Mission

I think somewhere in Rod Colfield's notes (or perhaps another inventory), there was at least one record of more than one beverage being consumed by a patron. I'm pretty sure from my days working at a historic site that was also a tavern/inn, that multiple beverages were available, as well as food, lodging, fodder for horses, etc.(depending on the establishment). The art work bears this up, in that you can see different types of bottles and punch bowls on some tables in tavern scenes. Not to be puckish, but this is one of those questions I can't even imagine us needing proof for. Unless there was some cultural more that was so strong and overriding (and thus, probably codified in some sort of law) it would have almost certainly been the case that someone somewhere in the many, many cultures that existed at that time would have hit upon the idea that they could get more customers if they offered variety. And when it worked, others would have taken the idea elsewhere in their travels and the idea would spread virally. (This also assumes that no one had thought of it in the many centuries before in which drinking establishments existed and the deciding point to offer variety occurred in our period.)

Absolutely. I love that line. "That's ridiculous!" "So's the job." You know, there only seem to be a few of us still around doing this. (Which makes it hard if we don't know the movie.)

HB2U Mary! (I hate arriving late to these parties. All the good comments are always taken.)

Wait...so...your avatar photo is you? Wow. It was so good I thought it was a movie still. (You should definitely go for that last look when you're on Duvall.)

I really wanted to get a clyster syringe for this auction, but not very many came up on eBay this year (seriously...this WHOLE year) and the ones that did went for $60+ which I doubted it would fetch in the auction. Ah, well.

Actually, Etsy has its own topic. (In fact, I see you already found it.)

Bet she plays a villainess, the Queen or the head of MI-1 (the Jack Sparrow "period" equivalent of MI-6).

And I don't even want to think about what sort of food the black pirate would be vending...

Chicken is fowl. A mathematical equation? Really? Does it use calculus? Lessee...integrate the attendance curve...apply Euler's (pronounced 'oiler's') power function...

I split this out of the Tavern discussion since it's gone off in its own direction. Note that I added all the relevant posts from the Tavern topic to Grymm's first post. According to the Wiki on this outfit: This completely jives with my research. The airborne theory of fever transmission held sway for millennia. In fact, I found so many references to the airborne theory of fever that I plan to put a whole section in my book on this topic. However, I doubt this would ever be seen on a ship as worn by a ship's surgeon. The very nature of the outfit implies it would be land-bound. A "plague"-infested ship would have no need of the full costume. Still, for those interested, a replica of the mask can be purchased here, although $150 seems a bit steep to me. But what a great Hallowe'en costume this would make!

What is the mask? It sort of looks like a macaw...or Adam Maitland.

Not to get off topic, but...oh, what the hell... So...seeing this I can't help but wonder; would it be PC for me to wear a mask like that at an event? It would be so cool and we have period evidence...sort of. (Don't even bet I wouldn't do it. You'll lose.) Speaking of PC (or, perhaps, non-PC) Man cannot live by beer alone, but add brown bread and life is just about sustainable... This reminded me of a favorite pun I recall reading in the Hart-to-Hart parody in Mad Magazine Issue 224 (July 1981): Ok, sorry, back to the topic at hand...

What an odd topic. The book about the French buccaneers that you're referring to is The Memoirs of Père Labat, 1693-1705. It contains that account I quoted as well as other really fascinating tales about the French buccaneers. It's quite diverting; I highly, highly recommend it. If you want to research Scottish pirates, you might try Eric J. Graham's Seawolves: Pirates & the Scots. I don't recall anything specifically about religion (although neither was I looking for such when I read it), but I found it to be of at least passing interest.

If you read my comments closely, I am using modern methods of proof, not modern conceptions of the past. My last paragraph was stuck in there to show that behaviors vary widely today and human behavior is sort of like that. Do you disagree? Reasonably guess? Ah, common knowledge. Part of that paper was spent disproving "common knowledge" about women in bars. You can't reliably use "common knowledge" to justify anything. (Half the well-researched books today on history spend a lot of there time looking closer at and disproving common knowledge.) We all have faced the problem that the publicly perceived 'common knowledge' about pirates comes from incorrect Howard Pyle drawings, the book Treasure Island and mid 20th century movies.But again, I think all sorts of stuff could and did happen. That doesn't mean it was SOP. Several people have implied that this is general behavior without supplying any actual proof. The court records are proof, but I explained why you shouldn't rely exclusively on them to make your point. As for drinking a lot, I know regular sailors drank quite a bit shipboard from reading different journals and accounts. So drinking appears to have been a lot more prevalent then as Hurricane suggests, which also indicates that tolerances for alcohol were greater. (Unless you think their physiology was different then.)

I'm inclined to agree, in the sense that satire, to be effective, must be based very firmly on reality. Good satire (such as Hogarth and Ward) is not about making up stuff that didn't happen, but about ridiculing the stuff that did. Being a satirist myself, I quite agree. However it is impossible to know the degree of fact vs. exaggeration employed unless the satirist indicated the actual event on which the satire was based. So you cannot call such things historical proof, only hints at what may have happened. Surely two such veteran historical researchers would agree with that.I have agreed that all sorts of behaviors likely took place. Get people drinking in any time or age, add a rowdy patronage and human nature and you're apt to see all manner of things going on. To quote myself from an earlier post: The broader question (I think) is what was the general behavior in such places. With this in mind, I'd advise one and all to be cautious not to focus only on the police or court reports as your evidence. Usually only the exceptional things get reported there and they necessarily focus on the most aberrant behaviors. To use this as your primary evidence is to ignore the vast body of other, non-court related evidence he presented. Saying "this must be the prevalent behavior" while ignoring the more general, if not always as easily accessed, daily records and reports is an easy mistake that must be guarded against if you really want get a true understanding of historical behaviors. (This is a statistical error - easily accessed data on a statistically small minority is used to prove a hypothesis while data on a much larger, sometimes less easily counted majority is ignored. It's occasionally called the silent majority error.) Mr Cofield actually presents quite a bit of non-court/police data - more than you normally find on such topics, in fact. Think about this in terms of something we can observe in our own environment. Our court documents and police blotters present the worst moments in time, not the more general ones. If you were to extrapolate our behavior in bars using only court reports, police reports (and noir films), you'd think our bars were dangerous, riotous places to be. But we know most of them aren't. Even the ones that show up in reports frequently are only that way at certain times, when certain groups of people show up and engage in certain collective behaviors.

Huh. A very thorough examination into the role of women in bar, public houses and ordinaries. Well worth reading. "...Marcia Schmidt-Blain and Natalie Zacek have looked at women proprietors in New Hampshire and the British West Indies... [From footnote 4: "The St. Christopher’s percentage is found in Natalie Zacek, “Women and Work in the Cities and Towns of the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies,” paper presented at the 2002 meeting of the Bi-Annual Southern Labor Studies Conference in Miami, and at the Staff Work-in-Progress Seminar of the Department of History at the University of Manchester, March 2007..."]" (p. 2) Ah, to point! Proof of women owning drinking establishments in the Caribbean. That might be a dissertation worth reading for our little club here. Those of you who were earlier interested in prostitution (at least in the states) may want to skip down to p. 7. There you will also find some stories that might amuse the misogynists. But I digress from what interests me... "And as an interesting case involving murder from St. Christopher’s [Kitts] in the West Indies shows us, the public houses down there also hired women. This case, from 1753, involved Patience Dorset who had been hired to help with the lieutenant-general’s celebration of King George II’s birthday at Alexander McCabee’s establishment. At the party, Patience overheard John Barbot tell a group of men gathered on the porch that he was going to kill “a certain gentleman” within a fortnight. Patience’s testimony helped convince the jurors to recommend the death penalty for Barbot since this was a premeditated action." (p. 14) "Going forward to the mid-1640s, Adam Eyre’s diary includes many references to he, his wife, and other women enjoying public houses without any concerns that they were undertaking immoral actions. One such entry states that Adam borrowed a horse “to carry my wife and myself to John Shawe’s” an alehouse in Swindenwall. At the alehouse, Eyre and his wife met a few other couples with who they had already planned this gathering. As Eyre wrote, “we met this day only to be merry." [Footnote 46: As quoted in A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex and Gender, page 75]" (p. 18) He goes on from there forward in time with loads of different references and situations, but I don't want to steal all his material. Read the pdf. One last one, "I was able to find many interesting references to women in public houses. At various times during the early 18th century, a Charles County ordinary keeper, Thomas Orrell, like many of his fellow publicans, sued some of his patrons for nonpayment of debts. When William Watt was sued, the account reference for May 18 indicates that Watts’ wife drank 2 pottles of cider in Orrell’s establishment." (p. 23) I put that there because I like the word 'pottle.' Pottle, pottle, pottle. I also look forward to the discussion on "the apparently underappreciated role of monkeys in taverns." Lob has expressed much delight that so thorough a researcher is turning his attention to this subject.

PiPmas...

What's opening and fantastically in bloom in that garden is your wallet... I always carry a camera at PiP. I made the mistake of hardly using mine in 2007. I just stick it in my garb pocket and haul it out when I see something happening that needs to be saved for posterity. I do that at every event - otherwise I'd not be able to illustrate half the stuff in the Surgeon's Journals. (In fact, if someone invited me to an event where cameras were not allowed, I probably wouldn't go for that reason alone.)

Ah, yessssssssss. Mae snakes. "Lethal! Lethal these snakes! Born killers!"

. My question is, what will he do with it when he gets it?

Don't look now, but Patrick has gone all Dr. Frankenstein on us... It's ok so long as one of the women isn't Patrick himself...remember Hallowe'en...

I do want to hear what Mae has to say about child-rearing. I just talked with Lily and I will be hanging around talking about period surgery stuff after the battle each day.

The Green Parrot bar (which is straight down the Southard a few blocks from the Pegasus heading SW - it's on the left on the corner of Whitehead) is also a great place to meet some of the locals. Last time I was there, the drinks were pretty reasonable too (for Key West). Still, you won't find more reasonable prices than with the rest of the pirates. If you find the right bunch and go barhopping the tourist girls in the bars might buy drinks for you. (Well that's what I heard... )

I think everyone is invited to hang with the Mercury Crew. We're kind of like that. It would be helpful if you posted a photo of yourself in your profile so we know who we're looking for (preferably in garb - we all seem look different in plain clothes - well, most of us). I came to PiP 2007 not knowing a soul and was immediately greeted by the ambassadress of PiP, Mama Ratsey (aka. Fayma Callahan). Then I met Harry (who is since gone to live in some godforsaken southwest state) and Papa Ratsey and the Sacred Heart Scooby Gang. Then I met THE quartermaster, William Redwake, Haunting Lily and Keith/Edward/Darth and it was all good. There are very friendly folks at PiP and even though I didn't know a one of them, they made me feel very welcome when I introduced myself. Personally, I have stayed for several weeks in Key West totally solo and had a fine time just staggering around exploring the island and Duvall street. If you get really bored, rent a moped for three hours and become a hazard to everyone on the road. (You won't get that bored, but put that card in your hip pocket in case you do.)