Mission

Gah, I don't know why it didn't occur to me to remove the dash. (Nor do I know why it didn't occur to Google search...) Wiki defines an 'outwork' as "a minor defense, fortification, built or established outside the principal fortification limits, detached or semidetached." Based on that I would say you got it right.

This is an excerpt from Exquemelins The Buccaneers of America, describing the creation of a fire-ship by Morgan. What the heck are "out-works"? Cabins built on the main deck? "...they cut down many out-works of the ship, that the powder might exert its strength the better..." (Exquemelin, p. 120)

I kept seeing images referring to this book (without knowing it's name or author) and I finally found it. It is the third volume of the book Les travaux de Mars ou l'art de la guerre [The Work of Mars or the Art of War] which was written by French engineer and illustrator Alain Manesson Mallet in 1684. Not one to be greedy with public resources I have found, I thought I'd share it with those of you who would enjoy it. The first paragraph of the description roughly translates, "The third and last volume, which treats new evolutions, instruments, & materials of the ground debris, of artillery, of the instruments, which are used or for the defense, or the attack of towns, places and houses." It's all in French (obviously) but there are some splendid illustrations of period fighters and weapons.

It looks to me like the edit function doesn't work on older posts for regular users. (I'm not sure what the age of the post cutoff is, but I tried it with one of my regular IDs and I found I couldn't edit something I wrote years ago.) There's got to be a setting for that somewhere in the controls - something they must have added during one of the upgrades. I doubt Stynky Tudor set it that way on purpose, but I don't know. If you really want to pursue that one, you'll have to contact him since he sets the policy of the board.

AFAIK, the edit function still works. However, I will be happy to delete the posts for you if you like. Tell me the post number(s) you want removed so that I only take out the ones you don't want. (This number is in the upper right hand corner of the post - looks like #xx - for example, this is post #117.)

You were there when Tony Malesic was around? He was awesome. He did all sorts of original research that I never found anywhere else and still treated the rest of us like thoughtful, fellow researchers. (Which we all hoping we were. :) ) I'm sorry I didn't get to meet him before he died. Those were great times with Ed, Daniel, Tony, dt, Mary Read, Jessie, Cire and some of the other regulars. I think the school kids thing Brit. Privateer mentioned may come from a (very) tongue-in-cheek post I wrote when I was there that I have since edited and added to my site, the link to which I occasionally flog here. Like this: Do-It-Yourself Pirate School Report. Those were always in and out posters, though. The real core were the folks like the ones mentioned above. We had some pretty good discussions there - at least as good as the ones that were going on here in 2003 and 2004. (The posts got pretty interesting here for me around 2006 or 2007 when we started really getting more into the primary research into things other than just clothing.)

Excellent! While you haven't been around here much, at least you always pop back in when the opportunity presents itself. I am finally meeting Ed today here in England. Some day you and I must really get together. (It would be really neat -but probably impossible- to gather the lot of us. I am friends with Jessie still, but no one seems to know what happened to Mary Read.) Congratulations and all that.

piratesinfo! Foxe and I met there in 2002.In fact he sent me here when I left there in 2004. It's still around, you know. (But now I'm really dragging this OT. Sorry.)

Not to drag this OT, but Foxe (one of our forum experts) also said that the stories of Captains Lewis and Cornelius were probably fictitious in the second General History book. Plus all the stuff about Misson in Tew's story is fictional. You can see the whole discussion in the thread The History of the Pyrates (Vol. 2 of the Gen. History. I could swear someone said a lot of the Volume 2 accounts were gathered from other sources, but Foxe says, "Corroborative records are fairly sparse for most of the pirates in the second volume, and by the time Johnson wrote about them the events he describes were 20+ years old, so it's difficult to assess how accurate they are."

Say, it's Rabbitz's birthday again! (Funny about that.) Just thought you should know.

From studying medicine (which, again, has nothing whatsoever to do with this topic, but it's a period topic I know well), I can tell you that in that field terminology was astonishingly loose. Many terms are used for the same thing, some of which are no longer relevant and some of which we would identify as being positively incorrect. I found the same thing when trying to explain parts of a ship while discussing the surgeon's quarters. From this, I suspect that terminology was much less precise than it is today.

I don't know anything whatsoever about this topic (although I am finding it quite fascinating and looking forward to additional informed comment), but the first thing I thought of when I read it was that it would be highly unusual for there to be a 'standard' ordinary template. There were no doubt scattered rules and regulations as has been noted, but I intuitively suspect that these were much less specific and detailed than they are now. Even today, with the armies of inspectors and so forth, people don't always follow the rules and regulations anyhow. Imagine what it was like three hundred years ago. Standardization in many things (other then government imposed rules - and even then - think of how far the colonies were from the mother country) seems to be mostly a creature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Last year it was wall-tent to wall-tent pirates. :) I have heard that the name "Pirates in Paradise" is copyrighted and when the events split, they named the fort event Fort Taylor Pirate Invasion. Like most such things, what it's called is mostly irrelevant once you're there, though. It's pretty much the same event with many of the same people as it was for me in 2007.

Hmm. Sounds like a stretch then. They do have their businesses to tend to and all that. Still, this could be a nice outing for those interested. (Like the old days when there was just a hand full of us.)

John, honestly, there is no alternative to Put-in-Bay. Truly. You have to experience it to believe it. (As much as I love FTPI - and I do - P-i-B gained a very slight edge over it last year IMHO.) That is a pretty choice date, though. The schedule makes It look like we'd be our own historical area. (What is a Pirate Barber Shop, I wonder? Is it a display, or a skit or what? I DO have period barbering tools in my kit as that was a function of the surgeon on a ship...) Is that during the Ren Fair season for Trish, Shannon, Michael, SoS Boss and Bryan? Maybe we could create our own little corner of the world like we've done at some other events...

Hey, are there any period quotes of interest specifically about fireballs burning people in that book? I'd order it, but by the time I got it, it would be too late for my article (on burns, obviously) and most of the rest of it doesn't look interesting to me.

For our crew, it had better be a replica. (Otherwise, what would the Archangels do with themselves at FTPI?) There's a course in period bookbinding?! I wish I could take that. The bookbinding thing has been stowed as a point of interest in the back of my mind ever since we discussed how books were made during period in The Value of Books during the GAoP. Speaking of, I have something for you when I see you next month, PoD. I think you'll quite like it. :)

Apparently they're twins. Happy birthday you two.

It's from after the time of the buccaneers, but a fire ball none-the-less. "[Dec 26, 1710] Then we fell a-stern in our Birth along side, where the Enemy threw a Fire-ball out of one of her Tops, which lighting upon our Quarter-deck, blew up a Chest of Arms and Cartouch Boxes all loaded, and several Cartridges of Powder in the Steerage, by which mean Mr. Vanbrugh, our Agent, and a Dutchman were very much burnt; it might have done more Damage, had it not been quench'd as soon as possible." (Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, p. 161)

See and I thought your backstory would include being a genius-level mastermind serial killer who came from California and got bored with that so he decided to became a pirate.

Hey PoD, will you print my entire book in period correct form when (if) I ever finish it? I want a really, really long title like a proper period book would have, perhaps one that runs over onto the next page.

Well... it's one of those things that seems to generate upset when you talk about the specifics so most people don't. In 2010 some of the original PiP organizers wanted to bring the event back to its roots (when it was a town-based event), so they decided to split it off and hold events outside the fort as separate from the Fort Taylor. (These events had been going on concurrently with Fort Taylor in the previous years.) Then they put together a more elaborate event in 2011 with carnival rides, pirate vendors, pirate-oriented kid's games and a stage for music and pirate contests in the area to the north of the Marine Sanctuary (sort of near the Fort Taylor entrance gate - I don't recall the exact name of this, but there's a neat concrete dock that runs along the sea side there. It may be the US Coast Guard dock or something like that.) You can see some photos of their setup in the first two chapters of my 2011 Surgeon's Journal. You can see a complete list of the events in the thread 2011 Pirates in Paradise Festival thread. As for why they decided not to do it in 2012, my understanding was that the attendance numbers for PiP weren't what the organizers wanted after they spent all that time and effort on the event. So they elected to cancel it. At the time Rob Zerr mentioned the possibility of restarting it later, possibly further north on the Florida Coast... I believe that was somewhere on the event's Facebook page. It's too bad, really. I liked being able to do both of them, attending PiP town events early in the week and hanging in the fort during the weekend. Oh, and I don't believe the bus thing ever got worked out properly. There was some discussion of it happening on the forum as I recall. People still went back and forth between the events though. BTW, Mission steals a lot of his photographs from other people. The Key West event always has the most 'borrowed' photos which is why the Journals wind up being so long.

There's actually a lengthy discussion on this called Uniform Colors? although it doesn't focus specifically on officers. I can merge this thread with that one if you like. Or not. Your call.

Now I know the guys on top are on a makeshift scaffold drinking (which in itself is sort of interesting), but when glanced at quickly, it looks like they got their boat trapped up there and are trying to figure out how to get it down.

This month's Surgeon's Journal article is about goats being used as food shipboard and during landfall, sorting instances from period and near period by geographic location. It also contains a discussion about their use as food specifically by shipwreck victims and maroons along with how they were used as food for recovering patients during this time. Goats in the Sailor's Diet During the Golden Age of Piracy