Mission

Hey Jon, would you be willing to bring the surgeon's gear with you? It's in a wooden box with handles that weighs about 70 pounds. I would mail it down to you via UPS. If you have room and don't mind Scarlett Jai wouldn't have to worry about it.

II think you're right about moving the surgeon's operating theater around the ship. The surgeon's place on the ship would almost by necessity have to be fluid based on what was happening around him. Still, there has to be a location where the medicine chests and tools were stored. Your point about establishing a sick bay on a ship with lots of men is well-taken. Having almost no data on the surgeon aboard a GAoP pirate ship, I can't say whether they would have such a thing on long voyages or just leave the ill man in his regular quarters. From my understanding (which may be wrong), pirates had a lot more leeway about making landfall, so they may have left sick men behind rather than take them out when they weren't making long voyages. (This is really good stuff. You've just helped me gel several things I've read. This month's article could almost be useful as genuine research on my part. Thanks! :) )

I think references are all most people are going to find in that paper. (And a lot of them appear to be to other recent academic papers written in the same style that this has been.) I read the first couple chapters and it's the kind of stuff that is written by one academic to other academics. (If you boiled this down to its essential point, taking out all the $20 words, repetitive concepts, interrupting phrases, calls out to other academic papers and theoretical nonsense, it'd be about a third or quarter as long as it is.) In its defense, it is an anthropology paper and not a history paper. However, I still think this sort of writing is what university-style indoctrination produces. (You can't write in the common language or your doctorate might not appear so strange and mystical. I can see needing specialized language for many of the hard sciences where the concepts are highly specialized, but for history and anthropology? C'mon...) Personally, I found what I wanted buried in the first chapter. "Plans or lines for either seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Jamaica sloops do not exist, and most [so modern] descriptions of their form [them are based on] are derived from a later ship type, the Bermuda sloop,) Forgive for being so tart, but this is the kind of product that ticks me off about large universities. (If you haven't noticed... ) I was so hoping to find some useful info on the hold and cockpit of the Jamaica Sloops and instead I found things like: "If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English sloop data is used to create a normative equivalent for sloop construction, then this baseline may be compared with the stimuli necessitating Jamaica sloops to identify areas of potential variability." Oh, do go on...

Hey, I know it's been awhile (like... years) since we discussed seines (nets) in this thread, but I came across another reference to them in Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670-1679 and I thought I'd throw it into the mix. (To this day I can't think of seines without Dutchman coming to mind.) "Our Capt. caried a net on shoar, which by all our Seamen was called a Sain... It was a sort of drag net. Having obtained leave, we turned it twice or __ thrice in the sea, but we catch't few fish, and those very small ones. They wer Mullet, Barboni, and our common plaice and a little sort of what we call Maids." (Covel, p. 120-1)

That's pretty accurate, although I wonder how many merchant and pirate ships would have bothered with a formal sick bay.

That's a great photo. While the clothes are great (and they are), I think the photography on some of these have as much to do with their appearing period as anything. I actually sort of prefer the non-retouched and balanced photos to the artistic ones because they present the clothing rather than the art. (But that's just me being an engineer, I suppose.) As for my fellow twins and Jack... well! And from 2007 ( )

Not having been that interested in the details of ships, I thought the surgeon would always be on the orlop deck (one above the hold) because that's what everyone says. But a lot of ships, particularly ships used by pirates, didn't have an orlop deck per se. The point of the surgeon's place during battle (as I understand it) was to have the surgeon at or below the waterline for 'safety' and above the bilge if possible. On a small ship, like a sloop, this would be the hold. (I wish I understood the design of ships better, but it just doesn't hold my interest like the surgeries and surgical tools do.)

That is an awesome photo! Even if the clothes weren't interesting, the assembly of characters is. This is 2007, right?

Oh, those are beautiful! What ship is that? You don't mind if I use them in my article on the surgeon's quarters on my website, do you? I will give you photo credit. (Although I only know you as Coastie04 right now. )

I commented on this on FB, but, for the record, I really like the details in this one. Our QM at his work. Also, in regard to MDs (smoking?) jacket, I would like it noted that I recognize it as significant because I make fun of that every time it first appears in the Surgeon's Journal. (Well, nearly every time.)

Whoa. If you were editing and tagging them, they should have been in there. That sort of sounds like a server glitch. When was this? Stynky had been fooling around with gallery a few months ago and they may have been part of the problem. For the nonce, feel free to email them to me and I will try to get them posted for you. (They may also wind up on the Surgeon's Journal website if they show what I'm looking for. With photo credits, of course.) I will send you a pm with my email address in it.

This is madPete. I believe he makes his own stuff.

He's using the wrong ingredients there...

Anything I can do to help? I'm pretty good at explaining how to do stuff like that.

I agree that the Pie Fight (if it even happens, and I for one hope it does) should be entirely separate from the skits. The skits are intended to be historical in nature.

I have read that explorers and privateers over-hired somewhere too. Something like 30 - 50% if I recall that stat correctly. I believe it was in relation to scurvy, so it was probably Bown's book on scurvy. Of course, in his book Brown (not Bown) notes that the Dutch and other navies had far more problems with scurvy than the English who were (at least according to Brown) working diligently to fix the problem of scurvy. In a related note, another interesting quote I found in that book had to do with how much worse the French and Spanish armies were about disposing of the dead than the English during the beginning of the 19th century. (There's a whole lot more info on this sort of stuff from the late 18th/early 19th than there is for the late 17th/early 18th.) While I really would like to use this info, I don't feel comfortable doing so (at least not without a giant caveat) because things of this nature may have changed dramatically in 100 years time. “British naval surgeons were often horrified when they saw the results of the work their counterparts in the French and Spanish navies. William Shoveller, the surgeon on Leviathan at Trafalgar [1805], was not impressed by the condition of the Spanish prisoners taken aboard, many of them ‘with tourniquets on their different extremities, and which had been applied since the action, four or five days elapsing, consequently most of the limbs in a state of mortification or approaching it.’ Shoveller had to try to do something for these men to save their lives. The seaman William Robinson was also scathing about ‘the scene of carnage horrid to behold’ on a captured Spanish ship, with the dead bodies ‘in a wounded or mutilated state’ piled up in the hold, and ‘the heart-rending cries of the wounded’ on a French ship [1785], where the doctor, ‘having lost or mislaid some of his instruments, was reduced to the necessity of resorting to the use of the carpenter’s fine saw, where amputation was needful.’ Gilbert Blane castigated the French for the mangled limbs, and even whole bodies of men, were cast into the orlop or hold and lay there putrefying for some time… When, therefore, the ballast or other contents of the holds of these ships came to be stirred, and the putrid effluvia thereby let loose, there was then a visible increase of sickness.’ Not surprisingly, dysentery and typhus were rampant. Moreover, the French and Spanish fleets did not have in place any effective measures against scurvy, and suffered a loss of experienced mariners as a result of the epidemic of yellow fever that was raging through southern Spain. When Villeneuve sailed to meet Nelson at Trafalgar, there were 1,731 sick in the Combined Fleets of France and Spain.” (Kevin Brown, p. 102)

To lose so few is impressive, especially in the face of such significant losses in earlier years. You have facts or references I can use? I have so little on the survival rates of seamen dressed by surgeons while at sea.

I occasionally get asked about the survival rate of sailors when people hear about the medical procedures and I say that I read somewhere that for capital operations (amputation, trepanation and similar high mortality operations) that it was about 50%. However, I found this info in Kevin Brown's book Poxed and Scurvied: The Story of Sickness and Health at Sea. It is from info on Nelson's ship in the early 1800s, but the surgical procedures remained fairly consistent from the 1500s through the mid/late 1800s with a few rare moments of medical progress, so I am comfortable quoting it. It should be noted that this would be an example of a ship with a captain who was very concerned about the health of his men and a surgical crew that was keen and fastidious. (So - the upper end of the scale as far as medical care goes.) “On the way to Gibraltar, the Victory was caught in a storm; wounded men lying on the deck were rolled along the ship, those in hammocks were pitched against each other and the bulwarks, some were thrown down to the decks, and wounds were reopened. Yet the high survival rate of the casualties was remarkable and reflects and impressive quality of care by the surgeons. When the Victory was decommissioned in early January 1806, Beatty reported that nor more than six of the 102 convalescents had died, five on board and one in the hospital at Gibraltar and five who were transferred to the hospital ship Sussex. Remarkably, eight of the eleven amputees survived. Of the men who died after amputation, loss of blood was the cause of death for two of them and only the 22 year-old seaman William Smith died from infection after his leg was taken off at the thigh.” (Kevin Brown, p. 90)

For the record, I was trying to get it back on topic and the thread author posted something that led me back OT. Also for the record, I like a lot of the fantasy costumes. (I know, I know, we're in Twill.) Besides, I have long said we are probably further from being truly regular, everyday PC than we'd care to know. I can't repeat what would make me stop being a reenactor to get us back on track again or I'll turn back into a mouse. ("Wumpledumple! Wumpledimple! Wumplestiwtskin!")

If that's directed at my last comments (and it's not clear so I'm just guessing), I've noticed that everyone does this; most people just don't admit it to themselves. I love hanging around with a lot of the people in pirate reenacting - some of them are the best (and most generous) folks I think I've met. I love learning about them and writing about them and hanging out with them. However, once I stop reenacting, I recognize that I will go on to some new interest where I will meet new people and those folks will do likewise. It's human nature. How many of the people from your last personally engrossing endeavor with which you're no longer involved are you still good friends with? (Not casual acquaintances, good friends.) How about the endeavor before that? I'll bet it's one or two people. Sure, I get in touch with some of my friends from the past every once in a while, but we do different very things now so it's more of an acquaintanceship.

By George if I didn't just come across more on this in the book I am currently reading: Poxed and Scurvied: The Story of Sickness and Health at Sea by Kevin Brown. "A mutual medical aid scheme on a nation scale, known as the Chatham Chest, was established by Francis Drake and John Hawkins in 1590 for the aid of sick and disabled mariners. Each parish in England contributed a small weekly sum for the maintenance of invalid sailors born of living within that parish, and seamen were invited to make their own voluntary contributions. In 1604 a compulsory deduction of 6d a week was made from the wages of all seamen serving in the navy. Additional funds came from prize money and the fines levied at courts martial. The money raised was kept in a strong brass-bound chest in the parish church at Chatham, and the five keys to it kept by a master attendant, a shipwright, a boatswain, a purser, and a principal officer of the navy who appointed his four colleagues. It was then down to the individual sailor in hardship to apply for assistance from the fund and he had to attend in person at Chatham, where the governors of the Chest met only once a month." (Kevin Brown, p. 43)

No. For me it's primarily about learning things. The relationships are icing on the cake. "“People come, people go – they’ll drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a favorite book. When you finally close the cover, the characters have told their story and you start up again with another book, complete with new characters and adventures.” -Nicholas Sparks

I think it would be hard for me not to have a good time with Mary D. and Cheeky. We always have such bizarre fund when we get together. The only thing that would make me stop reenacting was when I stopped learning new things. (Although I believe I already said that.)

A little. The cartoony image is the most interesting one for my purposes, but it's copyrighted so I can't use it. The third image is neat, but that's too big a ship for a pirate. (Although I can use that for another thing. I seem to be gradually acquiring a huge store of images...) Thanks!