, nor any evidence to say where the Boston News Letter got its information. Even if it was a highlander who killed Blackbeard it's very unlikely that he was using a sword as pictured. The newspaper report only says it was a "broadsword", which could be one of several things, including a naval issue broadsword. Sailors in the Royal Navy did not provide their own weapons, so it's far more likely to have been a naval issue sword rather than a Scottish claybeg.

Bear in mind that the figures relate to the number of attacks in which gold was taken, not the amount of gold. For example several of those cases involved the theft of a few ounces of gold dust - valuable in itself, but not as valuable as, say, the slaves that were taken at the same time.

I can't recall off the top of my head, but it wasn't Every. Hamilton was actually mixed up indirectly in Every's story. When the Mogul Aurangzeb heard about Every's capture of the Gang i Sawai he took resprisals against the East India Company and imprisoned the EIC staff at Surat in their own factory (headquarters/warehouse) for several months. Hamilton was not actually an employee of the Company, but got swept up with every other Englishman and imprisoned with them. Samuel Annesley, the EIC factor in Surat and senior man during their incarceration had terrible trouble with Hamilton and his letters are full of complaints about him.

Editorial note: I wonder how accurate this account is. Every and his men were anchored of 'prim' (or Liparan, or Bob's Key, or Perim these days) for about seven weeks altogether, so would have had time to dig a ninety foot well through hard rock, and they certainly had the manpower available. However, they were lying there waiting for the Pilgrim Fleet from Mocha to pass, and were daily expecting it, so whether they would have bothered to dig that deep is questionable. Of course, they needed to maintain their stocks of fresh water, but there were other sources available. Either way, Every did not go to St. Mary's Island, did not capture Sawbridge's ship, did torture people on the Gunsway, and didn't take a young Mogul woman or her servants on his ship...

Up to a point I agree, but I think that generalising that they're all bad is as bad as generalising that they're all good as far as reference material is concerned. Taking this picture as an example. It was drawn 18 years after Blackbeard's death, and it is most probable that the artise never saw Blackbeard in the flesh. If he had, the time lapse would have much the same effect as him never having seen him anyway. But, he was working in London, which at the time was the biggest sea port in the English speaking world, so to suggest that he was unfamiliar with the appearance of seamen of the time is absurd. To use this picture to determine how many braids Blackbeard had in his beard would be wrong, but you could certainly use it to show, say, that seamen of the 1730s wore trousers that ended just above the ankle or (as in Mission's original post) thaty not all shoes had square toes. Could he have done? Yes. Would he have done? Unlikely. Trousers were essentially work-wear, not fashion, and in the written record at least (including such catch-all sources as wills and inventories) trousers appear significantly less often than breeches. A surgeon was not a man who would have worn trousers as part of his work-wear, and he certainly wouldn't have worn them for fashion's sake. He might have worn them from necessity I suppose, but if you're talking about wearing them for your surgeon portrayal then you're venturing into the realms of making up stories to excuse inappropriate kit.

You're welcome Laura. You're quite right Mission, 88 attacks for the whole of the 1690-1730 period is only a fraction. One problem was that I only included attacks where I was able to garner enough detail to make it worthwhile. Largely these detailed references were taken from newspaper notices and trial indictments. There are a lot of other attacks where we can surmise what was, or might have been, taken, but don't know with enough certainty to include in the table. For example, in theory pirates might have taken provisions, clothing, and ship's equipment from every ship they captured, but we can see that they did not. I therefore felt it would be misleading to include 'probables'. However, it is worth bearing in mind the limitations of such an approach. For example, in the summer of 1720 Roberts' company took at least 41 vessels off the Newfoundland coast, at least half of which were fishing vessels. The percentages in the table would be considerably different if Iknew rather than guessed that the booty from most of those ships consisted of provisions, clothing, ship's equipment, fish, and small amounts of valuables or cash. If it helps any, all of the major cash-carrying prizes taken by pirates in that period are included in the table, so although it's quite probable that some prizes not included were carrying gold dust or coined money, they were certainly carrying other commodities too. If all the omitted attacks could be included they probably wouldn't skew the end findings all that much, and if they did it would most likely be in favour of personal and professional necessities, and tradable goods.

Navy, privateers, merchant seamen... They appear in wills a lot.

There are plenty of good references around (see sources below). I did an analysis a while back of the various types of plunder mentioned in accounts of 88 pirate attacks from 1690-1726. Various limitations of the evidence means that the figures given in the table below relate to the number of attacks resulting in the theft of a particular commodity, not the amount or value of that commodity. Figures in the "Total" column are not the sum of figures in the preceding columns, because in many cases more than one commodity was taken in a single attack: for example, if an attack involved the theft of both clothing and food then it would be counted once in each of the "clothing" and "provisions" columns, but only once in the "Total" column. Sources: Boston News Letter, 11/8/1718, 18/8/1718, 22/8/1720, 29/8/1720, 21/11/1720, 23/4/1724, 7/5/1724; Daily Courant, 15/11/1717, 31/8/1720, 21/3/1722; Boston Gazette, 4/5/1724; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 22/12/1716, 27/12/1718, 31/8/1723; Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post, 5/10/1717, 14/12/1717; Post Boy, 31/7/1718; American Weekly Mercury, 17/3/1720; London Journal, 2/8/1720, 10/8/1723, 5/10/1723; Daily Post, 20/1/1721, 22/6/1721; Dublin Mercury, 21/2/1724; Evening Post, 29/8/1724; Tryal of John Quelch, pp. 2-4; Tryals of Thirty-Six Persons, p. 175; CO 37/10, ff. 35, 36, 168; Tryals of John Rackham, pp. 18, 21, 49); HCA 1/55 ff. 54, 76; Tryal of Captain Kidd, p. 40; Trials of Eight Persons, pp. 3, 9, 24-25; Tryals of Sixteen Persons, p. 4; Johnson, General History, pp. 67, 71, 74, 75,76, 130, 298, 399; Jameson, Privateering and Piracy; pp. 170, 190-191, 206, 208, 210, 337, 340, 373-4, 379, 380; Proceedings on the King’s Commission, p. 5; At a Court Held at Williamsburg, 15/8/1728 HCA 1/99; At a Court of Admiralty held at Williamsburg 14/8/1729, HCA 1/99; Tryals of Stede Bonnet, pp. 7, 21; At a Court of Admiralty held at Nassau, 11/10/1722, CO 23/1 f. 32; The Humble Petition of Francis Sittwell, CO 28/15, f. 390

1. Presumably the artist wanted to make it clear he was a seaman so put him in trousers. 2. I'm pretty sure it's a firearm of some description, call it a musketoon if you like. It's pretty crude, but all the elements are there: there is a distinction between the barrel and the stock, there is something resembling a lock in the right place, and there are definite lines of a shoulder rest at the bottom end.

Yes it is. Admiralty slop contract specs specifically call for round toed shoes.

I wonder if this is a land-based v. maritime myth. Pictures of pockets on sailors' clothes turn up very frequently from the 16th century onwards, and it has been suggested numerous times that sailors invented pockets. I can't prove that statement but the alternative to a pocket is some kind of external pouch or bag which would be potentially fatal in the working environment of a ship, so it makes sense. By the time of the 1706 slop contracts the jacket, ticking waistcoat, and all three types of breeches were specified as having 2-3 pockets. However, military reenactors can be a little blinkered to maritime sources on occasion.

They're by Thomas Rowlandson, published 1799.

Can easily do you images from the second half of the 18th century if that's any good? GAoP images may take a little longer...

Ah, I didn't realise it was a reenactor myth...

Is that all that surprising? There are pictures of 16th century seamen with pockets...

Must've belonged to a fisherman, it's got herringbone...

Must've belonged to a fisherman, it's got herringbone...

Mrs F's new website is now up and running. http://www.tamfoxstays.co.uk/ (and if you forget the address you can always find it by clicking on the advert on the Pub's front page - thanks Stynky!)

Actually, a quick perusal of the OED forces a small rethink. Roger, meaning a rogue - specifically a begger who pretends an Oxford or Cambridge education - was used in 1536. There is only one reference in the OED, so although the term predates the GAoP it may have fallen from usage. Also, the specific type of beggar implied doesn't accord with a pirate usage. Old Roger, meaning the Devil, is first used in print in 1725, but was probably in usage before that time. So, "Johnny Rogers" remains the only period explanation, but "Old Roger" the Devil is also possible.