Daniel

The Wooden Horse, in New York City, was a "particular favorite of sailors," and was noted for "drunken brawls, sometimes involving knives, cutlasses, and pikes." Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, p. 54. The tavern was founded in the 1650s and stood until the great fire of 1776, spanning the whole Golden Age. There's no specific reference to pirates there, as obviously any sailors with piratical inclinations or histories wouldn't talk about it openly. But to me it is almost inconceivable that Kidd would not have recruited at the Wooden Horse, having arrived in New York with most of his English crew lost to the press gang, and we all know how those New York City recruits turned out once they got within reach of easy booty in the Indian Ocean. Not to mention what they did when Culliford invited them to join his pirate crew.

The very best to you, old chum!

Wishing you only the best, old friend.

I've seen Pirates of Blood River and The Devil-Ship Pirates, both featuring Christopher Lee. Pirates of Blood River is kind of blah. The idea is Christopher Lee in an eyepatch, and yes, Christopher Lee in an eyepatch is an arresting sight, but it's not enough to carry the whole movie. But The Devil-Ship Pirates is friggin' awesome! Lee sheds the accent for this one and makes a super villain, and the setup is tense as all hell, a sort of 16th century version of The Desperate Hours. Regrettably, Hammer never made any more pirate films after The Devil-Ship Pirates, because they lost their pirate ship in an accident during shooting.

OK, the shirt is as done as it's going to get before Halloween; everything is finished except the slit gussets and the stitching on the hem. For the cuffs, would buttons or hooks and eyes be more period?

By the way, I was wrong about the blue and white checked linen; it was only 51% linen and 49% rayon. So I'm going with a plain linen instead.

Just a cutting diagram. I'm going to hand sew with silk thread (couldn't find linen thread). I found a diagram here from 1769 which looks pretty good: http://www.marquise.de/en/1700/howto/maenner/18hemd.shtml,

So I know a place where I can get blue and white checked linen, which I know is period material for a sailor's shirt. Does anybody know where I can get a period pattern for cutting and sewing it? Showing what kind of cuffs, collar, pleats, and stuff like that to use? Anything from 1680 to 1750 would be close enough.

Law school classes start again tomorrow. I hope I can visit here a little more during the semester than I did last year, but can't make any promises. Fair winds and following seas to all.

Not only is Brett a wonderful Holmes, but I love both the guys who play Watson. It's so much better than Nigel Bruce playing Watson as a dunderhead. In the Brett version, Watson is a smart man, who knows Holmes is smarter than he is, and takes genuine pleasure in seeing Holmes out-think him. You can tell that Holmes, if the situation were reversed, would resent seeing himself surpassed, and in that one respect Watson is a greater man than Holmes. I second the recommendation of By the Sword Divided, and would add I, Claudius. Centennial, Michener's fictionalization of Colorado's history, is superb. Masada is more of a miniseries than the type of thing you're talking about, only four episodes, but it's unmissable all the same (be sure you see the full miniseries, though; on no account should you watch the butchered feature film version of it).

That is a most awesome find, PoD! "LInes" is surely Philip Lyne, who is known to have been hanged at Curacao and to have lost an eye, but I had never heard the detailed description of his flag before! That is also the first case I have heard of a pistol figuring in an authentic Jolly Roger, although William Red Wake has made some stupendous modern pirate flags with pistols in them.

Novelty may have been one reason for setting up shops on the ice. But you also have to remember how intensely crowded London streets were, and how tough it was to find selling space there. The frozen river would have been a brief opportunity for craftsmen who couldn't afford shop space on regular streets to grab some for nothing.

Link here: http://chicagoist.co...owed_to_sue.php To sum up: in 2006, two Americans were working in Iraq for an FBI investigation of a security company suspected of corruption. They were seized and held by U.S. forces, during which time they say they were kept in freezing cold cells, deprived of sleep for days on end, deliberately slammed into walls, and threatened constantly with additional violence. They are suing the former Secretary of Defense among others. A federal court has ruled that they are allowed to sue, disagreeing with the government's argument that no one working for the U.S. government can be sued for anything that happens in a war zone. This is still a long way from a trial, so nothing has been proven yet, but a leaked U.S. government document matches the two Americans' story of how they got into military custody. http://www.iraqwarlo...m/PDF/25/13.pdf So far, so depressing, but the main thing I wanted opinion on was about how the two guys were first seized. They were working for a security company that was suspected of corruptly trading alcohol to U.S. soldiers in exchange for weapons, which weapons the company then sold to God-knows-whom. The two men say they were secretly sending information on the company to the FBI; I'm not clear on whether the FBI confirms this. The security company got suspicious of our two whistle blowers and yanked their Green Zone passes, effectively confining them to the company's compound. When they called the FBI for help, they say they got this answer: "they should interpret [the company's] actions as taking them hostage, and should barricade themselves with weapons in a room of the compound." Does that strike anyone else as incredibly bad advice? If you do that, isn't there an excellent chance that the company will report, "We have two heavily armed terrorists barricaded in our building with lots of weapons," and that the two guys could well have simply been killed before anyone figured out that they were actually FBI informants? Indeed, wasn't there a very serious threat of the company sending goons with grenades to kill the two guys themselves, and later explaining it as as a necessary response to a life-threatening emergency? The story seems so strange that only two explanations come to me. First, our two guys might be lying, at least about the part where the FBI told them to barricade themselves. Second, if they are telling the truth about it, whoever they were talking to might have been trying to set them up to be killed. At any rate, the fact that our two whistle blowers first came to the attention of the military while barricaded with guns in a security firm's arsenal might explain, though not excuse, the abominable way their captors treated them.

OK, I have no trouble accepting that a true-bored gun with a tightly fitting ball will be more accurate than a loose-fitting ball fired from a bad bore. But no matter the ball's fit or the quality of the bore, a smooth bore ball still won't spin, at least not on an axis parallel to the ball's flight path. So how can a smooth bore achieve comparable accuracy to a rifled bore?

Wow. I didn't know the idea of animal transplant surgery was that old. Also, I didn't know that the phrase "robbing Peter to pay Paul" was over 300 years old. Now that I look it up, I see it may go back as far as 1380: John Wyclif reportedly wrote: "Lord, hou schulde God approve that you robbe Petur and gif is robbere to Poule in ye name of Crist?"

Apparently, it was no romantic fiction or P.C. kowtowing when Master and Commander showed the Surprise's sailors as every color and nationality you can imagine. According to Woodes Rogers, the privateer crew of the Duke and Duchess on leaving Bristol in 1708 numbered "333, of which above one third were foreigners from most nations." That begs some questions. How did so many foreigners get aboard? The obvious answer is from foreign ships docking in England, but that explanation won't do because the Navigation Acts didn't allow foreign ships to sell much of any important commodity in Britain. Were English ships picking up foreigners in foreign ports and then bringing them back to England? Then also, how did they deal with the language problem? Did most of the foreigners speak English, or the English officers speak the crew's languages? On Navy ships, which were required to hold services in the Anglican rite every Sunday, did Scottish Presbyterians, Dutch Calvinists, Danish Lutherans, Portuguese and French Catholics, or even African Muslims participate? And knottiest of all: it must have been inevitable, what with Europe's shifting alliances and the long communication lags, that England would occasionally go to war with a country whose sailors were still on English ships. What happened then? Did the foreign sailors consent to fight against their native countries? Were they imprisoned as "enemy aliens?" Traded for English seamen in foreign service?

Mission, here's another paragraph from Rodger's Command of the Ocean that I thought might be particularly interesting to you, dealing as it does with Navy surgeons and medical care.

While reading through Rodger's Command of the Ocean I found a paragraph on slops on pages 190-91. A lot of it is redundant with what Gentleman of Fortune put in his first post, but a couple of items contain additional detail, such as the mention of shoes having buckles. I didn't read every word in the thread, but I skimmed and this doesn't appear to have been posted yet, so here goes. His endnotes, on page 679: PRO means Public Record Office, so you pretty well have to be in the UK to get at some of these sources. Notice that at this time the contracts were not in fact Admiralty at all. Rather, the Navy Board was entirely responsible for these contracts to supply the pursers, the Admiralty now being at the lowest ebb of its power and responsibility.

Thank you, gentlemen; your findings match very well with mine. Apparently when Weaver invented his two-handed stance in the late 50s, the dominant method was point shooting, which is the exact method that Captain Bo described, and which is generally done one-handed, just as he does. I'm not sure how old point shooting is, but an 1835 self-defense manual by the Baron de Berneger shows him suggesting a similar method to point shooting, and clearly suggesting practicing with one hand; indeed, he recommends learning to shoot left handed so as to keep the right hand free for other work. Can't find any paintings of pistol duels older than the 1804 Burr-Hamilton duel, but that too represents a one-handed grip (and if I were a second in a pistol duel, I would definitely not be standing that close to my principal). Another point: when WIld Bill Hickok fatally shot Davis Tutt in 1865 in Springfield, MO, at a range of 75 yards, he steadied his Colt revolver by laying the barrel across his forearm, not by gripping the butt with two hands. This would be further evidence against the popularity of the two-handed technique before the 20th century. I suppose this doesn't prove 100% that the one-handed technique was already dominant in 1700, but it seems likeliest. As for the accuracy of black powder weapons, my understanding was that it wasn't so much the black powder itself that made it inaccurate, although old style black powder didn't burn as uniformly as modern commercial black powder. But the smooth bore I have universally heard as being very inaccurate. If a Brown Bess can only hit a 12-inch gong at 150 yards 2 out of 3 times, that's quite consistent with what I've heard about its inaccuracy; when I was in practice with a quite ordinary Savage .30-06, I could put three bullets in a 4-inch circle at 200 yards, and shooters with actual talent (unlike me) can do much better than that. On the other hand, sniping squirrels at 50 yards one-handed with a smooth bore black powder pistol is way, way better than anything I've ever heard of. I think both your brother and his pistol must be well above average, considering how often pistol duelists missed each other completely at 10 to 20 paces.

I was taught to fire a pistol two-handed. I was always a lousy pistol shot even that way, but at least I could group 7 shots about 3 to 6 inches low and left of the bullseye at 25 yards. With one hand? Fuhgeddaboutit: I'd be lucky to put the shots on the paper at all. Basically every manual I've ever seen about modern handgun shooting agrees: use two hands, whether in the squared off police stance or the sidewise Weaver stance. In the movies, handguns used to be invariably shown used in one hand. Since about the '90s, films set in the modern era more often show an accurate two-handed use of handguns, at least by police and other trained shooters, but Westerns and movies of the 17th-18th centuries still pretty much always show people firing handguns one-handed. So, do we know anything about whether people in the 17th-18th centuries actually fired flintlock pistols one-handed or two-handed? I realize that with a smoothbore flintlock, a loose-fitting ball and black powder, the flintlock pistol isn't accurate beyond 10 yards or so even in the best of circumstances. But does that mean it's not worthwhile to use two hands? If you add muzzle wobble from a one-handed grip to the aforementioned problems, wouldn't the effective range be even less than 10 yards? On the other hand, we're not concerned with whether shooting one-handed was a good idea, but whether it was done. The contemporary practice may not have been the ideal practice.

I personally doubt that Dana is worth the effort. He has a very labored, Victorian prose style that, for me, is tougher to penetrate than Charles Johnson or Daniel DeFoe. And it's so far removed from GAoP in both time and location that the book's pure research value is questionable. But it didn't help that I listened to the book on CD read by a very poor narrator; with a hardcopy that allows you to go back and reread some of Dana's more cumbersome locutions, it might be more bearable. Barlow's journals are coming up now in my reading of Rodger's Command of the Ocean; he seems to have been quite the pessimist, and he has a hilarious quote disparaging physicians and surgeons. Just to be clear; is he the same Barlow whose East Indiaman tangled with Captain Kidd at the mouth of the Red Sea?

That could be. You are certainly right that the book is intended to be didactic. Although the message I got from it was not so much that Franklin was a teetotaller, much less that others should be, but just that making beer your principal beverage was a needless expense. Then too, I don't know if Franklin appreciated the fact that for poor Englishmen, beer was an important part of the diet, worth several hundred calories a day, while water has none. 18th century American workers typically ate a lot more and better than English workers did, and could better afford to dispense with those beer calories.