Fox

I've read that in several 'history' books, but I think it's a mistake. From Richard Lazenby's account: The Quartermaster told me that if ever he knew knew me off the deck in time of action he would shoot me through the head. I told him he had better do it at once than keep me in misery there, at which he begged the Captain to correct me, he being lame of his hands. According to his desire Captain Taylor fetched his cane and began to belabour me... Taylor's QM was disabled in his hands, not Taylor himself.

Davis was on the other side of the Atlantic at this time, and Vane didn't have a big enough ship. I've been digging deep and from the letters of Woodes Rogers and a newspaper article or two, I'm 99% sure that it was William Moody in the big ship, possibly with Edward England and Captain Thompson commanding the consorts.

Who was hanging around the Virgin Islands in early 1719 with a 30 gun ship and two 8-10 gun consort vessels? (Accepting that the ships were seen from a distance so the tally of guns might not be exactly accurate)

I've never read it, but it sounds very interesting. It's going on the list. Also worth a read, though perhaps a little dated these days, is G.F. Dow's Everyday Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Ooh. Is Cocklyn actually called Jeremiah in the original source? I've been pondering this recently - he's always known as Thomas Cocklyn but the only source I'm aware of that gives his first name calls him Jeremiah - this would be a second source. Incidentally, the same is true of "John" Taylor, who is only given a forename in one primary source that I'm aware of, which calls him Richard Taylor. "John" appears to be a modern appellation, from whence I know not.

When the first PotC came out I got daily emails from people asking how historically accurate it was. My stock reply was "I don't know of any primary sources that support the historical existence of a ghost ship crewed by the damned."

Verifiable facts about Anne Bonny's life (and indeed Mary Read's) are extremely limited, and can just about be summed up in the following: Late August 1720. Rackham, Bonny, Read, and others steal a sloop from New Providence, commit a few paltry acts of piracy. Early November 1720: Barnet captures Rackham's company at sea. 28 November 1720:Bonny and Read are put on trial, found guilty but plead their bellies. They are examined by a doctor who confirms they are pregnant. There were no ultrasounds or suchlike available and pregnancy could only be determined for certain towards the end of the first trimester, making it extremely likely that Bonny and Read were actually pregnant before they became pirates. April 1721: Mary Read dies. That's it. All the stories about their earlier lives come from Johnson's book, but there's no indication as to how or from whom he could have learned about them, so there's every possibility that he made it up.* All the theories about what happened to Bonny after 1721 are unverifiable. That said, Johnson's book, especially the appendix attached to volume 2, does contain information about their activities on New Providence before they became pirates, particularly Bonny's. Johnson almost certainly interviewed Woodes Rogers, governor of the Bahamas, who might well have been aware of Anne Bonny's activities on New Providence, but anything before that time would have been hearsay. * I have a theory about how much of their early lives Johnson made up, and I have identified a woman born in Bristol whose life story shares several similarities with the purported early life of Mary Read, but how Johnson could have got such information is impossible to tell.

It's helpful to draw a distinction between a pirate 'crew',the collection of pirates on one ship, and a pirate 'company',the collection of pirates under one command. Often,they are interchangeable, when one captain commanded one ship, but when one captain commanded more than one ship - as in the case of Blackbeard and his fleet of five vessels, then you have a 'company' spread over several vessels. In the case of Davis,Cocklyn and La Buse,they seem to have been three independent companies sailing together, rather than three crews under one command. Moving around within a single company was quite common, but changing company was very much frowned upon,so probably less common in groups like the Cocklyn,Davis, La Buse group,though Taylor managed it and moved from Davis' company to Cocklyn's.

I think pirates were people. Just like society at large they had different personalities. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to suggest that any of them were much like Captain Blood, and I don't personally subscribe to the "rebels at odds with the law" model much, but certainly there were marked differences in their behaviour. Perhaps more importantly, being people, they didn't always behave consistently. John Taylor, for example, was well loved by his company and highly respected by his captives, but was not averse to settling arguments with his fists or beating a man on a whim.

One interesting phenomenon amongst captured pirates was the number who claimed to have won very large sums of money by gambling with their shipmates. Of course, this may have quite a lot to do with the fact that if they'd admitted all the money in their pockets came from piracy they'd have been hanged and had their money confiscated, whereas if they'd won it gaming then it couldn't be held against them in law... Some surviving sets of articles, such as John Taylor's, Bart Roberts', and Lowther and Low's ban gambling outright, but other allowed gambling for small sums: Thomas Anstis: 8th: If any p[er]son or p[er]sons shall be found to game on board the privateer of the value of one Real plate shall suffer Moses’ Law John Philips: 3. If any Many shall steal any Thing in the Company, or game, to the Value of a Piece of Eight, he shall be marroon'd or shot.

Lol, that almost sounds like a challenge! The thing is, that once a book gets published and read, there are going to be people who disagree with the conclusions, the interpretations, the methodology, and a thousand other things. It's a fact of life for historians, and we just have to get over it. Sourcebooks tend to come in for less criticism because there's less new material to criticise, but I don't know of a single book that the entire community of historians has got behind and judged flawless. It's not being uppity, it's having and expressing a different point of view.

Not just in battle, but often when any sailor died. We have enough sailors' wills to know that frequently particular items were bequeathed to specific friends and relatives, but even so, it's likely that many items (knife, spare underpants, bits of hard cheese...) were not included in wills and were sold at the mast. If a sailor died intestate then his gear might also be sold. Mast sales were common. There are plenty of mentions of sales taking place by the main-mast, including pirates selling off small items of plunder for the common fund, and there is definite evidence that dead men's good were also sold this way. The concept of mast sales illustrates the difficulty of determining what was in a sailor's chest - not everything made it into the written record. Wills usually record between two and four sets of clothing, and often valuables such as watches, buckles and buttons, things like thread and needles, books, technical instruments, and other oddments. As for what might have been sold at the mast, we can only speculate (to my knowledge, only one set of dead man's goods sold at mast is recorded in detail - see below). There are certain things that seamen must have had but that I've never seen in any list to my recollection, including eating kit (plate, spoon, mug) and tools (knife etc.), for example. There are various sailors' wills and probate inventories floating around on the net. Several, including the record of the mast sale mention above, can be found on this thread: http://www.piratebrethren.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=544

There are some very good bits in Teonge's diary. Chaplains were first paid by the Admiralty in the 1580s.

Good stuff as ever David, Again, you clearly shone out as being more expert than your co-panellist, but we expect that of Captain Twill alumni.* If I had been doing the podcast, I would have mentioned the decline in popular Jacobitism as one of the factors in the decline of the GAoP, as well as the 1721 Act For the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy, that really stepped up the government's war on piracy, but I think my fascination with both of those subjects may be bordering on obsessive anyway, so it's not a criticism by any means. *(I'd like to coin the phrase Old Twillians to describe graduates of the Captain Twill School of Pirate History.)

That's odd, it works for me If anyone else is having any trouble, a Google search for "Exeter University online piracy course" brings it up as the first hit: https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1SAVS_enGB557GB557&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=exeter%20university%20piracy%20course%20online

From 6 October 2014 the University of Exeter is running a 12-week online course on pirate history: The Real and Imagined World of Pirates, tuition by Dr E. T. Fox. http://education.exeter.ac.uk/dll/details.php?code=DLH20

I'm pretty sure that one 'scholar' attributed Maid of Amsterdam to Heywood and nobody else bothered to check until recently.

I don't know, but in a few days I should have a copy of each in my hands and will be able to tell you. FWIW, I'm expecting the binding of the soft-cover to be softer than the binding of the hard-cover, which will be harder. The binding on the eBook is rubbish.

And last but not least, the eBook: http://www.lulu.com/shop/et-fox/pirates-in-their-own-words/ebook/product-21708777.html

Paperback now available: http://www.lulu.com/shop/et-fox/pirates-in-their-own-words/paperback/product-21707029.html

Each chapter has an introduction of between 1 and 3 pages, and each* document has an introduction varying in length from a few lines to over a page. Likewise, the documents vary in length from around a page to 19 pages. There are also footnotes, mostly quite brief but one or two fairly large ones. If you want it properly quantified, the documents constitute about 84% of the total book. Of the documents, the testimony of pirates makes up 41%, that of forced men is 20%, victims' testimony makes up 17%, trials contribute 9%, and miscellaneous documents make up the remaining 13%. Just for giggles, here's the contents list: Pirates 1. Samuel Burgess 2. William Phillips 3. John Sparks 4. David Evans 5. Thomas Joy 6. Richard Sievers 7. James Kelly on two decades at sea 8. Theophilus Turner 9. John Brent 10. Thomas Bagley 11. Michael Hicks 12. Richard Roper 13. John Barrett 14. The Will of Joseph Jones 15. A Matelotage Agreement 16. John Brown 17. Robert Collover writes to a shipmate’s widow 18. A Pirate Reference 19. Dear British Apollo 20. Thomas Nichols and Francis Leslie surrender 21. The Whydah survivors tell their stories 22. David Herriot and Ignatius Pell on Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet 23. Bartholomew Roberts writes 24. Walter Kennedy’s deposition 25. Walter Kennedy’s views on the pirate life 26. James Bradshaw 27. Richard Luntly 28. The petition of John Massey and George Lowther 29. William Ingram 30. Alexander Thompson 31. Philip Roche 32. Thomas Lawrence Jones 33. James Williams 34. John Smith, alias John Gow 35. Robert Reid Forced Men 36. Philip Middleton 37. Henry Watson 38. John Ireland 39. Richard Appleton and others 40. Henry Hunt 41. John Matthews 42. Bridstock Weaver 43. Henry Treehill 44. Richard Moor 45. Edward Evans 46. William Whelks 47. John Fillmore’s narrative 48. Nicholas Simmons Pirates’ Victims 49. Mutiny on the ship Adventure 50. Israel Pippany and Peter Freeland 51. George Weoley 52. Edward North 53. Thomas Grant 54. Edward Green 55. Captain Mackra’s ship taken by Edward England 56. Richard Lazenby, a prisoner of John Taylor 57. Jacob du Bucquoy describes life in the company of John Taylor 58. Andrew Kingston taken by Bartholomew Roberts 59. Richard Hawkins’ account of his capture by Francis Spriggs Trials 60. Trial of Gibbons and Bournal 61. Trial of Bridstock Weaver and William Ingram 62. Trial of Mozley et al. Miscellaneous Documents 63. Adam Baldridge 64. The battle between the Dorrill and the Mocha 65. A pirate’s widow seeks her inheritance 66. A letter to a pirate 67. Prices of pirate supplies 68. John Vickers and the arrival of the pirates at New Providence 69. Pirates surrender to Captain Pearse 70. Certificate of Pardon 71. Inventory of a pirate sloop 72. The end of Blackbeard 73. Captain Davis on the African Coast 74. Lists of ships taken by pirates 75. The end of Bartholomew Roberts 76. Inventory of goods in the possession of Pierce and Andrew Cullen *Not quite every document has its own introductory text, some with similar themes have been introduced together.

I'll second that. I don't comment very often but I regularly look at this thread to see what's new.

That's not the sort of thing you should judge a book by (IMHO, the inside is even better)

The front cover, just because I like it.

At long last! The hardback edition of Pirates in Their Own Words is now available! 407 pages of original primary source material, mostly being published for the first time. Paperback edition on its way, hardback available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/et-fox/pirates-in-their-own-words/hardcover/product-21700684.html Thank you for your patience.