Daniel

Found the Maryland Dove's galley! Thank you for the tip!

Excellent, thank you all.

Regarding victualling, the daily bill of fare for the Royal Navy in 1707 can be seen here

I assume you're familiar with the East India Company flag, a.k.a. John Company's gridiron. And then there's the Royal Africa Company flag. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "logo," though.

I've found remarkably little information about ship's galleys in the Golden Age. It's tough to search the Web for, because of course people are mostly concerned with galleys right now, not galleys on sailing ships 300 years ago.

What I think I know is that disabled sailors were often made cooks, and that pirates would have prepared food similar to what they knew from the Royal Navy or the merchant service, i.e. biscuit, salt meat, pease, beer or ale, cheese, stockfish, oatmeal, and butter, with the occasional salmagundi (worms and weevils are a free extra).

What I don't know is:

1. How much was the galley actually used? Many of the items on the bill of fare, like cheese and biscuit and butter, don't require any cooking: I'm not sure if the meat was salted cooked or raw.

2. Did smaller vessels like sloops, schooners and brigs/brigantines have galleys?

3. Where on the vessel would the galley be located?

4. What kind of equipment did the galley have? Was there an actual enclosed oven or range? Cutting boards? Pots and pans (copper? lead? cast iron?). And how did they contain the fire, one of the most dangerous things on the ship?

5. How many men worked the galley?

Howell Davis's last ship was called the Rover, and had 32 guns and 27 swivels according to Johnson's 1724 General History of the Pyrates, p. 187. I'm not sure if this is the same ship as Bartholomew Roberts' Royal Rover.

Do we really want to try to list the crews of the ships? That would seem to me to be an impossible task, with people constantly dying from illness or injuries, volunteering to join the crew, getting forced, leaving the ship with their injury compensations, and so on.

Further data:

Bonnet's Revenge/Royal James initially had 10 guns, but was later up-armed to 12 guns, probably when he landed at Nassau after the fight with the Spanish warship where he was wounded. That's in Lindley Butler, Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast.

Rackham's William was only 12 tons burthen, per Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, p. 56.

Henry Avery's Fancy had 46 guns, according to the East India Company's letter of 1694 to the Lords Justices. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period, p. 154.

I could have sworn that I read somewhere that the ship Edward England commanded when he fought MacRae in 1720 was also named the Fancy, but I can't find the reference. Maybe Botting?

And are we really sure that "Christopher Condent" and "William Condon" are two different people?

It's interesting that the three of us who have responded as I write this all read the question differently. Michael is talking about clothing, I am talking about personality and M.A. d'Dogge is talking about character/persona. Of course, from what I've read (and written) these are the areas of the pirate re-enacting world that seem to correspond to our interests the best.

Along that very line, I'll bring in another perspective: a writer's. I lack not only the money but also the skills and the dedication needed for re-enacting, but the characters I create are each like an individual persona.

In my stories, the main pirate characters are mostly more pleasant than the average pirate, but inside the realm of realism. That is, if you arranged pirates' personalities on a bell curve from "most savage" to "most kindly," with l'Ollonais at one end and maybe Edward England or the guy who saved George Roberts from John Russell at the other end, my main characters tend to be closer toward England's end of the curve. On the other hand, I try to include villains and minor pirate characters who represent the whole spectrum of pirate behavior.

The reason I do this is that nobody wants to read about a protagonist with whom they can have no sympathy whatsoever.

I can't imagine anyone enjoying a book told entirely from l'Ollanais's point of view, using nothing but what we know about him historically. If I were to write a novel with l'Ollonais as the protagonist, I would probably try something like making him a reasonably nice guy when he first came to the Caribbean as an indentured servant, who then becomes embittered and filled with hatred from his suffering and abuse on the plantation, and finally out of desire for revenge becomes the monster whom we all know; that way the audience, while hating what l'Ollonais becomes in the end, can also feel mourning for the goodness in him that was lost. But of course, that's ahistorical; for all we know, Jean David Nau could have been a right bastard before he ever left the sands of Olonne.

The idea is not to make pirates look nicer or kindlier than they were historically, but just to write from a perspective that puts some of the more sympathetic pirates at center stage instead of in the background. At the same time, I try not to give the impression that the pirates at center stage were typical of all pirates, any more than Edward England or George Roberts' benefactor were typical.

The other thing I do is to make sure that even the more sympathetic characters (pirate and otherwise) still have most, if not all, of the prejudices and vices of their time. Most of the Christian characters assume as a matter of course that anybody who isn't Christian will be damned. All the characters believe that infidelity is unpardonable in a woman and trivial in a man; they discipline their children far more brutally than even a very strict parent would today; they assume that they have at least the right to veto their children's choice of spouse, and in many cases even pick the children's spouses for them; they rarely wash their bodies, etc.

think outside the box mate. Pirates were first sailors/ mariners. It was common practice in the European Navies to hang mutineers and the like aboard ship while at sea without a shoreside trial. The captain would oversee a trial by senior officers- i'm not sure if he would directly be involved in the trial though.

Naval captains and their officers could try crewmen, yes, but I believe they only had juridiction over crewmen from their own ships. I've never heard of them trying men from other ships, like pirates. I suppose a Royal Navy captain could get around that limitation by pressing a man from another ship into his own crew and then trying him, but I've never heard of it being done.

Also, a number of pirate hunters weren't Navy. Barnet was in the merchant service when he captured Rackham, as was Captain Holford when he arrested Vane; Rhett was a colonel of South Carolina militia operating under a governor's commission when he captured Bonnet; Maynard was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, but he wasn't commanding a King's ship and was arguably operating as a privateer for Spotswood rather than in the King's name when he fought Blackbeard. I don't know if non-Navy captains had any power to put people on trial. Merchant captains could flog men or otherwise punish them, but that wasn't judicial and required no trial; any master was entitled to physically punish his servants under the savage laws of that time. Merchant captains also had loosely defined powers under what I think were called "the customs and usages of the sea," but again I'm not sure that that included any general power to try and hang people; if it did, I would doubt that it went beyond the members of his own crew.

In short, captains would be on safer legal ground turning pirates over to the (vice)-admiralty courts than by acting as judge, jury and executioner themselves, and that's probably why they so rarely hanged pirates from the yardarm.

I don't know of any other case where it happened. The closest parallel I know of would be the mutineers on the U.S. brig Somers in 1842, where the three men hanged for mutiny had allegedly planned to turn pirate, but never got a chance to do it.

In theory, pirates were liable to be executed as hostis humani gneris by any captain who took them, if they could not safely be brought to trial. In practice, most captains who captured pirates seem to have been very happy to pass off the responsibility to the admiralty or vice-admiralty courts. Roberts' men, Bonnet and his men, Quelch, Vane, Rackham and Kenedy were all hanged on shore between the tide marks, not from a yardarm.

Certainly Earle believes that the governor ordered Spragge to hang Bannister because the jury would have acquitted him again.

In fact, pirates seem to have hanged men from the yardarm themselves more often than they were ever subjected to it. The most famous case, of course, being Roberts hanging the governor of Martinique from a yardarm.

Australia is a pretty big island too.

I was counting Australia as a continent. If you count it as an island, it's by far the biggest in the world.

This is outside my specialty, but maybe this picture of the assault on Cartagena in 1741 would be useful regarding colors of Spanish colonial infantry?

This is a kind of semi-piratical video production of the famous shanty

The presence of struggling colonies doesn't necesarily rescue a place from backwater status. Port Dauphin was the only long-term European colony on the largest island in the world and, from the pirates' point of view, who cares about the Arabs?

Madagascar's the fourth largest island in the world, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. I mention this only because I so very rarely have the opportunity to catch you in an error.

I'm not sure that the pirates cared much about the Arab settlements, but since they preyed on Arab shipping in the Red Sea, I assume it would be important that they not give the Arabs on Madagascar the opportunity to spot their ships being careened or preparing to depart, lest their targets get warning of the pirates' intentions. I would also be curious to know if the Arab shipping to Madagascar itself was ever targeted by pirates.

St Mary's Isle was probably chosen, not just for its remoteness but also because of its very easily defended harbour.

That makes sense.

Arne Bialuschewski has published an article on pirates and the Madagascar slave trade.

Hadn't heard of him before. Are you referring to his article "Pirates, Slavers, and the Indigenous Population in Madagascar, c. 1690-1715"?

Now that I'm looking him up, I see he's published quite a lot about pirates, including something called "Jacobite Pirates?" Is he good?

Just read a little article by James Armstrong, "Madagascar and the Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century."

Unfortunately, he deliberately skips over most of the pirate period, saying that it has already been adequately covered, but he does give some sources for piracy in Madagascar: H. Deschamps, Les pirates a Madagascar, Paris 1972, M. Brown Madagascar Rediscovered p. 72-91, Jacob Judd, "Frederick Phillipseand the Madagascar Trade," New York Historical Society Quarterly Oct. 1971 p. 354-74, and Virginia Platt, "The East India Company and the Madagascar slave trade" William and Mary Quarterly, XXVI Oct. 1969 p. 548-77.

It notes that a Dutch East India Company ship, the Westerwijk, that picked up slaves at Magelage was captured by pirates in 1686; what happened to the ship afterward is unrecoreded but none of her slave cargo reached their destination (p. 231).

I had previously thought that the pirates chose Madagascar as a base largely because it was an out-of-the-way backwater where they wouldn't be bothered, but I was wrong; Madagascar was a very busy place. The Arabs had been trading for slaves there since before 1613, maybe centuries before; six or seven thousand of the inhabitants of Massailly or Magelage (modern Nosy Antshoheribory in northwest Madagascar) were Muslim. The French had their settlement at Port Dauphin of course, but the English, Dutch and Portuguese also traded for slaves in their own ports. The English had twice tried and failed to colonize the island, in 1644 and 1650.

I was hoping to find something on the routes taken around the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar; unfortunately there's nothing about that. It does note that the English sailors usually went up through the Mozambique Channel and stopped at Johanna (Anjouan) on their way to Surat or Bombay; as I recall, both Kidd and Avery did precisely that. The Dutch, however, were often at war with the Portuguese, and thus preferred to stay well away from Mozambique; they dropped down into the roaring forties and went to the Indies by routes well to the east of Madagascar. On the way back they came closer to the Madagascar east coast (asnd presumably stopped over often at Mauritius), but still avoided the Mozambique Channel.

I'm listening on CD to DeFoe's Moll Flanders, while reading Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England: 1500-1800.

Stone is very interesting. He says that a lot of the characteristics of modern families only originated during the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries. Like:

The idea that marriage should be for love.

Calling your parents "Mom" and "Pop" or the equivalent, rather than "Mr.," "Mrs." or "Sir."

The idea that parents and children form a private family to themselves, and that it is none of their relatives' or neighbors' business whom they marry, what they do in bed sexually, how they discipline the children (or the wife!), how they spend their money, and even whom the parents choose to let pass the threshold of their door.

Breast-feeding children yourself instead of turning them over to wet-nurses (although of course the poor and lower middle class always had to do this themselves).

Letting little babies move and play instead of swaddling them into immobility.

Why in the world would Scots move to Panama?? Thats like Penguins living in the Mojave desert.

The theory was that ships carrying exotic Eastern goods (Chinese teas and silks, spices from the Indies, that kind of stuff) would start docking in Panama instead of going around Capes Horn or Good Hope, and the Scots would carry them across the isthmus to ships waiting on the other side, with the Scottish investors growing immensely rich on tolls, warehouse fees, and things like that. The guy who came up with this brilliant idea, William Paterson, had never seen Panama and thought it had great farmland that would sustain the colonists until they became international shipping tycoons. He also figured that the Spanish (whose huge port city of Panama was right next door) wouldn't raise a ruckus about it. I kid you not.

This was all happening during the run-up to the War of the Spanish Succession, and King William was eagerly buttering up King Charles II of Spain in the desperate hope that the idiot would leave his throne to a Habsburg instead of to Louis XIV's grandson. Unlike Paterson, William knew perfectly well that a Scottish colony threatening the city of Panama would provoke the Spanish big-time, so it's not surprising that he refused to do anything whatsoever to help the Scots.

As for it being like penguins living in the Mojave Desert, that's about right, and the Scots' life expectancy was about as good as a Mojave penguin's. Horrible, horrible losses to every kind of tropical disease you can imagine, and the leaders had made virtually no provision for medical care. About three quarters of them died.

Hey, Ed just said Gosse got something right!

Nobody's all bad... except perhaps Nigel Cawthorne

Argh! Don't get me started on Cawthorne! I just read his book two months ago; OMG was it bad!

This is an excellent roundup by Tartan Jack. The point about Jacobite leaders, including Scottish ones, projecting grand and unrealistic personal expectations onto the Stuart heirs is a good one I hadn't considered.

Remember, it wasn't but a hundred years since they were merged and Scotland effectively (and illegally, in the minds of Scottish Nationalists) ceased to be a separate kingdom and it's parliament closed until the 1990s. Independence wasn't some distant memory or some pipe-dream.

To emphasize the truth of this: the Acts of Union that dissolved the Scottish Parlliament and formally fused Scotland to England were 1707! So from the perspective of, say, one of the Scots in Stede Bonnet's crew in 1718, it was only 11 years ago.

Another thing that intensified Scottish bitterness against the "usurpers" was the Darien project, where Scotland had tried around 1700 to found a colony on the isthmus of Panama. The collapse of Darien and the death of most of the colonists ate up more than half of Scotland's capital and was large part of what had made the Act of Union necessary. The Scots blamed King William for Darien's failure, which wasn't fair; Darien was so horribly mismanaged from the start that no amount of royal support would have saved it. But William did order the other Caribbean colonies to withhold support from the Scottish colonists, and thus greatly magnified the suffering of the survivors. You can gauge the Scots' bitterness by an episode in Johnson where some English sailors were lynched by Scots for piracy, the crowd shouting, "Now we'll Darien 'em!"

If I were writing a novel with a Scottish character or constructing a Scottish persona, I would certainly include the Darien experience in it.

May your new vessel be safely launched, and have a long and happy voyage.

A pirate captain named Thompson is mentioned in the source I just found.

two [sloops] commanded by Capt. Lidderdale and Capt. Naylor . . . retook the Kingston, Capt. Saunders of London, whose Cargo amounted to 20000 l. Sterling, and destroyed the Pyrate (Thompson) who had taken him.

On the other hand, in the very next line, Boyer says that Barnet captured Rackham in 1717, which is wrong by three years, so there's cause to doubt his accuracy.

Here's the best source I've found yet: an actual 1726 book by an A. Boyer called The Political State of Great Britain, which mentions Cooper's capture by the Diamond.

The Diamond Man of War . . . has taken a Pyrate commanded by one Cooper, and had a great many Prisoners on board, and was bound to Jamaica with them. He further says that Low and Spriggs were both marooned and were got among the Musketto Indians.

The correspondence was written from Piscataqua River on April 22, 1726; obviously, it would have taken some time to reach New England from the Bay of Honduras. It's interesting not only for the mention of Cooper, but for yet another theory on the ultimate mysterious fate of Low!

And another reference from John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, from 1830:

Skipton, the pirate, with 80 men, is said to have been taken by his Majesty's ship the Diamond, in the bay of Honduras, together with Joseph Cooper, another pirate vessel. When one of these vessels saw she msut surrender, the Captain with many of his men went into the cabin and blew themselves up!

No sources are given unfortunately, so it could all be fancy. It's an interesting account, though; if true, it's the only case I know of where pirates actually did blow themselves up with gunpowder. It also mentions a Captain Line, who "had lost his nose and an eye," a possible historical case of a one-eyed Golden Age pirate.

Interestingly, Watson did not have access to Johnson's General History of the Pirates; he remembered his mother reading to him from it, but by the time he grew up, he was unable to locate anybody who had a copy.

Well, having looked at Hayward, I see everything in Gosse (and also in Rediker) is pretty well taken directly from his book, so they are little help.

Austin Meredith has put together an odd little PDF about Kidd, which you can see here. Besides the Upton incident, on page 175 it mentions a Joseph Cooper amongst a group of seven men charged with piratically seizing the Antelope in the Delaware River in 1718. It also mentions that this was the same Cooper who, with his crew of pirates, were captured or killed in the Bay of Honduras in 1725. That might be the same Cooper who commanded the Night Rambler, at least the year is right, and the Bay of Honduras would be an easy sail from Aruba on the trade winds.

Cooper, sans his first name, is mentioned in Gosse's The Pirates' Who's Who. Gosse's deficiencies have been mentioend before, but we're grasping at straws here.

Gosse says the Night Rambler was a sloop. He captured the Perry Galley three days from Barbados on 11/14/1725, and a French sloop the next day, and rifled them at Aruba. Their crews were starved by the pirates until the pirates' doctor got them some food. The Perry's bosun, a Mr. Upton, joined the pirates, and was later hanged for it in England; no word if Cooper and the rest of his crew were also caught.

Absolutely. In terms of numbers, during the GAoP at least, there were probably more Jacobites who'd consider themselves English than there were Scottish, and, as noted previously, Jacobitism never had anything whatsoever to do with Scottish nationalism.

In England preparations were made for armed rebellions, but were betrayed to the government before they could be put into action. If Ormonde's planned rising in the West Country in 1715 hadn't been found out before it began then it's doubtful we'd even associated Jacobitism with Scotland now, let alone Scottish nationalism.

Well, surely the 1745 rebellion would associate Jacobitism with Scotland no matter what (unless Ormonde had actually succeeded in planting James on the throne, which seems improbable). It was the only one of the risings that came anywhere near succeeding, and nearly all of its success was in Scotland; Bonnie Prince Charlie got almost no support when he marched into England. And of course Cumberland stamping out the Jacobite clans after Culloden was also bound to connect the suppression of Jacobitism with the subjection of Scotland, even though Whig clans like the Campbells were enthusiastically helping Cumberland.

And Killiecrankie was surely the most significant victory that the Jacobites ever won, with their Highland backers. That alone would strongly associate Scotland with Jacobitism.

It is true, though, that we tend to overlook the anti-Jacobite clans like the Campbells, and overlook how a clan-ridden society can't be nationalist in the way we think of it today.