Daniel

The article is 80% canting nonsense and 20% obvious banalities. Witness this sentence: "Incommensurability?" Incommensurate with what? Like most Foucault-citing poseurs, he just hopes the word is steep enough to deter the reader from climbing to the top and finding no meaning there. The fake paradox of "exclusion from society in order to be accomodated within it" depends on the false assumption that society stops at the water's edge. As for artists representing sailors out of their element, I can open Rodger's Command of the Ocean and instantly find five paintings of sailors aboard ship on the water. True, sailors were more often shown on land than at sea, for the obvious reason that painters didn't often go to sea, and when they did (like Willem van de Velde) they were often being paid to paint large battle scenes rather than individual sailors. No fearful or ideologically driven desire to "show him as distant from it as possible" is necessary to explain sailors being painted on land. The reference to the "commodification" of sailors' labor, a tortured way of saying that sailors were paid for their work as being somehow a new development of the 18th century proto-capitalist world is ludicrous. Sailors have sold their labor since classical antiquity; even slave-manned rowing ships like galleys and biremes needed wage labor to run the lines topside. I smell Rediker's propaganda at work here. The statement that sailors didn't represent themselves artistically is true enough, I guess; not all were literate, and those that could write usually lacked leisure to paint, draw, or write about their lives. Dampier, Ringrose, Wafer, Exquemelin and the like wrote about their sailing experiences, but none of them was an ordinary "tar." So there's an obvious banality, but at least it's not absurd like the rest of the article.

Interesting. What does he say about the prognosis of confluent smallpox? Wikipedia mentions a set of confluent victims of whom 62% died; I wonder if that was typical. Also, do you know anything about laudanum addiction and abuse in GAoP? All the instances I've heard of are from the 19th century.

But Philadelphia passed a law in 1683 forbidding "smoking seegars on the street." Dan Ahrens, Investing in Vice, p. 83. It was apparently common enough to be a fire hazard, because the fines were used to buy firefighting equipment. So I would say yes, a cigar would be period, although I don't have anything to show how cigars then differed from cigars now.

Here's a picture of a woman lighting up on a pipe from the mid-17th century. I love this picture because of the guy sitting with her who is so obviously smitten with her. He has this look on his face that's like, "My girlfriend is so cute when she's lighting her pipe."

One of the first cases they teach you in Torts class: Scott v. Shepherd, aka the Squib Case, decided by the Court of King's Bench in 1773. Squibs. Not to be trifled with. The question was whether the guy who first threw the squib could be held to have directly caused the plaintiff's injury or not, in which case he could be sued in trespass rather than "trespass on the case" (a distinction long ago vanished from our law). The majority held that the first thrower did directly cause the injury and could be sued in trespass, but no less a figure than William Blackstone dissented.

From The Sea-Man's Vade Mecum of 1706: "An Awning, a Sail set up like a Canopy to prevent the scorching of the Sun."

I may be confused here, but I thought that lithotomies (Samuel Pepys was successfully cut for a kidney stone), intestinal repairs, trepannings, and amputations were all done by surgeons, not physicians, and that the social and professional gulf between physician and surgeon was huge. There's no doubt surgeons did a huge amount of good: setting broken bones, relieving concussions, lithotomies and trepannings as you mentioned, amputating gangrenous limbs, extracting bullets and arrowheads, even pulling teeth in some cases. The surgeons' operations were extremely dangerous and painful, but a lot of them clearly worked. But I thought physicians didn't do any of that; they prescribed drugs or therapies, like cupping, bleeding, mineral baths, etc. And it's in the drugs/therapies department that I have a really hard time thinking of anything effective Western physicians did before the smallpox inoculation.

I agree. I'm sure the physicians were doing the best they could and knew how, and had good reasons for believing what they did It's just that the best they could do and knew how was, as we now know, worse than useless. A person back then who studied the outcomes of physicians' treatment versus magic and quackery could rationally conclude that the magic and quackery worked better. You couldn't come to the same conclusion about modern medicine; some individual treatments we use now will likely turn out to be harmful or useless, but medicine as a whole has worked huge reductions in morbidity and mortality. On reflection, I guess there were a few things the physicians did that worked. As you mentioned below, they knew how to use Jesuit's bark for malaria; that's actually quite significant. And some of them stressed the importance of cleanliness, right? But is that enough to refute my statement that doctors on average harmed more than they helped, even if they had the best of intentions?

Wow! Abracadabra amulets! I was expecting some primitive things would be used, but I confess I wasn't expecting quite that primitive. Thanks, this is very much the sort of thing I wnated to know. I would think that the people who "hated" medicine in the Golden Age would largely be different from the crystal fans, magnet users and faith healers of today. In our age of medical wonders, I think people who use such things mainly do it from a desire to feel they are privy to secrets that ordinary people don't know. But back in the 1700s, magic charms and quack medicines were sometimes less harmful than the treatments used by real physicians or surgeons - notably bleeding and searing wounds, prescribing lethal doses of mercury for venereal disease, or, as you mentioned in the other thread, prescribing tobacco as a sight restorative or a dentifrice! The sailors' belief that scurvy could be cured by breathing from a hole in the ground was useless, but no more useless than oil of vitriol or sauerkraut, which was the best that any health care professional could recommend before Lind, and often after him as well. I don't mean to say Golden Age physicians and surgeons were all bad. Surgeons at least could do episiotomies, set fractures, and their amputations reduced gangrene's death rate from 100% to 50% or so. On the other hand, I'm damned if I can think of anything physicians did that compensated for the harm they caused. Certainly you know more about physicians' and surgeons' overall effectiveness in the 18th century than I do; would you say they were a net benefit or a net harm to their patients?

Rarely have I seen such unanimity from all sides of pirate scholarship. Don't worry, I had no plans whatsoever to integrate knife throwing into a persona - I'm much more a writer than a re-enactor anyway, and the main result here is that I'm going to have to write an episode of knife-throwing out of my book. I had my doubts about it to begin with, as my first post makes clear, and the responses I see here only confirm those doubts. So, given that combat knife-throwing is completely unhistorical not only for pirates but for just about everybody, what COULD one do in the Golden Age to eliminate an opponent stealthily at range? With throwing axes also ruled out, the only remaining alternatives I see are the bow, crossbow, and spear! The bow and spear were used by Indians, but not so far as I know by pirates; but some Miskito Indians were pirates, or at least worked with them, and were legendary for their prowess hurling the harpoon. Drake's men used crossbows, but I've not heard of them being used during the Golden Age. Is there any record of pirates or other sailors using boarding pikes as throwing weapons?

I don't doubt you're right. Especially about people not dying in just a few seconds from a knife wound. I've never seen a person die from a knife wound, and don't want to, but twice I have seen sheep slaughtered with knives. Even with the entire throat cut clean across to the bone, they both physically struggled for about two minutes.

Ah, I had forgotten that. It's been many years since I saw the movie. Thanks for correction. Well, the theoretical reason would be so you can kill or disable your opponent without getting close enough for him to hurt you. Although a pistol does the same thing, the thrown knife is cheaper and doesn't give away your position with a muzzle flash. And it is often said that the knife is silent, although I question that idea: the knife itself may be silent, but the guy you hit with the knife would probably make quite a lot of noise! So the thrown knife has two or three theoretical advantages, but I don't see any evidence that those advantages have ever been consistently successfully put into practice.

Hi, I don't wander into this part of the forum much. How y'all doing? Anyway, we've all seen movies where a person is killed, or almost killed, by a thrown knife. There's at least one pirate movie where this happens, Swashbuckler, where the black pirate is an expert at knife throwing. He's also one of the few knife throwers in movies that's a hero; knife throwing seems to have been something of a bad boy's sport in movies ever since Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda. However, in all my searches I have been able to find two (2) nonfiction reports of a human being killed by a thrown knife. Ever. The first appears to be legitimate: the New York Times reported that on March 25, 1898, "Jew Gus" Eckhart killed his live-in girlfriend "English Mary" Ward with a hurled knife from a range of eight feet at New York's Beehive Saloon. The knife blade was only two and a half inches long. He threw it from his open hand, hit Ward in the left breast and cut an artery. She was dead in five minutes. It was the opinion of showman knife throwers that Eckhart, who had no training, could not have fatally struck Ward again in a thousand tries. The second report is from Harry McEvoy's Knife & Tomahawk Throwing: The Art of the Experts, p. 93. McEvoy claims that Sergeant Skeeter Vaughan killed a German sentry during World War II with a thrown 16-inch bayonet from a range of 87 feet in the dark that penetrated the base of the sentry's skull. My response, frankly, is: Bullsh*t. Skeeter Vaughan was a real man, and had a real career in the movies, but I don't believe he ever killed a man that way. McEvoy does not cite to any source for this absurd story, and I see no reason to believe that Vaughan himself had any hand in writing the book. Such an amazing feat should have led to a citation for distinguished service, and without seeing such a citation I don't believe a word of it. An expert knife thrower in broad daylight using a board much larger than a man. The first three times he hit the board hilt first. The fourth time he got the point into the board, but far off center; a man standing in the middle of the board would probably have been unharmed, or at worst would have been hit in the elbow.So there we have two reported deaths from knife throwing: one a freak accident, and another that better than even money says is a fabrication. Are there any other substantiated instances of knife throwing deaths that I don't know about? Is there any group of soldiers that manage to make the thrown knife consistently lethal? And if not, why not? The Franks did a number on their enemies with throwing axes that only weighed about 21 ounces. I would have thought you could make a throwing knife of a similar weight to the francisca, so why not a throwing knife of similar lethality?

Thanks for the info, Mission and Dutch! I've written the Smithsonian to try to get some additional information on the Chesapeake pipe-smoking evidence. In the meantime, I've found some interesting information in this well-referenced article: "The Social Dip: Tobacco Use by Mid-19th Century Southern Women. The article makes it clear that the antipathy toward women smoking was not very old at all in the 1920s. Two presidents' wives smoked pipes: Mrs. Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Zachary Taylor! But the article also mentions that women did not smoke cigars "in a century increasingly concerned with maintaining distinctive spheres for male and female"; apparently the pipe was considered more respectable for women. At some point, tobacco use became more common among Southern women than Northern, as by the American Civil War the Northern soldiers campaigning in the South were shocked to find the Southern women using tobacco. This may have had something to do with the fact that the temperance movement was under way in the North by the time of the Civil War, and the temperance activists, many of them women, tended to be anti-smoking as well as anti-alcohol. Also by the time of the Civil War, many rural Southern women had begun dipping and chewing tobacco, which could be incredibly disgusting, not only to Northerners but to Southern urbanites unused to what the country folk did: "[On the train there was] a very pretty young lady . . . I noticed that she was constantly spitting some dark colored fluid from her mouth. . . . I looked on the floor and there was a great puddle at her feet. It resembled tobacco juice very much, and by George it was tobacco juice, for I saw her spit out the old chew and put in a fresh one." There are limits to how far I will go for historical accuracy; in no circumstance could I entertain the thought of making my heroine do this. Wikipedia claims that an 18th century women's magazine suggested using snuff to restore eyesight, although I cannot track down the original reference. On GoogleBooks, I find a passionate pro-smoking history of tobacco from 1901 by W.A. Penn, called The Soverane Herb: he reports that in 1671 Worcestershire, it was customary for women and men both to smoke pipes after dinner; another observer had women as well as men using tobacco all over England in 1697 (in what form, he does not say). I am now strongly leaning toward making my leading lady a tobacco user of some sort. I'd prefer to make her a cigar or snuff user rather than a pipe smoker, but the evidence I've seen so far is much more supportive of pipe smoking for women than snuff use, and there is some clear evidence against female cigar use at least in the 19th century.

I'm doing a detailed* character sketch of the heroine of my novel, who is an 18-year-old white female living in New York City in 1714, the orphaned ward of a rich shipping magnate. And the question occurred to me, would she use tobacco? Immediately before Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds started pitching cigarettes to women in the 1920s, it's pretty clear that smoking was considered beyond the pale for women; those companies went to great lengths to convince buyers that "decent, respectable women" could smoke. But I'm not sure how far back that attitude goes. I followed one of Mission's posts to this site, which shows a skull of a woman who died aged 55-60 sometime around 1660 to 1680 in Maryland, whose teeth prove that she was a regular pipe smoker. The anthropologist suggests this was commonplace, that almost "everyone in colonial Chesapeake, young and old, men and women, was smoking." But I'm a little hesitant to stick a pipe in my heroine's mouth 44 years later in a different colony based on this single skull of a woman of unknown class origins. Is there any further confirmation of female tobacco use going on into the 18th century? If so, when did tobacco become scandalous for women to use? Was it yet another hangup inflicted on us by the Victorians? Then also, supposing my character might have used tobacco, in what form would she use it? My research suggests that tobacco was used in this period in at least three ways: in cigars ("seegars," as spelled in a 1683 Massachusetts ordinance), in pipes, and in snuff. Snuff was supposed to be very aristocratic. If women did use tobacco, would they have used it in all three of these ways? Is it more likely that my heroine, being rich but not of noble blood, would have been a snuff user rather than a pipe or cigar smoker? * When I say "detailed," I don't just mean that I know what her morals, ambitions, fears and loves are; I mean I know which side she sleeps on and the name of her first horse.

Mission, or anyone who can chime in, were there popular quack medicines or magic charms (or possibly even something that worked?) that were popular by 1714 for preventing the scourges of the age like smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, gangrene, tetanus/lockjaw, etc.? I see no reference to the smallpox inoculation being used in America before 1721, but if I know anything about human psychology, I would guess something was used before then, even if it was completely ineffective, just to reduce the sheer anxiety of getting the disease.

Walking the plank could be considered a form of psychological torture. It wasn't done during the Golden Age, but there are several verified 19th century instances of it. It was normally just a prelude to murder, but it could be used by itself as a psychological torture. If I recall rightly, actual mock executions (a tactic that is still with us) were inflicted on some prisoners, who in some cases were required to pick their own executioners. It may not have been intentional, but Blackbeard's locking the captured prisoners of Charleston together in the dark below decks, the high class folks with the servants, was considered clear evidence of murderous intent, and Blackbeard threatened them once that they had not two hours to live. The effect on the high-class prisoners was fearsome.

The 1706 Sea-Man's Vade Mecum calls the binnacle a "bittack." "Bittacle" is also a common 18th century word for the binnacle.

The attack on Guadeloupe is from Woodard, p. 216. He says Blackbeard sailed into the harbor, captured a ship, and set the town afire with cannon shots. His endnote for that page is not particularly good; it cites Thomas Knight's deposition, but only specifically mentions Nevis rather than Guadeloupe. As for attacking Charleston, Blackbeard reportedly did enter the harbor with the intention of bombarding the town until dissuaded by his men's report that the ransom chest of medicines was forthcoming. No dispute, this was not a storm-the-town-and-loot-it operation on the lines of Woodes Rogers at Guayaquil or Henry Morgan at Maracaibo. But it certainly is a good deal more aggressive than anything Blackbeard (or anyone else from the Flying Gang) had yet attempted.

Where did you get that? (And for what period of slave trading are those numbers valid?) On slavevoyages.org (great, great resource, I tell you). It's for the entire period, 1514-1866. You are, of course, quite right to point out that the mortality rate was not steady throughout the entire history of the trade; it went down over time. For the time period 1708-1728 (about three thousand recorded voyages over a twenty-year period), the database says the average death rate was 15.3%; factoring out voyages where the ship sank with no survivors or otherwise didn't make it to the Americas cuts the mortality rate down to 15.0%. Any way you slice it, though, the Concorde's 11.9% death rate was no worse than average.

We have one irrefutable fact that is not speculation: Blackbeard abandoned at least 82% of the slaves. Assuming that sixty to eighty slaves outvalued the other 374 would be speculation, and there is nothing to support it. Concorde had had an ordinary length middle passage of 66 days, and an ordinary number of slave deaths (11.9%, compared to an overall average of 12.1%), so there is no reason to infer that four fifths of them were too sick to sell for ordinary values. Dosset successfully transported all 374+ remaining slaves to Martinique using just the 2-3 tons of beans that Blackbeard spared him from the sloop's supplies; had he taken those beans aboard the Concorde instead, Blackbeard could have transported the slaves himself. You are right that there is no direct evidence that Blackbeard's interest in the Concorde was her combat and sailing capabilities, though Blackbeard's considerably more aggressive behavior after obtaining her (attacking Guadeloupe and Charleston, although he had never previously directly attacked port cities) is certainly consistent with that theory. However, abandoning a cargo is direct evidence against his wanting that cargo.

Just happened across a possible example of the Jonah superstition. While in the hands of Cocklyn's gentlemen of fortune at Sierra Leone, William Snelgrave encountered a pirate named Ambrose Curtis, who said that Snelgrave's father 11 years before had "used him severely for being an unlucky boy." This is in Stephens' Captured by Pirates, p. 122. It wouldn't make much sense to abuse a boy merely for having bad luck himself, so that would suggest that by "unlucky" Snelgrave's father meant that he brought bad luck to others.

Stephens' notes say it was Christopher. Sigh - add that to about thirty other errors I've found in Stephens' notes. But actually, that's good news: it means that the Moody reported off Charleston in October 1718 by Captain Johnson's correspondent may in fact be La Buse's captain. The Moody at Charleston was reported in a fifty-gun ship. Since William Moody was already in the Rising Sun in June 1718, and kept it until he forced Cocklyn into it somewhere near Africa in early 1719, then he would have had it off Charleston. If the Rising Sun were a fifty-gun ship, that would clinch the identity of the Moody off Charleston as being La Buse's Moody. I don't see anything in Snelgrave about the size of the Rising Sun, though.

PoD: The voyage you identified is indeed the voyage where Blackbeard captured La Concorde. Woodard clearly identifies Pierre Dosset as the captain and Rene Montaudoin as the owner, matching the data from the Slave Voyages database. There were 61 slave deaths crossing the Atlantic: 516 slaves were loaded at the Bight of Benin, but only 455 were left when Blackbeard captured the ship, which again matches Woodard. Blackbeard captured the vessel on November 17, 1717 Old Style (Woodard, 210). Woodard says that Blackbeard gave Captain Dosset a sloop in exchange for La Concorde, and left all but 61 of the slaves with Dosset at Bequia. Dosset renamed the sloop the Mauvaise Recontre ("Bad Encounter") and transported the slaves from Bequia to Martinique in two separate voyages (presumably the 40-ton sloop couldn't carry all the slaves at once). As you point out, the Slave Voyages database suggests that 374 slaves were left with Dosset on Bequia, and thus that Blackbeard kept 81 slaves (455 minus 374) aboard, not 61 as in Woodard. The database further would seem to suggest that Dosset landed 313 of the slaves on Martinique, but that when he went back to Bequia he then took the last 61 slaves to Grenada, not to Martinique as Woodard would have it. Another possibility is that Blackbeard did indeed take 61 slaves aboard the new Queen Anne's Revenge, leaving Dosset with 394, and that twenty of those left with Dosset died or escaped on Bequia, so that Dosset only managed to get 374 of them to market on Martinique and Grenada. In any event, Woodard quotes verbatim from the depositions of Blackbeard's crew to show that, when Blackbeard offloaded the treasure of Queen Anne's Revenge onto the sloop Adventure after the wreck at Beaufort Inlet, "'forty white men and sixty Negroes'" went aboard the Adventure. Woodard, 256. So I would conclude that Woodard's figure of 61 slaves aboard Blackbeard's vessel is not based just on the slave trading documentation: it's based on eyewitness evidence. We're really just missing 20 slaves: either 1) Blackbeard took 81 aboard at Bequia and somehow lost 20 of them between there and the loading of the Adventure at Beaufort Inlet, or 2) Blackbeard took only 61 slaves aboard at Bequia, and Dosset lost 20 of the remainder while bringing them to Martinique and Grenada. If the first option is correct, the missing 20 slaves could be among the more than 200 crew that Blackbeard abandoned at Beaufort.

She may be born under the sign of the twins, but there's no one like the Duchess!