Daniel

Haven't read Silver. The Pirate Primer is fun, but mainly it made me want to read the novels he got the language from, instead of finishing the book.

OK, that makes sense; thanks to both of you.

It seems pretty common to mount the ship's wheel forward of the mizzenmast, as in this magnificent model of a 1740 East Indiaman. This arrangement, however, would make it difficult or impossible to step the mizzenmast on the keel. The wheel's tackles must connect to the head of the tiller, and unless the tiller is to slice through the mizzenmast, then the tiller must have its own space below the step of the mizzenmast, but above the keel. I suppose it might be possible to put the head of the tiller abaft the mizzenmast and then run the wheel tackles at an angle on either side of the mizzenmast, upward and forward to the wheel, but wouldn't that take away most of the wheel's leverage and make it very hard to turn?

On the other hand, if they don't step the mizzenmast on the keel, what do they step it on? Plain deck planks wouldn't be able to support it, would they?

Well of course you need one that says "My other car is a Galleon!"

Or maybe a skull and crossbones and the legend "On Payne of Death!" to play on the town's name.

The exhibit also gives prominent place to Hendrick Quinton, who was Bellamy's sailing master IIRC, and who was a free black man originally from the Netherlands. I have no evidence againstthat. I agree with Kinkor that at least some Africans or African Americans were treated equally in some pirate ships; certainly more equally than they would have been anywhere else in the European world. I merely object to the generalization that pirates in general didn't own slaves, and to the continuing efforts to excuse and ignore African kingdoms' role in cooperating with the white slave traders.

"Fie" is one of my favorite curse words. You find it all over Shakespeare. I know at least one case in GAoP where it was used: Congreve wrote in 1695, "O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell."

On the other hand, I don't remember seeing the word "fie" anywhere in the General History of the Pirates, Moll Flanders, or anything else written in GAoP. Maybe Congreve was deliberately using an archaic term, instead of an everyday one? Does anyone know any other case when "fie" was used in GAoP?

Have you looked at Jameson's Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period? The deposition of John Dann refers to Captain Wake and Captain Want, as does Adam Baldridge (who calls Wake "Weak").

The isle of May is in the Cape Verdes, but where is Fernando? Is it Fernando de Noronha, off Brazil? The latitude is about right . . .

On the way back from Washington DC, I got to spend 90 minutes in the Real Pirates exhibit at St. Louis Science Center, seeing real artifacts that Barry Clifford's team brought up from the Whydah wreck. Regrettably, no photos allowed. In no particular order, here's what I saw.

1. The bell. Not your little ship's bell like I saw on the St. Lawrence II. Big mofo, easily a foot across, and I'll bet it weighs over fifty pounds.

2. A wide variety of cannons: a Danish six pounder, an English "long three," and a four pounder. The three carried round shot and all kinds of different bar shot: some dumbell shaped, some with full-size balls each end, and some with hemispheres. No expanding shot, grapeshot, or canister was shown. Shot wadding also was found; it looks like wood, but I assume it's just been solidiifed after centuries on the ocean floor.

3. Pewter spoons and plates, some marked with Masonic symbols. The exhibit says that Jacobites used Masconic symbols, so there's another point for the pirates-were-Jacobites crowd. Looks like my long-held view that pirates were basically non-political may be plain wrong.

4. No whole swords, but several hilts. Surprise: only one cutlass hilt, but three smallsword/rapier hilts! And yes, that same hilt that in the book is identified as a cutlass is identified in the sxhibit as a rapier or smallsword. The cutlass hilt was bone, and had that humpbacked look you see on a lot of the old Hounslow hangers from the previous century. Brass fittings on the cutlass hilt were surprisingly bright.

5. Several cufflinks and a big bent kilt pin, but still no earrings.

6. A shoe sole, very narrow, small enough to have been a woman's or a child's. No boots.

7. A lead sounding weight. The books don't give you the idea of how big these things are; I would guess eight inches long, an inch and a half at the bottom, and must have weighed at least ten pounds if it was real lead. The bottom was indeed concave to hold sticky tallow so the pirates would know what kind of sea floor it was.

8. Several pistols, including a magificent Louis XIV pistol, but mostly too damaged after years on the ocean floor for me to tell anything useful about them.

9. A magnificent ship model of the Whydah. Basic three-mast design with lateen mizzen that you would expect for that time, very bluff-bowed, showing no sails bent on. A very curious design of the wheel: the tiller is on the open quarterdeck with the wheel just forward of it, and the rope drum aft of the wheel. This means that you can't stand behind the wheel; the rope drum is in the way. You would either have to stand forward of the wheel, facing aft, or (which I figure is likelier) stand to the side of the wheel facing forward, probably with another helmsman on the other side of the wheel to assist. Model also shows something that looks like a globular lantern hanging from a line over each side. The mainstay is not connected directly to the mainmast; instead, it splits into about a dozen little lines, each secured to the edge of the maintop.

10. A few slave artifacts were still aboard, including manacles. I almost cried at the sight of the first one, because the manacles were so small they appeared sized for children; on second glance, they might have been big enough for adults. The manacles were connected to an unbending iron bar, very close together; if all of them were actually occupied, the occupants would have been literally sitting in each other's laps. There was also a device called a "branding needle," but so small I doubt any useful branding could actually have been done with it; maybe it was used for tattooing? There was an honest-to-God branding iron too, shaped like a plus or X, but I think it was from Jamaica, not the Whydah.

11. Overall the quality of the reconstruction was pretty good. I disagreed with some of the captions. One said that pirates baording a prize would have carried boarding pikes; with your hands occupied I doubt a boarding pike would have been practical. The section on the slave trade was msotly accurate, but inaccurately said that Africans attacked slave forts to free their brethren. Yes, Africans attacked slave forts, but it was for the same reason Europeans attacked each others' slave forts: to take the slaves and other wealth and use them for their own ends. It also suggested that pirates didn't use slaves, but they ignored Henry Morgan's articles specifying buccaneers' compensation in terms of slaves. Aside from that, though, they did a pretty good job.

A late discovery: the Whydah pirate ship carried all kinds of bar shot, and also round shot, for her three pounders. Saw it myself at the Real Pirates exhibit in the St Louis Science Center.

The point that large ships required much more maintenance and more specialized personnel is valid. But note that some pirates, like Bartholomew Roberts, dealt with this problem by simply switching to newly captured large ships, so they didn't have to deal with the headache of maintaining their old one.

I love, love, love the Star of the County Down.

The Jolly Roving Tar is a fine air too.

I confess, I only glanced over the previous posts, but I thought I would share that I read somewhere that pirates rarely used torture as punishments. When punishments were used it was a bit more reasonable,

Depends on who was the victim. You're right that pirates very rarely punished their own crew with flogging or other tortures. But they tortured prisoners all the time. The Port Royal and Tortugfa buccaneers were particularly notorious for torturing prisoners. It wasn't even that remarkable by the standards of the time; Thirty Years' War mercenaries had routinely done the same nasty stuff to anyone unlucky enough to fall into their hands.

but many pirate crews became pirate crews having mutinied against a navy fleet.

There's where you're mistaken. Not a single pirate crew is known to have got its start by mutinying against a naval captain (much less a whole fleet). Several pirates did start out as mutineers - notably Every, Lowther, Culliford, Fly, and Gow - but all these mutinies occurred on merchant or privateer vessels, not navy ships. The reason is pretty clear: private ship owners kept crews small, so you only needed to recruit a few followers to organize a successful mutiny. Nut navy ships had huge crews, which required a large force to overcome, and every man you brought into the plot was one more potential informer. Plus, navy ships were patrolled by large forces of rigidly disciplined marines, a major impediment to mutiny. On the rare occasions that Royal Navy ships did mutiny, it was often a bloodless affair, with the crew essentially going on strike rather than physically attacking their officers, and they were usually just demanding back pay or better rations rather than seizing the ship for piratical purposes.

Of course, some navy sailors did become pirates, but only after deserting or simply being paid off and discharged, not because of a mutiny.

Here are my favorite movies that are just pirate movies. By the way, I don't count The Sea Hawk as a pirate movie, or else it would be on the list.

1. Treasure Island (1990, with Charlton Heston)

2. Treasure Island (1950, with Robert Newton)

3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

4. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

5. The Devil-Ship Pirates

6. A High Wind in Jamaica

7. Galaxy Express 999

8. Cutthroat Island

9. Muppet Treasure Island

10. Treasure Island (1971, with Boris Andreyev)

My favorite nautical movies are actually mostly non-pirate.

1. Billy Budd.

2. The Caine Mutiny.

3. The Sea Wolf

4. Saboteur: Code Name Morituri

5. Treasure Island (1990)

6. Treasure Island (1950)

7. Crimson Tide

8. Titanic

9. The Sea Hawk

10. The Devil-Ship Pirates

I'd just like to point out that the Mythbusters' ecperiment did find splinters; lots of them. What it did not find was lethal penetration by those splinters.

Under combat conditions, gunners would not have been able to precisely predict before loading their cartridges the range at which they would have to fire, nor, in a line-of-battle engagement, could they have been certain whether the next ship they would have to fire on would be a first rate or a fourth rate, whose hull thicknesses varied. Only occasionally would they know the exact thickness of the wales of the opposing ship, even if they knew what rate it was. Cartridges were loaded long before the battle. Under those conditions, it is extremely implausible that gunners could have precisely calibrated their powder load to an amount just barely adequate to pierce the hull of the particular enemy ship they faced at the particular range they ended up firing at.

If the Mythbusters episode was inaccurate (as it probably was given how much first-hand evidence contradicts it), I think the reason lies elsewhere.

Maybe the bending and absorption of the Mythbusters' wooden wall had something to do with their results, but do we know that the side of a ship in combat would behave any differently?

Elizabethan and early 17th century ships were built with very high sterns because of the fear of being "pooped" by a large following sea. I don't know if this is the reason that the after decks curved upward as they went aft, but a higher stern would be a natural accompaniment of such a deck plan.

I'm not sure exactly why the curving lower decks were abandoned later in the 17th century, but certainly the speed advantage of a lower after deck must have played some part. Whether ship builders just decided to sacrifice safety to speed, or they found that the upward curving deck wasn't that much of a safety advantage anyway, I don't know. Theoretically, mariners might have found that extra speed helped reduce the impact of a following sea better than the high stern did, or they might have decided that the sloping decks increased the impact when the ship was pooped by channeling it downhill. I don't have any direct evidence.

While we're at it, maybe someone can explain the switch from those long, nearly level beakheads of the early 17th century to the short, sharply upswept ones of the late 17th century.

Edmund Halley conducted a survey of the Atlantic in the 1690s and the resulting maps were published in the same decade. I'm not sure how widespread they were in 1714, but they were available. They are well detailed and I have a repro of one showing lines of compass variation.

Perfect! Is this the one?

In the past few hours I've also found some world maps that show the Atlantic, in a book called The Image of the World: 20 centuries of World Maps, by Peter Whitfield. It has a world map showing the Atlantic by Adam Friedrich Zuerner, from Saxony, published by Amsterdam cartographer Pieter Schenck in several atlases from about 1710 onwards.

I'm trying to find out what maps of the Atlantic would have been available to navigators in 1714, the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Dampier's journals were available of course, but the only maps of his I've been able to find show only the Caribbean, Central America, and the Indian Ocean. Woodes Rogers' maps would have been complete, but were they published and in circulation? All the Herman Moll maps I've been able to find postdate 1714.

Anyone know which maps were known, and were popularly used? The Atlantic was one of the most traveled oceans in the world; I would have thought it was mapped abundantly.

Here's another:

When the crocodile called on James Hook,

The pirate those waters forsook.

With the croc down a peg

A white whale ate his leg.

And he said, “Why, I’m in the wrong book!”

The pirate had captured a wench,

quite youthful and pretty, and French,

he showed her his bed,

she shook her sweet head,

so he polished her off on the bench!

Polished her off? I've usually heard that phrase used in a less, um, friendly way. Good limerick, though!

Anyway, here's mine.

To the foretop climbed old Captain Nash

To search for a prize full of cash,

But the waves rocked the ship

Till he quite lost his grip

And alas, Captain Nash made a splash.

There's a picture of Kanoji Angria, an Indian pirate, here, but I don't know if it's contemporary or at all reliable.

There are tons of representations of Barbary corsairs: Aruj Barbarossa, Aruj and Hayreddin together, this picture of Stephen Decatur, USN, fighting Barbary corsairs.

I urge anyone interested in period sexuality to look at Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500-1800.

About the worst time to be having any kind of sex was the Elizabethan period. That was before anybody had any concept that sex was a private or personal thing that other people had to keep their noses out of. Neighbors and servants were always spying on people, and went straight to the archdeacon the minute they got suspicion that anyone was doing anything not strictly approved. Homosexuality, adultery, fornication, unorthodox positions between man and wife, sex while pregnant, ANY of that stuff could get you dragged in front of the archdeacon and flogged to an inch of your life. Repressive doesn't begin to describe it.

Things got more relaxed in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially after the Restoration, but homosexuals still had a pretty hard time of it. Nobody had any concept of "orientation" as we describe it today, and homosexual experimentation was pretty common in the segregated boys' schools, but it was still flogging, disgrace and banishment if you got caught. Lesbianism was virtually invisible, to the point that nobody really has any clue how common or rare it might have been.

The 1757 Articles of War made "buggery" at sea a mandatory death penalty offense, but before that there are cases of homosexual sailors being spared if they were caught; Cordingly mentions an example.

I must admit that I find all the different kinds of ship's boats tremendously confusing. But here are some clues from Falconer's Marine Dictionary

The largest boat that usually accompanies a ship is the long-boat, chaloupe, which is generally furnished with a mast and sails: those which are fitted for ships of war, may be occasionally decked, armed, and equipped, for cruising sort distances against merchant-ships of the enemy, or smugglers, or for impressing seamen, &c.

The barges are next in order, which are longer, slighter, and narrower: they are employed to carry the principal sea-officers, as admirals, and captains of ships of war, and are very unfit for sea. See the article BARGE.

Pinnaces exactly resemble barges, only that they are somewhat smaller, and never row more than eight oars; whereas a barge properly never rows less than ten. These are for the accommodation of the lieutenants, &c.

Cutters of a ship, (bateaux, Fr.) are broader, deeper, and shorter than the barges and pinnaces; they are fitter for sailing, and are commonly employed in carrying stores, provisions, passengers, &c. to and from the ship. In the structure of this sort of boats, the lower edge of every plank in the side over-lays the upper-edge of the plank below, which is called by ship-wrights clinch-work.

Yawls, (canots, Fr.) are something less than cutters, nearly of the same form, and used for similar services, they are generally rowed with fix oars.

The above boats more particularly belong to ships of war; as merchant-ships seldom have more than two, viz. a long-boat and yawl: when they they have a third, it is generally calculated for the countries to which they trade, and varies in it's [sic] construction accordingly.

Note the use of "clinch-work" rather than "clinker-built" as we would say today, and a vessel that moves under its own crew's oars without towing being called a "barge."

OK so far as it goes, but what about "dories," "cockboats," "gigs," "jolly-boats," "dinghies," "launches," and all that? You will search Falconer in vain for any of these. My Merriam-Webster has a few definitions that aren't much help:

dory . . . [Miskito dóri dugout] (1709): a flat-bottomed boat with high flaring sides, sharp bow, and deep V-shaped transom

cockboat . . . (15c): a small boat; esp: one used as a tender to a larger boat

gig . . . a long light ship's boat . . .a rowboat designed for speed rather than work

jolly boat . . .(ca. 1741): a ship's boat of medium size used for general-purpose work

launch . . . (1697) 1 : a large boat that operates from a ship

In short, if there even is a difference among all these boats, it needs someone saltier than a lexicographer to define it.

The term "dinghy" may be post-Golden Age: Merriam-Webster says it's first seen in print in 1810, and is of East Indian origin.

If you've never attended an event in full garb before make sure to bring plenty of bottled water and sunscreen with you. It gets really hot dresed as a pirate during the spring and summer

As someone who's never re-enacted, I'm curious: why is this? Given that pirates had to live and work all day under a hot Caribbean or Red Sea sun as often as not, why would they wear very hot clothes?

*Soap Box* Please strike tall ship from your vocabulary, its a modern description originally used by event marketers to describe a traditionally rigged or designed vessel, or collection of them for an event, that has made it into main stream terminology.

I respectfully disagree. The term "tall ship" goes back at least to Hakluyt. In 1589, he wrote that "divers tall ships of London" were trading to the Mediterranean from 1511 to 1534, that la Roche had sailed with "3. tall Ships," that Humphrey Gilbert had suffered "the losse of a tall ship," and so on. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica says that in Elizabethan usage, a "'tall' ship was apparently a vessel carrying topmast with yards and square sails, an important development of the simpler pole-mast rig of earlier times."

The term "tall ship" continued to be used during the Golden Age. In 1657, Francis Vere wrote that he had seen "40 or 50 tall ships" in the mouth of Cádiz Bay. When Argensola's Discovery and Conquest of the Molucco and Philippine Islands was translated into English in 1708, the term "tall ship" was frequently used: "the one was a Tall Ship, the other a Sloop"; "Twenty Thousand fighting men were put aboard tall ships"; "Here the Fleet rendezvous'd, consisting of six Tall Ships, Six Galleys, Three Galliots." John Barnard wrote of encountering a "tall ship, probably a French man-of-war" in 1709. In 1720, Josiah Burchett wrote that Captain Wallpole had seen "nine tall Ships steering to the Westward," that Benbow spotted "seventeen tall Ships" heading for Cuba, and the same admiral at Dunkirk "found not any Ships in the Road, fifteen or sixteen tall ones he saw within."

No doubt the term "tall ship" got a big boost from Masefield's poetry ("all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by") around 1900, but the phrase was already over 300 years old when he wrote it.