Oops

You did not seriously consider that those kind of boots were worn by a sailor (the guys working in the rigging) for one second, right?

Certainly I did. Not every sailor is a topman; there are fo'csle hands, waisters, afterguard, and officers too. I suppose even topmen might have saved such things to go ashore in.

No, Daniel. This thread started with the suggestion that instead of people (who aren't interested in being historically accurate) making a lame attempt at justifying their crushed velvet "frock coats" (which are period for about 1985) and bucket boots, that they just say, "I wear these because I like to wear 'em." No one wearing a goth coat they got on eBay is wearing anything that could have been plundered without a time machine! So any historical justification is ludicrous in the extreme!

I don't think anyone would dispute that. If a certain item never existed in the period, obviously it couldn't be stolen by the period's people.

The example of Landsknechts not wearing their plunder is still a good example of why wearing fancy clothing and calling yourself a common pirate isn't justifiable historically.  I can list tons and tons of things taken by the Landsknechten during the Seige of Milan.  But still, you never seen any of them wearing it.

Now you're talking about something completely different; saying that fancy stuff that IS period can't be worn by common pirates, because landsknechts didn't wear the fancy clothing of their own period. But pirates were in fact seen wearing some items that were on the cargo list for the Providence, a plundered vessel. Taffeta ribbon, for instance. And pirates were not at the bottom of a social hierarchy, as you say landsknechts were, but were outlaws who in some cases chose their own leaders. So no parallel exists with German soldiers from a different era in another place.

Don't you also find it strange that there were all these fancy clothes on ships taken by privateers but none of the depictions of pirates show them particularly well dressed?

I have seen many depictions of pirates very well dressed, but I would not trust those depictions since they were not made by eyewitnesses nor, so far as I can tell, were they based on eyewitness descriptions. Nor, for the same reason, can I trust most of the depictions of pirates plainly dressed. Every time I see a pirate picture in a book there's never more than a caption and, if I'm lucky, the name of the collection it came from. No basis for me to judge authenticity there.

The simple truth is that clothing isn't as easy to carry or convert into something useful as gold and jewels were.  What would you rather do with your plunder?  How much joy do those silk stockings really give you?  Or would you rather have the two pounds five? 

Me? I'd take the money. But the question isn't what I would do, but what pirates did. And we can't just throw out the evidence reported by eyewitnesses of what pirates wore at their hangings or how Bartholomew Roberts dressed for his last battle because we personally would have done something different.

But thanks for the fabulous lists!

You're welcome.

Not the Batavia, but a shipwreck.

"dear mr. Peterson,

The boots showed in the picture are from a ship that sunk roundabout 1625 in the Zuiderzee (on the location where now the Lelystad is located). It was a so called beurtschip, for the transport of cargo and passengers. There is one person in the Netherlands who knows everything about archaeological shoes and boots. You could write him a letter:

greetings

Vie van Steenbergen

Dep.Communication ROB/NISA

Pure gold, Petee. Thanks for the work.

Since this was a cargo boat, these boots might have been meant for sale to landsmen, rather than being worn by a sailor.

For some reason, I can recall more film and artistic representations of bucket-booted Dutchmen than bucket-booted Englishmen. Were bucket boots more popular in the Netherlands than elsewhere?

I know they had some clothing requirements, but how about diet? Did they drink beer or wine?

Somewhere, maybe in Alister McGrath's biography of John Calvin, I read that the average Puritan was "no ascetic" because "he found it a serious hardship to drink water when the beer ran out."

I believe McGrath misinterpreted the facts. Beer was drunk not merely for fun in those days, but because it was much safer than water, which was often contaminated with cholera and God knows what else. Nevertheless, while the Puritans could be plenty ascetic about some things, they saw no shame in drinking beer in moderation.

I don't know the Puritan stance on drinking wine, although I know that John Calvin, whose theology was the foundation of Puritanism, approved wine drinking in moderation. But note that "Sunday blue laws," which forbid drinking alcohol on Sundays, are a New England Puritan invention.

Hi, Pub Management?

Daniel here. I screwed up my ability to post. My old e-mail address, derby@joplin.com, expired some weeks ago. I decided to change it to danimal@pyracy.com, but when I changed it I couldn't get my validation e-mail. So here I am, reregistered under the appropriately embarrassing nickname of "Oops." I sent off an e-mail yesterday to pyracy@graysail.com, but I don't know if it ever got there. Is there anything to be done to revive my old account?

Er, hi. This is Daniel again, but I've screwed up my regular account and can't post from it. Thus I am appearing temporarily under the humiliating moniker "Oops."

I note that this thread started with the claim that pirates cannot justify unusually fine clothing by saying they stole it, because, as with German landsknechts, their superior officers would take it from them. The Davis/La Buse incident suggests that the very opposite was sometimes true with pirates; the pirates would demand that their superior officers yield up their finery to the men.

Foxe wrote,

My question is just how much finery was there available to steal at sea? . . . In the Caribbean in the GAoP the vast majority of prizes were small merchantmen manned by four men and a dog*- their clothing might have been less tattered than the pirates', but it would still have been common seamen's clothing.

I would point out that there was far more clothing to steal than just the crew's own clothes. Clothing was also cargo. And the clothing in the seamen's chests was sometimes surprisingly good.

As it happens, I have inventories of two prizes that show some of the clothing available to be plundered, from J. Franklin Jameson's Privateering and Privacy in the Colonial Period.

The merchantman Providence was taken by a privateer en route from Falmouth, England to Virginia in 1673. Here are the clothes that she had aboard (I exclude clothes plainly labeled as women's, since the vast majority of pirates would not have worn this).

13 pairs of French falls (collars)

11 pairs plain shoes

6 pairs men's woolen hose

12 pairs Irish cloth hose

2 old hats

2 new shirts

20 pairs worsted hose

1 coat (worn)

1 doublet (worn)

2 pairs breeches (worn)

22 pairs men's French falls

4 pairs pumps with heels

12 pairs boys and girls shoes

30 men's plain shoes

24 pairs men's French falls

10 pairs men's plain shoes

40 pairs French falls and wooden heel shoes for men and women

18 pairs men's plain shoes

2 pairs boys' plain shoes

66 low crown black hats

3 gowns

2 Jasto Corps (justaucorps)

4 stuffe coats for men

2 stuffe vests for boys

2 boys' little coats

2 children's coats

2 scarlet parragon (double camlet) coats

2 children's parragon coats

1 boy's coat

5 coats and breeches for men

2 men's cloaks

12 men's white worsted hose, rat-eaten

23 low crown black hats

16 pieces of taffeta ribbon, several colors

20 pieces black taffeta ribbon

1,728 coat buttons

3 straw hats

[items below are marked as having been taken from the seamen's chests]

Chest 1

2 pairs children's hose

144 breast buttons

1 silk neck cloth

1 demity waist coat

1 old shirt

1 coat

1 pair breeches

Chest 2

12 pairs men's white worsted hose

5 foul shirts

3 pairs foul drawers

1 pair fine gloves

2 stuffe coats

1 pair breeches, waistcoat and jacket

1 waistcoat and jacket more

1 pair new and 3 pair old shoes

1 pair yarn stockings

3 neckcloths

2 pairs hose

Chest 3

6 men's coats

1 stuffe pair breeches and doublet

3 pairs cloth breeches

1 old doublet

2 pairs Irish stockings

3 pairs children's hose

5 boy's hats

1 periwig

2 white tiffany hoods

2 pairs of gloves

3 bands (collars), 1 laced

2 pairs of sleeves

276 buttons

1 child's silk cap

How much of this was "fine" is not clear, but such items as fine gloves, a lace collar, a silk neckcloth, a periwig, scarlet double camlet coats, and tiffany hoods certainly sound pretty fancy.

We may note, as a contribution to the Never-Ending Debate, that there are many shoes but no boots.

The Dutch merchantman Willem was taken by privateers in 1745 while en route from Amsterdam to Curacao. It did not have nearly as much clothing as the Providence, but unlike with the former ship we have some idea of its value.

Item Value

504 men's and women's gloves 126 pounds

1 pair silk stockings 2 pounds 5 shillings

6 pairs embroidered vamps for

shoes and slippers 6 pounds

2 pr. stockings & 1 pr. mittens 5 pounds (!)

1 pair fustian breeches, 6 pairs

sleezes, 2 pair cotton stockings 12 pounds

Total value of clothing: 151 pounds, 5 shillings.

Note the value of the gloves comes to 10 shillings a pair, more than the price of a whole kersey jacket from the Navy slops! I would guess that these were pretty good gloves.

*I assume Foxe is speaking figuratively when he says "four men and a dog." Johnson's General History usually reports considerably larger crews than four men aboard pirates' prizes.