Mission

Hmm. Playing around with the image to make the scene of interest lighter and larger, it almost looks to me like the lad is describing a point under the kerchief and telling a story about it, to which Ivan and the burly chap are listening while Stynky goes about his work and Mission sleeps. Based on this (admittedly purely conjectural) interpretation, I'd say it's a bandage and the kid is telling the story of how he was so wounded. Of course, when we consider that Stynky is shown working instead of listening or stealing people's hats, we must also recognize that this explanation may be completely wrong.

Yeah, but you're a pirate Quartermaster. From what I've been reading, they 'vapoured' and swore rather freely and without much consequence.

Making fellow grad students walk the plank, for example?

The forum ebbs and flows as far as history and movies go. Actually it sort of depends on who is posting what - lately it's been focused more on history because it gives us all something to argue about discuss. However, the Pyracy Pop forum is all about fantasy pirates and movies. Feel free to wade in and start a topic there and you may shift the trend a bit.

Just read the General History and you'll find all sorts of examples. (Except most of them look like "G---- D------!" With a bit of imagination you can piece it together though. (For example, in this case, the missing words would read "Goofy Dog!") ) We had a really neat list of period insults to use during Searles Raid of St. Augustine in 2010. You can find links to pdf's of them in my Surgeon's Journal of the even on this page. (The links to them are a few paragraphs in on that page.)

I probably only remembered it because I posted it.

Yes, that is handy. (It would be even more handy if you'd re-copy and post the quotes. ) I will post them when I start entering quotes from the version of the General History into my notes. If I just go and grab them and stick them in here I may end up typing them twice which is wasted work. I dislike wasted work. So feel free to do it yourself if you want to help Dutch out.

Between 1500-1830 sea life was pretty much same with diseases and all.... Huh? What does that have to do with the article or my comments on it?

Interesting, but not very surprising. "Feeding so many men was a huge logistical challenge requiring strictly controlled diets including flour, oatmeal, suet, cheese, dried pork, beer, salted cod and ships biscuits when at sea." That agrees pretty much exactly with what we've found here on the pub from reading period accounts. As the article later says, "The results revealed that the naval diet was virtually unchanged in 200 years." Which is also not very surprising to me given what I've read. "Our findings demonstrate the benefits of using forensic methods to complement documentary records." Uh huh. As much as I love forensic anthropology, I can't help but wonder if they couldn't have found a more productive way to spend the money used for this study.

Looks really cool to me. It makes sense (to me at least) that a shipboard grinding wheel would be stationary. Probably the only time they would want to move it would be when they were careening. For a local city vendor, you probably do need your wheelbarrow rig, though. There's nothing quite like diversifying impressions to make a pirate groups display more interesting. (Nearly everybody has personal weapons; nobody I can recall seeing to date has a grinding stone.)

That's kind of what I was thinking. We all learn and grow in our understanding as we continue our research.

Yes, Teonge and Edward Barlow both commented on Christmas as well as several other holidays. Check out this thread. I know pirates reveling (on land and shipboard) on Christmas is mentioned in The General History. I don't have it handy, but I can post them when I do if you like.

Coming from the other direction, I have DOZENS of references to the dangers of splinters on a ship, so I long ago wrote Mythbusters opinion on that front off.

Whoa! Pretty cool from a ship's surgeon perspective. The men appear to be about 100 years out from period, but the surgical stuff didn't change a whole lot over that time. I loved the stuff about the amputation - with many splendidly accurate details, falling, weather, the crush fracture, the lovely stuff about the scruvy including those gruesome makeup effects, the sword wound, the effect of splinters (not cannonballs) from cannonfire. (Splinters were a far greater problem for period surgeons than cannonballs were.) However, they tend to assume that all these wounds were from battle, where they may not have been. A ship was a dangerous place to work and, other than during war, my understanding is that battles were infrequent. But you gotta' make it seem exciting for teevee. Still the surgical details jibe very well with what I've learned. Interesting that syphilis can give the bones a worm-eaten appearance. This gives an alternate explanation to those in my recent article on amputation. I'll have to go back and revise that as their explanation makes far more sense. I love forensic anthropology. When I was thirteen or fourteen, that was my ideal career until I found out that there were only about a dozen of them in the world at that time. (My how times change...) Thanks for the link. Well worth watching from a medicine perspective..

Now it works. You have to use the little chain icon at the top of the editing box to create a link now. (You used to be able to just pop links in and the forum would automatically convert them, but that doesn't seem to work with this latest version of IP.Board.)

Point still being, you could easily set up a site. It would be but a small step from your some interesting pictures thread and would provide people like Pyrate Joe with the sort of info they want.

Maybe you should put together an image site since you seem to think you know so much about them. You can get free image space on dozens of photo websites and gather and post your idea of what images are correct.

Pyrate Joe, there are a number of pictures posted on the forum, but you have to find the threads that contain them. Some of them are in the Sewing Room forum. (Not to get OT here, but a comment on searching. To search a particular forum - enter that forum and use the search function in the upper right hand corner of the main forum page. That will restrict your search to the forum which you are in.) Two Sewing Room threads that have had recent discussions on how to make period clothing are Minimum Garb Standard and Common Sailor Clothes. There are some images in there, but that is not their primary focus. You might also look at Being a collection of art depicting period seamen. (I notice that topics such as this often start off being about a generic image holder thread and then wanders off into specifics. That's the nature of a forum though.) There are literally dozens of such threads here in Captain Twill where you will find images. The trouble is finding those particular threads, of course. A few I found interesting were 'Slops' Not Period? and Dissecting the Pirate: 2 Guayacil. There are many, many more, although finding them is an exercise left to the student. As for websites, GOF would be a good place to start. Foxe's site has a nice image repository. Ivan Henry also has a decent collection sorted by century.

Yes, but you're also a fan of tarps, painted brown. (I know. I sort of helped.)

I have parrot, monkey and even flying squirrel references.

That's kind of my impression from what I've read. (It seems to me to go hand-in-hand with the discussion we've been having in the pirates the savers? thread.) Pirates would have made piss-poor period correct pirate reenactors, y'know. Although this (in a way) sort of belies your black wool bunting argument, doesn't it? Just as Davis used a dirty tarp, so I would think most pirates would use whatever they had at hand. It may have been an existing flag or it may have been some other piece of cloth they had. The exception being Bart Roberts who seemed to have more than a passing interest in his flags and their appearance. At least that's my impression from reading his account. I guess when it comes down to it, you have to recognize that pirates weren't just a mass of people who all did the same thing for the same reason, they were composed of individuals, just like any other group of people. Human nature is human nature. (And THAT sort of belies my agreement with your previous quote. But perhaps I am equivocating... )

This doesn't help the 16th century case, but I thought I'd throw it out there. "The finest of their [brazil's] Sugars fells at 9 s. per Roove, and a small ill tasted Rum drawn from __ the Dregs and Mulossus, at two Testunes a Gallon." (Johnson, General History of the Most Notorious Pyrates (3rd ed.), p. 215-6)

We've established peglegs thanks to Swashbuckler.

See?

Someone (besides me - I'm too busy fashioning a unicorne) should do a search for all the topics like this that are on this board and post an index. (Don't forget striped clothing of all sorts, tats, eye patches and such like...)