John Maddox Roberts

Capnwilliam: Seems to me the store was called Waldhorn's. It was huge and mainly furniture oriented, but there was a room full of weapons and armor on one side. They'd just bought a lot of stuff at a Tower of London auction, including the pikes and a rack of Indian cavalry service talwars in khaki scabbards. I only had the $25 to spend and chose the pike. Glad I did now. The Monteleone had a big grandfather clock from Waldhorn's in their lobby, I recall. Spent many an evening tippling in their Carrousel Bar.

Goldman freely admits that he meddles with historical fact in favor of a cinematic story. There was a lot about Butch Cassidy that he wanted to use but didn't because it wouldn't fit into the movie. I suspect the Blacbeard film would likewise have been primarily fictional, with a historical base.

Goldman loves to write about odd couples: Butch & Sundance, Robin & Marian, and so forth. His idea about Stede & Blackbeard was that Stede was a rich planter who seemed to have everything but hated his life, loved the idea of piracy and wanted a life of adventure. Blackbeard had had all the adventure in the world and wanted to make a big score and retire as a rich man. Each had the life the other desired. I don't know where Goldman wanted to go with this but we can be sure that the guy who wrote The Princess Bride would have made it a fun trip.

vI had the Lucas story from Alan Dean Foster, who ghosted the first Star Wars novelization (which had Lucas's name on it). He said he wrote the second novel, "Splinter of the Mind's Eye," set on a foggy planet to cut costs if they had to go low-budget.

Breaking the screenplay down into a shooting script, storyboarding, all that stuff gets done long before photography starts. After principal photography starts, then they start rewriting everything, especially if the star wants his/her role rewritten to make him/her even more adorable. Happens all the time. But if they don't even have a screenplay ready - Lord, how Disney hath fallen. Ol' Walt has to be spinning in his grave (though I've heard he had his head frozen.) And, when a new guy takes over a studio, everything his predecessor did, however successful, becomes poison. That's showbiz, folks.

Chances are that the script for the sequal was finished before POTC came out. That's routinely done these days when anticipating a monster hit. It saves time, which in Hollywood is money just like everywhere else.The writing is the cheapest part, anyway, so it's false economy to save dough by waiting until you know you'll have a big budget before you hire a writer. Everyone remembers how George Lucas got caught flat-footed without a sequel script when the original Star Wars turned out to be the most successful movie in history. In fact, he was making preparations for a low-budget sequel in case the movie only broke even. I'd bet that the POTC2 script is already being broken down for shooting right now.

I've just been reading William Goldman's book "Which Lie Did I Tell?" the second volume of his "adventures in the screen trade." Goldman wrote such nifty items as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and "The Princess Bride." In the 80s he was on top of a string of hits and had a three-movie deal with a producer. One of hisscripts, approved and green-lighted, was called "The Sea Kings." It was to be about Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. For the usual Hollywood reasons (primarily budget) the movie and the other two never got made and Goldman went into a leper period when he couldn't sell anything. By the time he was back on his feet epic movies were out and he figured "Cutthroat Island" killed the pirate genre forever. The book was published in 2000. I wonder if the success of POTC and the revival of epic movies generally will make him change his mind. We can always hope.

Just read an article about the Yangtse River Patrol (in Shotgun News, of all places.) It states that the Patrol was apparently the last organization in the U.S. Navy to be issued cutlasses. They had both the 1917 and 1860 pattern, (more of the 60s) and they show up on ship's inventories right up through the 1930s. So we may have here the last U.S. sailors who packed cutlasses.

Not to mention what it must've smelled like. In Kenya years ago I bought a Maasai throwing stick that had been smoked and polished with goat fat. For years afterward, people would ask what was that weird smell in my study.

To correct the false impression given by movies like "Ben Hur,": ancient galleys of the Mediterranean were not rowed by slaves, but by free men. In Athens and many other Greek maritime cities, the poorer men, who could not afford the armor of hoplites, rowed the galleys instead. It was not a degraded calling, because rowing an ancient, multi-banked galley required great skill, it was not just pull-and-heave. Besides, once ships were locked together, the rowers could fight, unlike chained slaves, and so added to your fighting force. Roman galleys, likewise, were rowed by free men, though they certainly had plenty of slave labor. The far simpler galleys of the Middle Ages had only a single bank of oars to each side and required little but muscle power. These were indeed rowed by slaves and POWs. At least one Grand Master of the Knights of Malta put in a stint rowing a Turkish galley. Spain continued to use galleys right up into the 19th century. At first they were rowed by Muslim power, later by Protestant power. France used galleys as well. but they were little more than floating prisons, used mainly for towing ships during a calm. The design was no good on the high seas, but small, shallow-draft vessels like Kidd's Adventure Galley could be rowed during calms and taken up creeks and so forth.

Capnwiliam: It depends on what your personal mania be. If you're into swords, you're going to part with a lot of money. The last couple of decades there have been many offerings of swords from good-quality medieval replicas costing a hundred or two (we won't mention the absolute junk here) on up to fine hand-made replicas costing thousands. But smallswords have been rare at any price. Hanwei makes one at a reasonable price, but it's said to be much heavier that this Cold Steel sword. If it's of decent quality, and CS blades almost always are, $400 is a good price.

Must've been a hell of a dialect he was teaching, since the English language didn't exist in the time of Richard I. The court spoke Norman French and the natives were still speaking Anglo-Saxon (actually, Anglo-Saxon refers to the culture, the language is Old English, as in Beowulf.)

On accents changing quickly: When Scorsese was filming "The Gangs of New York," much thought was given to reconstruct a "native" New York accent of the mid-1800s, as spoken by Daniel Day Lewis. One of their sources was an Edison recording of Walt Whitman reciting a few lines of verse, revealing that certain words were pronounced differently back then, a sort of paleo-Brooklyn. An elderly English lady traveling in the American South in the 18th century noted that the distinctive southern drawl sounded like the fashionable speech at the late Stewart court of her youth. The clipped, Oxford accent became the standard court speech in Hanoverian times. If you're interested in the subject of regional accents and how they change, the Library of Congress has been collecting recordings of them since the 20s. Every couple of decades they go back and have natives read the same paragraphs. The most recent survey had some surprising findings: In some areas the accents had actually grown stronger since early in the last century.

I may have been at this longer than anyone else here - around half a century (God, how that thought makes me depressed.) Around '51 or '52, we had a kid's book called "Pirates, Ships and Sailors." My brother would read the stories and I was fascinated by the pictures. The first real novel I read was "Treasure Island," around '56. Been into the subject ever since. Saw the Disney "Treasure Island" when it came out and saw all the Flynn and other Hollywood pirate movies in the early days of television. Got into everything nautical as a result except for one thing. I found to my horror that I am a wretched sailor! In '74 I worked on a Scottish trawler on the North Sea and learned all the permutations of nausea. It didn't stop until we got back to the calm waters of the Firth of Forth. I like to imagine the Caribbean of the old days as quieter.

As a spinoff from another thread, let's discuss the "pirate accent." Classically, it seems to have been invented by Robert Newton for his portrayal of Long John Silver in the Disney Treasure Island. Of course, to do it Newton style you have to roll your eyes and wiggle your eyebrows with every syllable. This pirate accent may be described as "West Country plus nautical jargon." In reality, in the Golden Age, a large number of pirates were from the American colonies, so a pirate was as likely to be from Boston or Charleston as from Bristol. Plus, many were non-English speaking. Is there any evidence what American accents were like in the late 17th-early 18th centuries? I suspect they didn't sound nearly as cool as we do, with our own made-up pirate accents.

Mate Carrie, It be: http://www.coldsteel.com/csstoreonline/new.html

Avast! Check out Cold Steel's website. At least three new weapons of interest to pirates! First, a nice-looking smallsword for the more elegant pirate. Then, a serious-looking naval dirk - plain handle and 16" blade, a real weapon. And for the Highlander gone to sea, a Scottish dirk. Have a look. That smallsword has me drooling.

Mate Hawkins: Most of us are serious scholars of the pirate field. We are also pirates for fun. On the serious side, I, too, am a skeptic, as all scholars should be. I am skeptical most of all of things I would most like to believe. The will to believe has been the pitfall of many a reputable scholar. Need I say more than: "the Hitler Diaries?" A number of fine scholars had their reputations ruined by falling for that transparent hoax. They just wanted to believe it so much. On the fun side, half the fun of being a pirate is talking in a ridiculous accent and spouting pseudo-nautical jargon. As near as I can tell, the stereotypical pirate accent was invented by Robert Newton for his impersonation of Long John Silver in the Disney "Treasure Island." In British theater actors use "Mummerset," an undefined but vaguely rural British accent that belongs to no real locale. Our little subculture uses a nautical version of the same. When we play pirate, we like to dress up authentically and we argue endlessly over arms and clothing, but I've never seen a modern pirate who had his teeth pulled for authenticity, or lash stripes administered by plastic surgery, or even a few syphilitic lesions. So, scholarship where it's required, fun the rest of the time.

I want one of those Hollywood pirate ships. You know the kind: a towering galleon with a captain's cabin the size of a basketball court with overheads not only high enough to stand upright, but to hang chandeliers from and lots of furniture that never rolls around in a heavy sea and chests spilling doubloons to prop my feet on and--- well, you know the drill.

The Bloody Scupper

It's worth it for a single scene: The estimable Frank Langella as Captain Dawg, cutlass in hand, in the midst of a chaotic, deck battle pauses, looks around wistfully at all the carnage and says, half-whispering: "God I love this." And you think a lion is out of place? In Le Golif's supposed memoir he once crosses Jamaica on foot and is menaced by "tigers" and a 70-foot serpent! This in addition to the ghosts he occasionally runs into.

"Tha Pirates Own Book" (1834) has about 10 pages on Low. Unfortunately, it's a popular broadside-style history, and neglects to give things like dates. Low does seem to have been a nasty, vicious, murderous, treacherous bastard - our kinda guy. And his crew were a pack of psychopathic, homicidal lunatics who would "kill a man from good humor as much as from anger and passion." Surely a model for all of us to follow.

It's been my impression that, at Crecy, when the French got their unpleasant introduction to the longbow, armor was still principally mail. Mail is rather easily penetrated by a bodkin point. But, more importantly, the great storms of arrows killed almost all the French horses. It's only in movies that men ride into arrows or bullets and the riders topple off the horses while the horses trot off unscathed. A horse presents ten times the target a man does. Imagine hundreds of horses going down with every volley of arrows. Probably more knights died of broken necks and suffocation than arrow wounds. At Poities the French tried to avoid this by attacking dismounted, but heavily armored knights don't make very effective infantry. By Agincourt plate armor was the norm, but the horses were still vulnerable. Those elaborate horse armors you see in museums were never common. A knight could go broke just paying for his own harness, forget the horse.

Capnwilliam: I forgot to mention: back in '72 I was in New Orleans and wandered into an antique shop on Royal near the Monteleone Hotel. I walked out toting a Royal Navy boarding pike. Cost me $25.00! I still have it.

In Richard McKenna's novel "The Sand Pebbles" he mentions cutlasses being distributed to shore parties during hostilities. This was in the Yangtse River Patrol in 1925. McKenna was there just a few years after the events he described, so maybe as late as '25 American Navy men were packing cutlasses ashore. Cap'n William: On the other hand, I bought my Randall #1 for all of $28.00. In mint condition (mine has been hard-used these 38 years) it would cost right alongside those cutlasses.