Fox

Depending on what is meant by 'man of substance', that's quite a surmise to make. Based on the inventory, he doesn't seem any better off than any other typical merchant sea-officer of the time. The cloth products, lead, and wire were almost certainly private trade goods, but that was fairly normal. The list of clothes is comparable with the inventories of many other seamen, including foremastmen and petty officers. The elephant tusks and slaves naturally wouldn't show up on any customs documents from Dartmouth as they'd have been acquired on the African coast. The cloth was probably overlooked because it was personal property rather than proper 'cargo'.

Well, they wouldn't have been Jacobites before 1688 at the earliest, but it's quite possible they were either Royalists from the civil war or Irish from the Irish revolt in the late 1640s-1650s, lots of those got transported to the colonies. They may also have been shipped as indentured servants who were treated much like slaves, but only for a fixed term.

As a navigator he would most certainly have been able to read, for two reasons. Firstly, a navigator needs to be able to read charts and write up a log, and secondly in the 17thC schooling was generally done in order: reading first, writing second, arithmetic third. In order to be able to navigate he must have had some skill at arithmetic and thus his schooling had progressed beyond reading and writing. Literacy amongst seamen (and indeed the population in general) was much higher in the GAoP that we generally credit, By the end of the 17thC most children had some basic schooling, and in some colonies it was actually enshrined in law that every child must be taught to read so that they could engage with religious and legal texts. Even lower ranking officers, like the boatswain and quartermaster, used the written word int he course of their professional duties, so virtually any advancement relied on at least some measure of practical literacy. One of the most interesting things regarding priates and literacy is that shipments of good sent to St. Mary's island in the 1690s included horn books, which are an educational aid, suggesting that pirates were teaching others to read and write, either illiterate members of their own company or possibly the Malagasy.

I'll take that as a compliment

Sed mea culpa.... I assumed the town of Lewes, Sussex. (I forgot about the other Lewes, "across the pond.") Sorry

FYI, the article that sparked this can now be read online or downloaded here: http://exeter.academia.edu/EdFox/Papers/795259/Jacobitism_and_the_Golden_Age_of_Piracy_1715-1725

Reed was originally cast to play Morgan Adams' father in Cutthroat Island, but was replaced when the producers realised that he couldn't be relied on to stay sober long enough to get his lines out.

(Possibly) true, but in this case, since we're talking about common habits amongst seamen, we're not limited to pirate-specific sources. But even limiting it to pirate-specific sources, I've always maintained that there are a lot more accounts that are largely ignored. Trials would be a good example here: one fo the questions that comes up in a lot of trials for various reasons is "And what were you doing at the time?" Answers range from sleeping and being aloft to sitting on a hatch repairing a sail. Also, many of the depositions taken before trials include really odd bits of collateral information of the kind that might include knotwork and the like. I'm not saying they didn't do it btw, but I've found no evidence that they did, and I'm always wary of assuming that 'traditions' go back to the GAoP. The French Corsairs by Lord Russell and The Defeat of James Stuart's Armada by Philip Aubrey both deal with Anglo-French maritime encounters in the Channel in the 1690s and neither of them mention a landing at Lewes in 1692. The French landing at Teignmouth in 1690 is generally reckoned to be the last time that a foreign enemy set foot on English soil, so if the landing happened at all then I suspect the date is wrong.

Oh, they certainly did that! "They hoisted upon Deck a great many half Hogsheads of Claret, and French Brandy; knock’d their Heads out, and dipp’d Canns and Bowls into them to drink out of: And in their Wantonness threw full Buckets of each sort upon one another. As soon as they had emptied what was on the Deck, they hoisted up more" From William Snelgrave's account of his time as a captive of Cocklyn's company. Sounds like my kind of party. All the surviving stuff seems to be much later, and there's very little textual evidence for what might be called "sailors' art" from the GAoP, so it's quite possible that that particular pastime was a later fad. Agreed that they must have done something to stave off the boredom, but not necessarily knotwork or scrimshaw. The quotation above shows how many pirates staved off boredom, and there are plenty of other similar accounts. The difficulty would be recognising it. Something like a pirate flag would be distinctive, but none are known to survive from the GAoP, and considering the staggering number of flags that must have existed in the period compared with the number surviving, of any type, it's hardly surprising. There are probably a number of pirates' artefacts of a more robust nature surviving, but without a complete provenance, how can we tell whether that cutlass in the museum or private collection was owned by any particular person?

Atkins' book may be slightly out of period, but he himself certainly isn't - he actually patched up a few wounded pirates with his own hands! I have no opinion either way about scents. They were around, but I don't think they were especially widespread (willing to be corrected). As for the parodying, I suspect that it depended largely on where the incident took place: the bit with the wigs above occurred at sea, so there was nobody around to see the elegant fellows and it degenerated into farce. On the other hand, when Davis, Cocklyn, and La Bouche wore those famous embroidered coats from Snelgrave's cabin they were moored up on the coast and they had hopes that the coats would impress the women ashore, so there's no farce or parody there. Trial transcripts vary in depth and scope from one page summaries to pamphlet length verbatim accounts. Although they need to be treated with caution because they represent, in effect, a life and death argument between two parties with diametrically opposed standpoints, trial accounts are a really wonderful way of hearing the pirates themselves in their own words. There are a few available online, including some in Jameson's book, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, for which there's a Google books or Gutenberg link floating around somewhere.

The wig quotation is from the account given by Captain Evans of the Greyhound to Johnson, regarding his capture by Captain Kennedy, John Martel's successor, and printed by Johnson in the appendix of volume II of the General History. Although it is not precisely identical, the bulk of the trial of pirates at Cabo Corso is also reprinted in the General History, and forms just under half the chapter on Bart Roberts. The full title of the printed version, which may help in your searches, is A Full and Exact Account, of the Tryal of all the Pyrates, lately taken by Captain OGLE, on Board the SWALLOW Man of War, on the Coast of Guinea, printed and sold by J. Roberts, in Warwick Lane, (London, 1723). It runs to 86 pages + index. It was transcribed by Mission's favourite, John Atkins, surgeon of the Swallow and register of the court.

Call me old fashioned, but I'd like to see some evidence of the bodhran being in any way a common musical instrument in the GAoP. Most experts are agreed that it entered 'traditional' music no earlier than the 19th century, but it remained pretty obscure until the Irish folk revival of the 1960s. "Old" and Irish doesn't necessarily equate to "period".

I believe they may have covered it.

One other instrument that I haven't yet seen mentioned but which can definitely be placed on a GAoP era ship is the hautbois, or oboe. Woodes Rogers had them on his circumnavigation and his musicians used them to entertain some Portuguese monks with a rendition of the English dance tune Hey Boys, Up Go We.

Slightly late I'm afraid. John Fletcher was forced to join Ned Low's crew 'because he could play upon a violin', according to testimony at his trial. He was acquitted, but that may have been because he was a boy or because he was forced, rather than for his musical ability.

Just in case anyone else is reading this thread, the event on the 24th at the MoL Docklands has been cancelled.

I've never seen any illustration of, or unambiguous textual reference to, an English seaman of the GAoP in a voyageur cap.

There were frost fairs intermittently when the Thames froze over. I have a couple of little printed slips with people's names on, the date, and some words like 'Printed on the Ice'. Basically you went to the booth, paid your ha'penny, and got a neat souvenir with your name on to show you'd been. A bit like Disneyland really.

For some reason Mission's link won't work for me, so I can't check and see if this is the same reference, but FWIW, the OED gives the following as the earliest example of 'lady's hole' in the sense of a gunner's store:

Daniel, you always ask the most interesting questions! I'm not sure that there's a right answer to any of your questions below that could be written in such a short form as a forum post, but I have a few examples for you. Edward Coxere, seventeenth-century seaman and memorialist, served in ships of various different nationalities during his career. He was sent to France in his youth to learn French, but after going to sea he also became fluent in Dutch and Spanish whilst serving on ships of those nationalities. At one point he wrote: "but still, though I had French and English, I had Dutch to learn to understand those I was withal, which I soon got". I also recall Irving Johnson saying somewhere that he had to learn the names of all the lines on the Peking in German. There were, for example, 19 different nationalities speaking ten different languages (English, Dutch, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Italian, French, Danish) on HMS Victory at Trafalgar. It's inconceivable that all the officers learned all the languages to accomodate the crew, far simpler for all of the crew to learn English. Thomas Lurting, another 17th-century seaman memorialist and a Quaker, mentions the Quakers not attending service with the rest of the crew, but holding their own private meeting: "The first thing observable was, they refused to hear the Priest..." and "it was reported in the Publick Place of Worship, that I was amongst the Quakers; at which, many of them left the Priest and his Worship, to come and see me". Interestingly, on Lurting's ship, the captain was a "Baptist Preacher". I've just been doing some research on American PoWs held at Dartmoor Prison during the War of 1812. Most of them were seamen who had been captured, but several were men who had been serving in the Royal Navy at the outbreak of hostilities and were given the choice to become PoWs rather than fight against their country. Conversely, RN recruiters made regular appearances at the prison to encourage Americans to escape captivity by joining the RN.

Embroidered corset relisted at lower silly price: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Embroidery-Corset-Stays-Reenactment-Steampunk-/330595106509?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item4cf900fecd

If you're looking for my seal of approval Adam I can only oblige you by giving it. I've only used the seam rubber 'in action' so to speak, and it did its job admirably. I'm very pleased with both fids and the seam rubber, fine pieces of work. My only criticism is that I didn't get to watch them being made by half-naked island girls.

And a plain set up as well now: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330592324029&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT

Mrs F.'s entirely hand sewn, reed-boned, and fully embroidered mid-17th - early 18th century stays now on eBay. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Textile-Art-Needlework-Corset-stays-reenactment-/330591852630?pt=UK_Artists_Self_Representing_Digital_Art_New_Media_ET&hash=item4cf8cf5856

I don't want to think about the cost of shipping barrels from Poland to the US, but Matuls can provide wood hooped casks and other coopered goods: http://www.matuls.pl/index.php?IDP=1&Lng=en&IDKategoria=9