Daniel

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. 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.

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!”

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 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: 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.

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?

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.

Aloof comes from the nautical term "to luff," meaning to turn the ship up into the wind. If a ship upwind of you luffs, it is turning away from you and becoming hard to approach, like an aloof person.

"You, too, Bobstay?" he gasped.

Very nice work! This is the best one yet.

My favorite of the lot is the gap-toothed pirate with the eyepatch, very well done. Lots of pirates and sailors were missing teeth because of scurvy. The second pirate standing on the rock is also good because of his ponytail; sailors tended to prefer ponytails and braids to keep their hair out of their eyes, so while the long flowing hair does tend to give a bit of a "wild man" look, it's not very historical. About your weapons: the cutlass hily in the first picture is very nice, but the blade curves the wrong way. And flintlock guns almost always have the lock on the right side, not the left as in the third picture. I generally like the full-figure pirate in the last picture, but his sword is quite a bit too big to be practical, and his hat needs to be narrowed and sit a bit lower on his head. Of course, I myself would be happy to produce anything half as good as what you have done here.

Thank you, you all relieve my mind.

This is a very nice find, yes, but I don't see any evidence that these are pirate artifacts. Especially if they're correct in dating the relics to the 1620s-1650s period; Suriname would have been a long way for the boucaniers to go in the little craft that they had back then. Sure, it could be a pirate site, but wouldn't these items be perfectly consistent with the far more numerous ordinary merchants of the casa de contratacion? Of course, these items would still make perfectly good models for boucanier re-enactors; boucaniers would have stolen or traded for very similar things at that time.

The red flag was used in the 1650s by Admiral Tromp of the Dutch Navy simply as a signal to all friendly ships to attack the enemy. It had no apparent significance to giving or not giving quarter. This is mentioned in Time Life's Seafarers book on the Dutch Wars, named Fighting Sail IIRC. At some point, the red flag acquired the name pavillon nomme sansquartier, "flag named no quarter," according to Cordingly, but I think that was later in the 17th century.

Very nice indeed. You say it's English - could it be of Shotley Bridge make? The time period is right...

Mission hasn't been on the board since April 19th. Where'd he go? Bad enough we're losing Cap'n Bo, but losing our ship's chirurgeon would be a disaster. Somebody please tell me he's just gone on vacation somewhere or something.

I see reference on the Web to some 19th century mountain howitzers that only weighed 250 pounds. Certainly that wouldn't be too great a weight for the tops, although I don't know if that weight includes the carriage. Still wondering about the recoil, though; firing at a high angle, a lot of the recoil would go down against the top, rather than laterally. But more important: since evidently the howitzers were used in the tops, how far back does the practice go? Did the ships of Benbow's and Rooke's time use howitzers in the tops? Might pirates have done the same?

That is awesome! It's just like they say, all real rules, at least for Roberts. Although they left out the part that you could still stay up and drink after eight, so long as you did it on deck without lights.