Fox

Not quite next week, but I'm editing it as we speak (or type, or whatever)

Have you checked the Rape of Lucrece? I couldn't find any reference to Maid of Amsterdam when I looked.

You see right through me.. =) Good on you! If there's one serous thing about pirates that needs questioning, it's the democratic model. There are other examples of pirates restricting writing: John Quelch's crew didn't ban writing, but they did read through forced man Matthew Pimer's journal to check for anything that could be used against them and tore out several pages, for example. Mind you, if you dig deep enough you'll find evidence of all sorts of unexpected ideas - John Taylor's company banned the discussion of religion.

Aye, there's the rub! And so we start questioning the democratic pirates model In the case of Bellamy's company, forced men were forbidden from writing anything down unless it was nailed to the mast for all to see - presumably a preventive act against secret messages and plots. The study of literacy is quite a big subject, but it's probably fair to say that more pirates could read than one would expect. It's impossible to give any firm figures, but around 2/3 of early-modern sailors could write their names: the number of people who could actually write in any meaningful sense was probably lower than that, but the number of people who could read to some degree was probably higher than the number who could write. One interesting thing is the provision of horn books for the Madagascar pirates in the 1690s, sent by Frederick Phillipse to Adam Baldridge. Horn books were a teaching aid, so it suggests that literate pirates taught their illiterate comrades to read in the off-hours.

John Taylor's company also had rules about fighting: 'When… quarrels arise on board, and the offence requires settling by force of arms, the quartermaster and the captain preside over the duel, which ends only with the death of one of the antagonists. A flag is then waved over the head of the victor' (Du Buquoy) The only specific pirate reference I can think of to duelling on shore comes from 1684, when John Gursford and John Bell ‘went on shore to fight with their guns’, and Bell was killed. (HCA 1/52, f.28) However, the practice was not limited to pirates: for example, two merchant ship masters 'Isaac Parker and Samuel Parsons, who having some Words and Difference, in their anger and rage challenged one the other to Fight with firelocks, and accordingly they went on shore, and at some Distance presented their Pieces, and Parsons shot Parker in his shoulder or breast, that he died of his wounds in five Days after' (Boston News Letter, 7 May 1722)

There's a copy of that issue of the Weekly Packet in the Burney Collection at the British Museum. If it helps, I can confirm that it says what the quote above says.

The other thing to bear in mind is that belief and practising religion are not always the same thing. Pirates who all expected to go to Hell together may not have practised religion, but they believed in Hell (and thus, presumably, the alternative). Other pirates are known to have practised religion, such as Taylor's company who sang psalms at the funerals of their comrades, and even went so far as to ban the discussion of religion in their articles - presumably because of its potentially divisive nature - but du Bucquoy says that apart from funerals he never saw them doing anything else religious.

Jonathan Swift was actually Defoe disguised as a woman.

I think it's been established fairly well that Defoe was actually the only person who could write in the early 18th century.

Fair enough, I was quite surprised when you mentioned the manuscript as I didn't think it still existed. That makes much more sense now.

You've been working from the manuscript version? Does it differ much (or at all) from the printed version?

No, in Under the Bloody Flag, which is a study of Tudor piracy. In fact, probably the best study of Tudor piracy I've read (which still has nothing to do with the fact that he cited me). I'm not sure I'd describe Fraser's Pyrates as "pirate pop culture/literature reference book", it's a humorous romp of a novel. If you enjoy it then I cannot recommend highly enough his Flashman series (also, his war memoirs are very good, Quartered Safe Out Here, and post-war memoirs, The General Danced at Dawn.) Sorry, that's terribly off-topic of me, but I'm the moderator here, so live with it.

I haven't read Appleby's latest, but his work is usually pretty sound and not too contentious (and my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that he's the first academic author to cite me as a reference in his footnotes :) ) Only 7 library copies in the UK? Golly! One of them happens to be my university library, so that's handy.

Tony, Ken, and a bunch of others (including Manuel Schonhorn) were working on collecting every English-language pirate trial from the golden age (not sure how they defined that) and editing the transcripts with heavy annotations and a lot of introductory matter, along with, I believe, associated documents. They were working on it for at least a decade before Tony's death and never seemed any nearer publication. I know of several libraries that have a copy of Baer's collection, so if you need to look anything up in it then it should be available via inter-library loan. Mr Bandlesworth, what tag did you go by on piratesinfo? You'll find several of the old gang here. Greg, I'm editing Pirates in Their Own Words. I can't give you an exact date I'm afraid, but I'm hopeful it will be hitting the presses within a few weeks.

Not as far as I know. Tony was the prime mover, with the late Ken Kinkor also playing an important part. Sadly, their deaths have probably taken the wind out of the project's sails. Also, several of the trials that were going to be in the work have already been printed in Joel Baer's British Piracy in the Golden Age. Three more of the trials will also be published in the near future in the forthcoming Pirates, in Their Own Words. Tony and Ken were not working alone, so perhaps some of the others will pick the project up, but I haven't heard anything for some years.

In absolutely no way whatsoever. I haven't read that particular book, but I have read other works by Kuhn and they are among the worst things ever written about pirates while masquerading as "history". Even if you have a barge-pole available, I still caution avoiding

Don't forget "Christopher". AFAIK only Edward and Edmund appear in primary sources, and they're close enough to be almost interchangeable in the 18thC

It's about a third of the bibliography from my thesis. I took out all of the stuff not directly related to pirates, like several very good articles on early-modern literacy for example.

f you want a reading list, why don't I just C+P a bibliography? Some of these are better than others, but most are worth a read (especially if you want to understand why some are better than others). Recommended titles in RED Anderson, John L. ‘Piracy and World History, an Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 82-106 Anderson, Olive. ‘British Governments and Rebellion at Sea’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 56-84 Appleby, John C., and Paul Dalton (eds). Outlaws in Early Modern England: crime, government and society, c. 1066 - c. 1600 (Farnham, 2009) Appleby, John C. Under the Bloody Flag. Pirates of the Tudor Age (Stroud, 2009) Arnold-Forster, F.D. The Madagascar Pirates (New York, 1957) Baer, Joel. Piracy Examined: A Study of Daniel Defoe’s General History of the Pirates and Its Milieu (unpublished doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 1970) ———‘“The Complicated Plot of Piracy”: Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 14 (1985), 3-28 ———‘“Captain John Avery” and the Anatomy of a Mutiny’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 1-26 ——— ‘Bold Captain Avery in the Privy Council: Early Variants of a Broadside Ballad from the Pepys Collection’, Folk Music Journal, 7 (1995), 4-26 ———‘William Dampier at the Crossroads: New Light on the “Missing Years,” 1691-1697’, International Journal of Maritime History, VIII (1996), 97-117 ———Pirates (Stroud, 2007) Beal, Clifford. Quelch’s Gold, piracy, greed, and betrayal in colonial New England (Westport, 2007) Benton, Lauren. ‘Toward a New Legal History of Piracy: Maritime Legalities and the Myth of Universal Jurisdiction’, International Journal of Maritime History, XXIII (2011), 225-240 Bergstrand, Finn. ‘Då Madagaskar Skulle Bli Svenskt - och England Katolskt’, Karolinska Forbundets Arsbok (1997), 28-42 Bernhard, Virginia. ‘Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View’, Journal of Social History, 19 (1985), 57-70 Bialuschewski, Arne. ‘Between Newfoundland and the Malacca Strait: a Survey of the Golden Age of Piracy, 1695-1725’, Mariner’s Mirror, 90 (2004), 167-186 ——— ‘Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the General History of the Pyrates’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 98 (2004), 21-38 ———‘Pirates, Slavers and the Indigenous Population in Madagascar, c. 1690-1715’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), 401-425 ——— ‘Pirate Voyages in History and Fantasy’, Global Crime, 7 (2006), 256-259 ——— ‘Pirates, Markets and Imperial Authority: Economic Aspects of Maritime Depredations in the Atlantic World, 1716-1726’, Global Crime, 9 (2008), 52-65 ———‘Black People under the Black Flag: Piracy and the Slave Trade on the West Coast of Africa, 1718-1723’, Slavery and Abolition, 29 (2008), 461-475 Black, Clinton V. Pirates of the West Indies (Cambridge 1989) Bromley, J.S. Corsairs and Navies, 1660-1760 (London, 1987) Burg, B.R. ‘Legitimacy and Authority: A Case Study of Pirate Commanders in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, American Neptune, 37 (1977), 40-51 ———Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (New York, 1984) Burgess, Douglas R. The Pirates’ Pact (New York, 2008) Burl, Aubrey. Black Barty: Bartholomew Roberts and his Pirate Crew 1718-1723 (Stroud, 2006) Chapin, Howard M. Privateer Ships and Sailors, the First Century of American Colonial Privateering (Toulon, 1926) Clark, J.C.D. Revolution and Rebellion. State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986) Cordingly, David. Life Among the Pirates, the Romance and the Reality (London, 1995) ———Heroines and Harlots, Women at Sea in the Great Age of Sail (London, 2001) Course, Alfred George. Pirates of the Eastern Seas (London, 1966) ———Pirates of the Western Seas (London, 1969) Craton, Michael. A History of the Bahamas (London, 1962) Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Newton Abbot, 1972) Dow, George, and John Edmonds. Pirates of the New England Coast (Mineloa, 1999) Earle, Peter. Sailors. English Merchant Seamen, 1650-1775 (London, 1998) ———The Pirate Wars (London, 2004) Fuller, Basil, and Ronald Leslie-Melville. Pirate Harbours and Their Secrets (London, 1935) Furbank, P.N. and W.R. Owens. ‘The Myth of Defoe as “Applebee’s Man”’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 48 (1997), pp. 198-204 Fury, Cheryl A. Tides in the Affairs of Men: the social history of Elizabethan seamen, 1580-1603 (Westport, 2002) Fury, Cheryl A. (ed.) The Social History of English Seamen, 1485-1649 (Woodbridge, 2012) Gilbert, Arthur N. ‘Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861’, Journal of Social History, 10 (1976), 72-98 Gilje, Paul A. Liberty on the Waterfront, American maritime culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004) Gilje, Paul A., and William Pencak (eds). Pirates, Jack Tar, and Memory: New Directions in American Maritime History (Mystic, 2007) Gosse, Philip. The Pirates’ Who’s Who (New York, 1924) Grey, Charles. Pirates of the Eastern Seas 1618-1723: a Lurid Page of History (London, 1933) Hamilton, Christopher E. ‘The Pirate Ship Whydah’, in Skowronek and Ewen, X Marks the Spot, pp. 131-159 Hay, Douglas, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1975) Hill, Christopher. ‘Radical Pirates?’, in Jacob, Anglo-American Radicalism, 17-32 ———Liberty Against the Law (London, 1997) ———‘Pirates’, in Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 114-122 Holmes, Geoffrey. The Making of a Great Power. Late Stuart and Early Georgian England 1660-1722 (London, 1993) Jacob, Margaret C. and James R. Jacob (eds), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London 1984) Kemp, Peter, and Christopher Lloyd. Brethren of the Coast, the British and French Buccaneers in the South Seas (London 1960) Kinkor, Kenneth J. ‘Black Men under the Black Flag’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 195-210 Konstam, Angus. Blackbeard: America’s Most Notorious Pirate (Hoboken, 2006) Kupperman, Karen Ordahl (ed.), Major Problems in American Colonial History, (Lexington, 1993) Lee, Robert E. Blackbeard the Pirate: a Re-appraisal of his Life and Times (Winston-Salem, 1974) Leeson, Peter T. ‘An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization’, Journal of Political Economy, 115 (2007), 1049-1094 ———The Invisible Hook. The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, 2009) ———‘The Calculus of Piratical Consent: the myth of the myth of the social contract’, Public Choice, 139 (2009), 443-459 Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000) Lizé, Patrick. ‘Piracy in the Indian Ocean: Mauritius and the Speaker’, in Skowronek and Ewen, X Marks the Spot, pp. 81-99 Lusardi, Wayne R. ‘The Beaufort Inlet Shipwreck Artefact Assemblage’ in Skowronek and Ewen, X Marks the Spot, pp. 196-218 Lydon, James. Pirates, Privateers, and Profits (Upper Saddle River, 1970) Mackie, Erin. ‘Welcome the Outlaw: pirates, maroons, and Caribbean countercultures’, Cultural Critique, 59 (2005), 24-62 McLynn, Frank. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1989) Morgan, Kenneth. ‘Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 107 (1992), 626-650 ———Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 2000) Oberwittler, Dietrich. ‘Crime and Authority in Eighteenth Century England: Law Enforcement on the Local Level’, Historical Social Research, 15 (1990), 3-34 Pennell, C.R. (ed.). Bandits at Sea, a Pirates Reader (New York, 2001) ——— ‘Brought to Book: Reading about Pirates’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, pp. 3-24 Pérotin-Dumon, Anne. ‘The Pirate and the Emporer, Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450-1850’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 25-54 Pringle, Patrick. Jolly Roger (Mineola, 2001) Rediker, Marcus. ‘“Under the Banner of King Death”: The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716-1726’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third series, 38 (1981), 203-227 ———Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: merchant seamen, pirates, and the Anglo-American maritime world, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987) ———Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (London, 2004) Ritchie, Robert C. Pirates: myths and realities (Minneapolis, 1986) ———Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) Rodger, N.A.M. The Wooden World, an Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1988) ———Command of the Ocean, a Naval history of Britain, 1649-1815 (London, 2004) Rogozinski, Jan. Honor Among Thieves: Captain Kidd, Henry Every, and the Pirate Democracy in the Indian Ocean (Mechanicsburg, 2000) Russell, Lord. The French Corsairs (London, 1970) Sanders, Richard. If a Pirate I Must Be (London, 2007) Sherry, Frank. Raiders and Rebels. The Golden Age of Piracy (New York, 1986) Skowronek, Russell K. and Charles R. Ewen (eds). X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy (Gainesville, 2006) Starkey, David J. (ed.). British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990) Pirates and Privateers: new perspectives on the war on trade in the eighteenth century (Exeter, 1997) ——— ‘Pirates and Markets’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 107-124 ———‘The Origins and Regulation of Eighteenth-Century British Privateering’, in Pennell, Bandits at Sea, 69-81 ——— ‘Voluntaries and Sea Robbers: A review of the academic literature on privateering, corsairing, buccaneering and piracy’, Mariners Mirror, 97 (2011), 127-147 Stumpf, Stuart, O. ‘Edward Randolph's Attack on Proprietary Government in South Carolina’, South Carolina Historical Magazine, 79 (1978), 6-18 Thomson, Janice. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1994) Turley, Hans. Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (New York, 1999) Vickers, Daniel, Lewis R. Fischer, Marilyn Porter, Sean Cadigan, Robert Lewis, Peter Narváez, Peter Pope, David J. Starkey, and Marcus Rediker, ‘Roundtable: Reviews of Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, with a Response by Marcus Rediker’, International Journal of Maritime History, I (1989), 311-357 Vickers, Daniel, and Vince Walsh. ‘Young Men and the Sea: the sociology of seafaring in eighteenth century Salem, Massachusetts’, Social History, 24 (1999), 17-38 ———Young Men and the Sea: Yankee seafarers in the age of sail (New Haven, 2005) Wilkinson, Henry. Bermuda in the Old Empire: A History of the Island from the Dissolution of the Somers Island Company until the end of the American Revolutionary War, 1684-1784 (Oxford, 1950) Williams, Crystal. ‘Nascent Socialists or Resourceful Criminals? A Reconsideration of Transatlantic Piracy’, in Gilje and Pencak, Pirates, Jack Tar and Memory, 31-50 Williams, Daniel E. ‘Puritans and Pirates: A Confrontation between Cotton Mather and William Fly in 1726’ Early American literature, 22 (1987), 233-251 Witt, Jann M. ‘Mutiny and Piracy in Northern Europe Merchant Shipping: Forms of Insurrection on board British and German Merchant Ships in the Late 17th and 18th Centuries’, Northern Mariner, 18 (2008), 1-27 Woodard, Colin. The Republic of Pirates (Orlando, 2007)

I wonder if wives cried when they heard their husbands had been forced into piracy.

An object lesson in the perils of going bare-foot on deck as the boatswain crushes two of the middle fellow's toes...

I'm just reading the incomparable Voices of Morebath by Eamon Duffy, not piracy but an extremely good analysis of an English rural village in the 16th century, and I came across this: "This brutally high level of mortality among their children may explain the custom, maddening to the historian trying to pick his way through meagre documentation, of naming several children of the same generation of the same family with the same name.In 1534 the branch of the Timewell family farming at Wood in Morebath had three unmarried sons, all called John, identified by the priest in a note of that year as John maior, John minor, and John minimus."

It's had a couple of outings, but I think those photos were taken at the last event that I didn't take my children to, so now when we authenti-camp we usually take a bigger (and proper) tent.

Ah, pirate sodomy, there's a myth I should have included in the original list Sodomy may not have been banned by pirates (unless you choose to interpret Roberts' rules about "boys and women" in that way - which I don't personally), but at least with the freedoms of drinking and swearing there's some evidence that pirates actually did it. Still, if you want to argue that pirates were free to drink, swear, and bugger each other then I won't argue. (And I'm not even going to start trying to list the errors and misconceptions of that 2020 site...)

On both his piratical cruises Tew sailed the Amity. He may well have had another ship called Liberty at some other time in his non-pirate career, but I've not heard of it. WARNING! DEEP POINT APPROACHING! Disobeying the law does not grant you more freedom. The law guarantees as many freedoms as it restricts. It may not seem like that at times, but without the law nobody is truly 'free'. Outlaws are unable to own anything and even their lives are in the hands of others. Absolutely, history is all about interpretation, so it's natural there will be different views. Konstam is following the line espoused by Rediker and others, that the power of pirate officers was limited, and there is some evidence which suggests that that was the case - principally though it's based on a couple of lines from the GHP which, as discussed elsewhere, contains some political rhetoric. There is (in my opinion) a much larger body of evidence that pirate officers had a greater authority than that. More than one set of articles, for example, says something along the lines of 'lawful commands to be obeyed'. True, the authority of most pirate captains (if not all) rested on the voluntary acceptance of the crew, but while they wielded that authority it was to be obeyed. There'd be no point in having officers at all if nobody had to do what they said. True, pirates did have the freedom to wear surf shorts if they wanted