John Maddox Roberts

Just wait a bit, it'll come to ye.

If we're down to complaining about scarf joints, that's a sign we don't have much to complain about. I'll be watching this tomorrow night and from what I've read here, it sounds really good. By the way, I've examined many skulls from this period and earlier, and often they have fine teeth, better than most peoples' now. It was the 19th century, with abundant cheap sugar and generally poor dietary habits brought about by industrial-era urban squalor that caused severe tooth problems, so pirates with good teeth don't cause me distress, though they should be stained by tobacco, tea and infrequent cleaning. In fact, gum problems would have been more distressing than teeth problems, but these would have affected older people, and pirates were mostly young men.

The first recorded case of mooning is from Flavius Josephus's "The Great Roman-Jewish War." Josephus says that in 66 AD a Roman soldier on the temple steps in Jerusalem turned his back, bent over and flipped up his tunic hem, exposing his buttocks to a large crowd of Jewish pilgrims in Jerusalem for a festival. This touched off a riot in which several thousand people were killed. They really knew how to have fun back in those days.

The handle is pretty standard for a Russian/Caucasian kindjal. The blade could go either way. The Russian long kindjal was usually curved, but straight, single-edged blades like this one were common. I'd say Russian, 19th-early 20th century. Scabbard and hangar are pretty similar to a Czarist era military kindjal.

I should amend what I wrote above. While we never see people prior to the mid-20th century holding a pistol with both hands on the butt or one hand supporting the other, we sometimes see or read about a person making a long shot resting the pistol barrel across the left forearm (assuming he's right-handed). This is two-handed shooting of a sort.

I remember when two-handed pistol shooting first appeared in the movies and television. I believe the first instance was when James Coburn made a long-distance pistol shot in "The Magnificent 7." Soon it was standard in the Bond films and tv spy shows like "I Spy" and "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." I don't know of a single art work showing a handgun being used with two hands from before that period. As to the famous inaccuracy of the Brown Bess, even period writers said that it was due to the very poor and crooked bores of the government contract arms, and that it would shoot quite accurately when "true-bored" which was a rarity.

American whaling ships (ref. Moby Dick) often sailed from New England ports with no more than a half-crew and picked up sailors on islands in the Caribbean, Polynesia, or wherever they sailed. The temporary sailors were dropped off at home on the way back. Many of these islands had a tradition of supplying sailors so there must have been a tradition of understanding simple orders, hand signals or the like. After all, you don't have to be fluent in a language to understand "all hands aloft!," "Shorten sail" or the like. When in the Army in the '60s, I knew many Puerto Ricans and others whose English was very shaky but had no trouble absorbing standard orders, drill and so forth. And probably, a few swift smacks from a rope's end helped.

The tulip makes an elegant variation on the shell-guard, which has always been one of my favorites. Is there a historical precedent or was this personal inspiration?

This concept was used in the novel "The Sand Pebbles." Granted it took place on the Yangtse River Patrol in the 1920s, the concept goes back a ways. The character Jake Holman (played by Steve McQueen in the movie)boards the boat and soon things start going wrong. The sailors conclude he's a Jonah. So: New crewman boards a ship where life was previously uneventful, bad things start to happen, and the new guy gets blamed for it, He's a Jonah. Understandable sailors' superstition, plus it has Biblical precedent.

It makes me wonder if many African pirates managed to escape hanging by claiming to have been slaves.

What is the nonwhite handle scale material? I love these knives.

250,000? There were a quarter of a million artifacts found in the wreckage? Man, that Blackbeard was one acquisitive dude!

Is there historical precedent for a copper buttplate? I've seen iron and brass. Sure looks cool in any case.

I should have made myself clearer. My meaning was that, if you can interest an editor, he or she will be willing to work with you in finding a ghostwriter. It is the publishers who issue the checks, nobody else. It is almost impossible to get the services of a decent agent of you aren't already published. I had to sell my first novel on my own. Many people these days don't use agents anyway, preferring intellectual property lawyers or just representing themselves. When I started more than thirty years ago the publishing business was located almost exclusively in New York and if you didn't live there yourself, you about had to have a NY-based agent to do business. That is fast changing. E-books are the wave of the future, but I've never done that and don't have any advice. I highly recommend Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog (kriswrites.com). Nobody keeps on top of the publishing industry like Kris and you have to be very careful about contracts these days. They've gotten really cutthroat and they weren't exactly benevolent to begin with. Good luck.

Do not, under any circumstances, trust anyone who takes money to work on or market or in any way have anything to do with your book. They are all, without exception, scammers. I'd suggest going to writer's conventions of which there are many, national and regional. These are attended not only by writers but by editors, agents, publishers, etc. For instance, Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, will be held September 15-18th in St. Louis. there are many others but the national cons have the most professionals. It's editors you want to interest. Don't be shy, just walk right up to them and tell them what you've got. If you get their attention, they'll want to hear more. You want to talk to writers, offer to buy them a drink. Look for panels on subjects similar to your material. At a mystery con, there are always True Crime panels, which is where whistleblowing would come in. Check and see what sort of literary conventions are held in your area. It's a worthwhile investment and if nothing else you'll have a good time.

Kenneth Asbury's "The Gangs of New York" mentions Maggie the Goat, who bossed a gang of 19th-century river pirates that plundered anchored ships and barges in New York harbor and along the rivers, sometimes attacking isolated farms along the shore. Far from the GAOP and altogether a pretty sad-sack lot of pirates, but pirates nonetheless.

I recall reading many years ago a history of the pox that quoted a description of 16th-century German soldiers (romping merrily over Europe during the Religious Wars)nearly all of whom had the pox and whose faces sported not only open lesions, but also warty growths and excrescenses memorably described as "..some turned upward and pointed like horns, others twisting downward like spigots." This was during the first great wave of syphilis that swept through Europe, when the disease killed people much more swiftly and featured more colorful and picturesque symptoms.

Finbar Furey sings "New York Girls" in the Scorsese film, "Gangs of New York."

Much later, but it was also resorted to in the Confederate states during the U.S. civil War, because of a dire shortage of paper.

Another little problem with bucket boots: the "bucket" part. Christopher Lee wrote about an unpleasant experience he had early in his career in a pirate movie (he made several). One scene had him and his comrades wading through a swamp. The scene was tropical, but it was shot in a studio tank and the water was frigid. To make it worse, he was wearing bucket boots for the role and they filled with several gallons of water, which weighs about 8 lbs. per gallon. He only had to walk a few dozen yards, but each step required him to lift a huge weight of water and boot. He said he was all but dead when he got out and could barely walk or even sit up for days thereafter. As to sailors and swimming, I've read that there was an old sailor's superstition (imagine that!) that if you could swim, you were more likely to drown. Seems the spirits of the sea took it as presumption. If you were a good sailor and couldn't swim, they were more likely to throw a spar or keg or something your way should the ship founder. I could be true.

As part of your impression, remember that being an itinerant knife-and-scissors grinder puts you pretty close to the bottom of the working class, about the equivalent of a 20th century shoe-shine boy. This could entail a lot of forelock-tugging. On the plus side, the calling had quite a few nice street cries, "Knives to grind! Scissors to grind!" being about the simplest. There are some good studies of British street cries to be found, some of them including recordings. This is something often lacking in reenactment. Most of us don't imagine how noisy cities were during the day, with everyone with goods or services to sell bellowing at the top of their lungs, trying to outshout the competition. It's a great idea. As an aside, in "A Tramp Abroad" Mark Twain describes a German grinder whose specialty was sharpening the swords used by the Heidelberg duelling fraternities. He said, "After he was done, you could shave with a blade he'd sharpened."

How about addressing the presence and influence of syphilis among the pirates? Both the disease itself and the need for medicines to treat it. Of course the disease was everywhere at the time, but it was especially rife among armies, navies and pirates.

Pete, Email sent

Is there a manufacturer's mark? Should be Armi San Marco, Pietta or Uberti.

Arr, sorry mate pegleg. It were the rum talkin'.