Daniel

You can actually find sternpost rudders on North European cogs as early as the 12th or 13th centuries, and much earlier than that in some other civilizations. But yes, the steering oar continued to be used on various other vessels at least into the 15th century, and maybe longer.

Excellent! Delighted to hear that! Regarding "port" and "starboard," my understanding is that "port" was initially used just for helm orders, to avoid the possibility of confusion because "starboard" and "larboard" sound so similar. Only much later did "port" supplant "larboard" for other uses. And I read in Time-Life's The Vikings that "starboard" goes all the way back to the Vikings, whose steering oar on the right side of the vessel was called the stjornbord.

One of the things I love most about pirates, and ancient sailors generally, is their picturesque language. Phrases like "lay her by the lee," "lay aloft the windward mizzen yard," "blowing marlinspikes," "have a care of the lee latch," and "how cheer ye fore and aft?" are like poetry to me. Although sailing jargon changed remarkably little over the centuries - sailors on the Golden Hind and the Cutty Sark would both easily understand a phrase like "the main mast is shot by the board" - it did evolve slowly. "Ahoy," for example, does not appear in print until the 1750s; the Sea-Man's Vade Mecum of 1707 has no entry for "ahoy," and suggests you greet an approaching vessel with the words "Hoa hoa!" Even the 1757 edition of Mountaine's Sea-Man's Vade Mecum and Defensive War by Sea does not have "ahoy" in its dictionary, instead saying "Hoa the ship!" Two of my favorite nautical phrases are "Sail ho!" and "Land ho!" But are they period? I have often read in older sources of sailors simply shouting "Land, land!" or "A sail! A sail!" These latter are so much more prosaic that I hate to write them in my stories, but are they more authentic? I couldn't have been more than ten years old when I first read the enchanting expression, "Hard a-lee!" Not until much later did I realize that "helm's a-lee!" is far more common, and also much more descriptive of what's actually happening. But which, if either, of these phrases was used in GAoP? I don't want to add too many other questions, but I'd like to invite everybody generally to mention any well known maritime lingo that wasn't around during our period.

I'm not sure how the Roberts story came to be attributed to DeFoe in the first place. Does Cordingly say anything about it? Here's one tiny piece of evidence against DeFoe's authorship. In Moll Flanders DeFoe has an unnamed pirate try to force Moll Flanders' husband to join his crew., "but by entreaties were prevailed with to leave him." In Roberts' account, Low's pirates have a strict rule against forcing any married man to join. If the books were written by the same man, it seems odd that they would represent the pirates as having such different rules.

I wouldn't say it was impossible, but it would be extremely difficult. Borderline insane, in fact. The Mississippi is four miles wide at Memphis and 200 feet at its deepest, so a sloop or even a full rig ship could theoretically stand off the city without grounding. But the current would make progress very slow, maybe 1.5 knots average, and you wouldn't dare sail at night in such constricted waters. Any ocean ship, even a sloop, is too big to practically pole or tow. So you're looking at a month or two to get up to the Memphis area. The other major problem is that the Mississippi is extremely prone to sandbars, mud banks, and other hazards to which deep-keel ocean vessels are particularly vulnerable. Until the steamboats came, virtually all the traffic on the Mississippi was flat-bottomed barges and Indian canoes. Besides that, the GAoP is usually considered as ending in 1730 at the latest, before Fort Assumption was built. So what is the ship going to attack? The Indian encampment?

I think we're talking about two different things. The platform that pushes the shrouds and chains out further is called the channel. In Foxe's picture, they're getting ready to climb onto the channel. But in Foxe's picture you can also see a step on the side of the ship, just a couple of inches higher and inboard from the channel, that runs all along the side of the ship; you can see one crewman's leg standing on it. The same step can be seen in this picture: the lower fluke of the anchor points right to it. The step could be easily reached from a boat, although I sure as hell wouldn't want to try it in a heavy sea. I'm not sure if there is such a step in your picture of the Kalmar Nyckel, although maybe those long brown-painted strakes on the sides project out far enough to step on; it's hard to see from this angle. I can see the fixed ladder on the Kalmar Nyckel, just between the aftermost gunport and the main chains.

I was wrong. "The wooden hatch-covers, or gratings, were placed in position and tarpaulins stretched over them. These were made fast to the sides of the coamings by nailing on long laths, or 'battens.'" Harland, Seamanship in the Age of Sail, p. 211. He has an interesting note about the gratings, too: "On the topic of hatch-covers, Liardet (104) complains that they are 'inviariably used for every dirty thing that is done, and when needed, are found unserviceable.'" One such use being to tie up sailors for flogging, presumably.

The hole is called the hatch, as Callenish said. The cover is called a grate or grating. Around the edges of the hatch are raised wooden projections called coamings; they help keep water from pouring into the hatch if waves break on the deck. In a storm, rain would fall through the grating if it were left uncovered, so you'd tie down a canvas tarpaulin called a batten over the hatch; whence the phrase "batten down the hatches."

Very informative picture. So you can actually stand on the boat's gunwale without tipping it! I did not realize that. And that gunwale gives you a good two feet of extra height. Another thing I didn't realize; there's a sort of "step" built into the side of the Golden Hind, at the base of the bulwark. Was that a common design feature? It certainly would have made boarding a lot easier. I assume the step is there because it's more important to be able to recover boat crews safely than to make it tough for hostile boarding parties to get onto the ship?

If you want to rob a ship (which you, being a pirate, would like to do) you have to get onto it first. In some cases, the persons who are already on that ship are violently disinclined to allow you on board. So how do you do manage to get aboard anyway? My sources say remarkably little about the nitty-gritty of getting from your own ship into somebody else's. Boarding from a boat One thing that looks pretty clear: pirates' favorite way to get on board the target ship was with the active help and cooperation of that ship's crew. The usual drill was to tell the other ship's captain to lower a boat and come aboard the pirates' ship, with appropriate threats, curses, and shooting across the bow to convince said captain that rapid compliance would be good for his health. With the captain in their power, the pirates would persuade him to order his crew to allow them aboard, and a prize or pillaging crew would be dispatched, perhaps in the same boat that brought the captain, and would be grudgingly helped aboard by their intended victims. But taking the captain hostage first was optional. At least two of Stede Bonnet's victims allowed the pirates to board, despite strongly suspecting who they were, and surrendered readily the minute the boarders put their hands on their cutlasses. There may have been no more than two or three boarders, but the mere threat of the Royal James lurking in the twilight dissuaded the captains from resisting. Even in these cases, the actual means of getting from boat to ship is a little vague. Rope ladder? Boatswain's chair? Fixed boarding stairs? Grappling line? Presumably only very small ships had low enough freeboard that a man in a boat could have reached the target ship's gunwale standing up. Some buccaneering accounts suggest that the target ship's stern offered handholds enough to climb aboard. If boarding from the side, it may have been possible for men in a boat to reach the chains, pull themselves onto the channels, and climb up the shrouds from there. One of Stede Bonnet's victims mentions that the pirates grasped their cutlasses "as soon as they came up the shrouds," which suggests they did indeed use this route. Boarding from ship to ship I've never seen any source saying that pirates ever really swung from one ship to another on a line hooked in the yards in Errol Flynn/Jack Sparrow style. Nor have I seen any primary source that bears out the idea, often reported in secondary sources, that pirates fashioned stair steps out of boarding axes driven into the prize's hull. May we safely consider these two methods fictional? Benerson Little reports one case where privateers leaped from their own deck to the prey's. This was dangerous; one man fell between the ships and was crushed between them, splattering his brains onto his comrade Duguay-Trouin. This may have been the most common method, but obviously there were situations where it couldn't have worked. First, the pirates would have needed a freeboard nearly as high as their opponent's; they couldn't have jumped onto a ship more than two or three feet higher than their own, except by grabbing the gunwale with their hands at the end of the leap and pulling themselves on board. Besides risking the fate of Duguay-Trouin's friend, this would have left the pirates' hands on a ready-made chopping block for anyone with a cutlass. Given the many cases where pirates in sloops or even smaller craft attacked large merchantmen, the freeboard problem must have been common. Furthermore, even when two ships had equal freeboard, the distance from gunwale to gunwale would often have been too far to jump. Because of tumble-home, two ships touching each other at the waterline might be as much as ten feet apart at the gunwales. Few pirates could have jumped such a distance. Swinging aboard would have solved this problem, as would laying down gangplanks from ship to ship. Running grappling lines from the prey's rigging to the pirates' capstan and tightening until the two ships' gunwales touched each other seems impractical. But what method did pirates actually use when they couldn't jump directly to the other guy's deck?

That's odd. I thought I posted the name of the Black Joke, commanded by Benito de Soto, but it seems to be gone now. De Soto was a 19th century pirate, though; are we going to include them?

About Sheriffmuir; it effectively ended the Fifteen rebellion, so in that sense it was indeed a big Jacobite loss. But I'd like to point out that from a tactical standpoint it was indecisive. Each side routed the other side's left wing, each side sustained comparable losses, and each army was well capable of continuing the contest on the next day. What really decided the battle was the Earl of Mar's decision to retreat the next day. Mar's clans had already lost confidence in him from all his dilly-dallying during the spring and summer, and when he slunk away without continuing the fight, they pretty well gave up on him and went back to their glens. And when James landed, he didn't inspire any more confidence than Mar did. Some historian once said that Mar probably wouldn't have accomplished anything even if Argyll had never opposed him. I'm inclined to agree. The heroine of my first novel, Maureen MacLinden, lost both her sons in the left wing of Mar's army on the banks of the Allan Water. She still wears a blue bonnet with a white cockade, but pretty well gave up on the Jacobites from that day.

I finished Moll Flanders. Might be worth reading for someone constructing a female persona or character; otherwise not. Although there are some bright bits of humor in it, it's mostly a plodding read. The general idea is that Betty, alias Moll Flanders, lives a life of wickedness and eventually becomes a thief, only to be redeemed in the end by pious penitence. Very moralistic. I do wonder how seriously DeFoe meant us to take the premise. Theoretically, Moll goes wrong because of her vanity, and all the disasters that befall her result from this sin, which allows her to be seduced at a young age and suffer the horror of losing her viriginity and honor before she's married. In reality, though, Moll's troubles have nothing to do with vanity. Her lost virginity causes her very little difficulty, as she gets her first husband so drunk on their wedding night that he never realizes she's not a virgin. What really lands Moll in the soup is that two of her husbands die early, another two desert her, and a fifth fails to work out for a hilariously improbable reason. Was DeFoe playing to the censors while quietly punching holes in the 18th century moralists' pretensions? Or was he himself blind to the fact that his story doesn't have the moral that he claims it has? I don't know, but either way it makes the book surprisingly appealing to a modern reader. The book is a fair source on Golden Age culture. It's published in 1722, but Moll is shown as writing in 1683, and thus to have been born about 1613. Oddly, the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Great Fire are never mentioned, even though Moll is in London beginning her thieving career at the time of the Great Fire. The story is mainly about marriage, specifically how money overwhelmed all other concerns in picking a spouse, and how a woman's options were basically, marriage, prostitution, or theft. Moll spends most of the book trying to convince husbands that she is "a fortune," that is, that she has enough money to be worth marrying. Moll's attitude toward her children is memorably callous; although there's a warm reunion with one of them near the end of the book, she places most of them with others soon after they're born and never bothers to see them, and she seems to have simply abandoned at least one bastard son. There's a fair description of the inside of Newgate, and mention of the prisoners who have money enough to buy the liberty of the press yard. One of the inmates has the memorably gruesome tagline, "If I swing by the string, I will hear the bell ring, And then there's an end to poor Jenny."

Here's a mysterious mark. That ghastly device is intended to burn the letters ATI into a person's chest. It is in the Cape Coast Castle Museum. But I cannot find out whether "ATI" meant an individual slave trader, or a company of them. The Royal African Company's brand was supposedly "DY" for the Duke of York, James Stuart. Edit: It is possible that the photo is reversed, in which case the brand would read ITA. But I'm not coming up with the name of an individual or company of those initials either that did business at Cape Coast Castle.

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?

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.

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.

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?