Mission

Yes, there is a large homeless issue in Key West and it was very easy for people to hide when the encampment was on the beach. The Fort staff also had major issues getting people that didn't belong in the encampment off Park property when the Park closed. There is also an issue with new plantings in the area where we camped. For now, we are in the Fort. Will that change someday? Good question. Perhaps the encampment could be fenced off and have specific entrances and exits? That way when the park closed, folks could go through the encampment and make sure there weren't any outsiders hanging around in there. The rest of the park must already have to be gone through at some point, so that would be no different for the park employees. Anyone who might be with the reenactors should have their ID card handy at that time. (Or a pog. Pogs are great. Bring back the pogs! Lily hasn't nearly enough to do. )

They should put all the events in the Fort and the camping on the beach. The key is to come up with events and reenacting stations in the fort to attract the reenactors there during the day. That is already half done anyhow They didn't have the push for displays and anything near the schedules of events that we do now. (That started in '10, didn't it?) I also think they ought to put half the battle back in there. Having been on the wall for the battle last year on Friday I can tell you that it's sort of dull. If it weren't for Michelle, it would be almost unwatchable because you really can't tell what's going on. (I do recall a discussion about microphones after last year, which might help, but based on what I saw last year, you still feel distant from the action. Look at some of the wall photos taken without zoom to see what I mean. You can't tell one person from another; it's like watching walking Weebles fight.) People could shoot from the gun ports or shoot hand weapons from the wall since we're not allowed to shoot cannons from the walls. Heck, just put all the cannons on the side of the people who are located in the field. It would make more sense that way anyhow - it would be easier for the pirates to take the fort if you want to stick with that storyline.

This month's article is the first of two parts on Wound Dressings during the Golden Age of Pyracy. It features detailed information on Plasters, Pledgets and Medicinal Tents. Next month we'll be looking at bandages and bandaging.

Well, I can't argue with that! (And here I thought Bob Guccione started the whole thing in the 1960s...)

See, and I thought it sounded more like Homer J. from the Simpsons. Jim, if you enjoyed that there is a really neat book out there called The History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage that would be worth checking out of the local library.

Say, we could camp on the beach...

No, not even that - he wears black-tinted glasses. As far as we know, they hadn't really come up with glasses with solid ear-pieces by the end of the GAoP. (Although I did find one modern source that dates them back to 1701, but I've never found a corroborating period source for that, so it's hard to say if it's right or not.)

Ah, and from not far behind pages 309-13 here are some selections of the illustrative pages for Art Militaire, Fortification

I was looking for near-period medical images when I came across the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers the volumes of which were published from 1751-1765. Below are the images for the entry on Arquebusiers that I thought were kind of interesting (Pages 274-277 from the 'A' book - 1751). You can click on them and zoom the heck out of 'em.

Now HERE'S an interesting picture! It's called the Barber-Surgeon's Shop by David Teniers the Younger and it's in the British Museum:

Ha ha ha! (Don't you realize the wrecks belong to all of us Hitman? You don't understand collectivism at all; she's gonna' start calling you 'sir' if you don't watch it.)

Here's a link to the 2012 Michigan Pirate Festival held in Grand Haven, Michigan. Pirate Surgeon's Journal From the Introduction... "Grand Haven is a very strange place to hold a Pirate Festival given that Grand Haven is also known as 'Coast Guard City USA.' The Coast Guard recently updated their rules regarding piracy, but the event organizers apparently managed to stay under the radar (so to speak.) Also odd is the fact that the Forsaken crew is a group of pirate hunters and the Mercury crew is a group of pirates. We'll have to assume that theirs is some sort of dysfunctional codependent relationship. What are pirate hunters without pirates, after all? On the other hand, pirates can be pretty happy without pirate hunters. Hmm. We'll have to ponder that further. We'll get back to you when we figure it out."

Great Scott! Look at the size of that flag! I doubt they could have made that much larger.

If asked me to describe my method of presentation, I think that "whimsical and distubing" would be an excellent response.

Now I want to get some gimblets and wimbles just so I can say that during presentations.. (Actually, I have two wimbles... sort of...)

The Hegewisch site is notoriously unreliable from my experience. Someone just pointed out their pirate medicine section to me recently. I wasn't aware they had created such a section because I don't visit their site based on my past experience with it. But I decided to give it a look. I found two major glaring factual errors in the first page I opened. Amputation. "Until 1718, a leg amputation above the knee almost always ended in the the patient bleeding to death." This is not provably true. We don't really know the mortality rate, but I've seen it estimated at about 50%. That's hardly "almost always." I have multiple accounts of people surviving amputations. "The drug most commonly used to lessen pain was Strong spirits such as rum or whiskey." That's not really true either, at least not before an operation. I have only a single period account of an operation where alcohol was advised before the operation (an amputation) and the prescription was for 1/2 a glass of wine. A drunken patient would do unexpected things during a painful operation. Both of these are the sort of thing that you hear about in movies. I didn't read any further. They kept babbling about the Petit tourniquet which was not widely used during the golden age at all. So I continue not to trust that website. It's not well researched and half of it seems like that sort of hearsay.

Yeah, the best way is really to put them on a photo upload site and link to them using the picture function, but that is more complex than putting them here and not everyone has the same level of computer skills.

Then you should be able to upload them to the gallery. Follow that link and play around with it some. It's gotten much easier to use. (I DO wish you could batch upload images, though.)

I doubt a pirate would have the need to declare himself a pirate lord or pirate king or such to his prey. From my understanding, the purpose of the flag was to declare themselves a pirate and that was more than enough to scare them. If you spotted such a thing and heard some of the many stories about the pirates abusing their captives or read about them in the local press, would you care what title they claimed? You might care if learned you were facing a particularly vicious pirate (like Roberts), but you could often tell that from the flag. It would be a pain to even get into position to ask such a thing if they were moving. We see ships making repeated passes within spitting distance of each other in Hollywood movies, but if you listen to director's commentaries, it takes them hours to get the ships into position and then hours more to do it again. Predator/prey chases sometimes lasted days. Reading the period literature you do find a ship encountering another one at rest and then stopping though. They would then ask one another where they were from. (If they weren't trying to fool the prey ship into thinking they were a merchant ship, the pirate response was often "From the sea" or something equally vague.) As for the Pirate King moniker, I suspect that is a more modern convention. Isn't it from a novel or a play or some such thing?

Captain Jim as a fop! Haa ha ha! (Key West... perfect place for it, you know.)

That's very cool. Is it made of wood? Are you planning to fix it permanently or make it removable? Hmm. Now you just need some matching boots.

Ah, thanks. It's funny how a lot of stuff Roberts did becomes "usually." I can see it in the groups of pirates he was associated with, but it seems a bit overreaching to say that this was usual.

Ah. I've never seen that movie - it never interested me. (Curiously, my thought after reading the MAD Magazine satire of it - as close as I got - was that it sounded like something that was made by idealists for idealists.)

Jack Nicholson wasn't in the China Syndrome. He was in Chinatown. Although I don't remember the scene you're talking about, it sounds like something from that movie. The core problem (as I see it) is that the government has larger things to concern itself in than underwater archeology. Sure, they can throw a little money that way, but it's a mighty unimportant issue when you stack it up against some of the other things it feels the need to get itself involved in. For example, my sister works at the CDC where she sometimes champions health initiatives. Conservation of historical sites (human history) often take a back seat to such things (human welfare). Even she waxes eloquent about lack of funding, how things should be, etc. Plus there are bigger fish still that the government wants to try and fry as you'll hear in the daily news if you listen closely. It seems to me that the best they are going to do is make laws that govern how things will go on such sites and maybe throw a few bucks here and there at projects that will barely make a dent in the overarching cause. Hopefully the laws that are worth anything get enforced, but as Commodore Swab has shown, they frequently do not. (This is one result of realists making things work.) Like its parent, the Coast Guard has larger issues to deal with than an old wreck and underwater archeology seems to have always been something of a cash sinkhole from what I've read. This means that if you want something actually done as opposed to just changing the rules (which is how I first understood you), you really need to rely industry. Industry relies on profit. Find a way to make the two work together as you're hinting at and you might have something. (However this is where I have often seen Idealists fail. They'd rather fall on their swords than give up even a small part of their personal cause.) Otherwise, look forward to pushing the rock uphill until you become burnt-out as you put it or just plain bitter. The benefit of the latter is that you can then write an idealistic book about how bad things are and how they should be and thus impact future generations of idealists interested in your pet topic. Then you can watch them and see how they do at playing Sisyphus.

I had always thought the term Pirate Lords was a reference to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies who stole it from some other pop-pirate source. However, as I was reading The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730 by George Francis Dow and John Henry Edmonds, I came across this in their chapter that attempts to explain every day pirate life: "The captain had usually a sort of privy council which was composed of certain of the officers and older and more experienced sailors and these were sometimes distinguished by the title of 'Lord.'" (Dow and Edmonds, p. 355) It is interesting to me that this is almost nothing like what was presented in the POTC movies or popular culture - in fact, it is almost the opposite: Pirate Lords were not ruling pirate captains, they were the wizened sailors who advised the captain when he asked for it. At the same time, I began to wonder where this idea came from. Dow and Edmonds often cite sources for their statements, but they don't do so for much of this chapter. In the next paragraph they explain that the Quartermaster was second to the captain, something Foxe has shown us may not have been the case on most ships. It's possible I may have missed something about Pirate 'Lords' in a period source, but nothing springs to mind. Has anyone seen a period reference for this idea in conjunction with that particular term?