Daniel

This is a kind of semi-piratical video production of the famous shanty , sung in French! No real robbing or pillaging, but lots of comely youngsters singing, sailing and donning pirate-like costume.

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. That makes sense. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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 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: 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.

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.

Liam was, I should hope, merely describing his persona's feelings toward the English in a historically accurate way, from a time when bitter ethnic hatreds were rife. Not venting any personal dislike against America's staunchest ally and her people. Foxe, I realize that there were plenty of English and colonial Jacobites, but amongst the Scots (who were mostly Protestant, after all) was there some element of Scottish nationalism in their Jacobitism, as the Stuarts had originally been kings of Scotland long before they gained the English crown? I realize there would be some historical absurdity in the Scots holding up the Stuarts as national icons, since the Scots had rebelled against Charles I Stuart before the English did, but by the 1690s maybe the Scots had forgotten about that episode?

I'm ordering the book. Thank you, Royaliste!

Sounds like just a distorted version of "woolding," which was mentioned upthread a little ways. If you tightened the knotted rope around the prisoner's head enough, his eyes would burst out. L'Ollonois's men reputedly did that, and Morgan's too. Twisting the knotted rope with a piece of timber would be a "screwing"-like process.

Here's a clue: some time before 1848, a Captain Maury suggested that ships leaving from New York bound for the equator should stand eastward to about 60 or 50 degrees west longitude before trying to make any southing; he believed this was the best way across the horse latitudes so long as the wind stayed fair for easting. So indeed ships from America did try to ride the westerlies for a good portion of the trip, but not so far as the Azores. After 1848, Maury changed his mind and suggested a shortest-distance great circle route to the equator, which proved much faster, not only because it was shorter but because the winds were much more favorable, the trade winds being stronger on the west side of the Atlantic than the east. Of course, Maury had good chronometers and could pinpoint longitude; to attempt a great circle route from New York to the equator in pre-longitude days would have been daring indeed.

Thanks very much, Foxe. You help remedy my deficiency in hands-on experience.

He renamed her the Windham Galley (and yes, I had to look that up; I didn't know it off the top of my head). But the significance escapes me.

William Red Wake is unquestionably the king of creating magnificent Jolly Rogers. Indeed, the only thing that could possibly be said against his work is that it is better than most pirates armed with just a needle, thread, and dyed cloth could possibly have managed. My own avatar, the flag of Maureen MacLinden and her crew, the Cutlass' Daughters, obviously suffers in comparison: here's the close-up.

For my part, no. I have found evidence of Jacobite sympathies among only three pirate crews. Stede Bonnet renamed his sloop the Royal James, and one of his captives saw Bonnet's men drinking the health of James Stuart, the "Old Pretender." Some of Ned Low's men may have been Jacobites, according to George Roberts, who was almost killed by the quartermaster when he suggested that George I was king; the quartermaster already bore him a grudge, however. Richard Tookerman, Bonnet's would-be rescuer and a small-time pirate, was accused of firing off a gun in honor of James Stuart's birthday. On the other hand, at least one of Bartholomew Roberts' Lords was strongly anti-Jacobite, his father having been a "sufferer in Monmouth's rebellion" and consequently strongly anti-Catholic. The name Queen Anne's Revenge, used both by Blackbeard and by Edward England for one of his prizes, is no real evidence of Jacobitism. Real Jacobites supported James Stuart, or his son Charles, not Anne; Anne herself supported the Hanoverian succession, not the Jacobite heirs. Even among those few pirates who showed Jacobite sympathies, there's no sign that they took the Jacobite cause at all seriously. Pirate participation in the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite uprisings was nil. I have seen no evidence whatsoever of any communication between James Stuart at the French royal court and any of the pirates. No supposedly Jacobite pirate ever put his money where his mouth was by contributing any of his plunder to one of the Stuart heirs. The Jacobitism shown by Bonnet, Low, and Tookerman was probably purely opportunist, intended to help them angle for a royal pardon in case the Stuarts returned to the throne. This is shown above all by the fact that, once the Hanoverian king offered the pirates a pardon, the vast majority of them delightedly accepted it, and no more was heard about Jacobitism among them.

In 1813, a boy in the Royal Navy was ordered to receive 60 lashes on the buttocks for stabbing a shipmate. He received 36 lashes at 11:15 in the morning, then ten days later was given the other 24 lashes at 10 in the morning. See http://www.corpun.com/ukrnr1.htm I'm definitely beginning to think that the hanging in the early morning vs. flogging at noon thing is a myth, or at least highly flexible.

Another reference, this time to flogging. in Two Years Before the Mast, the American merchant captain Frank Thompson flogs two sailors at a little after ten in the morning, immediately after one sailor says something to him that the captain took a dislike to, and the other sailor asks why the first was to be flogged.

Say, Foxe, can you give us a tutorial on how you use these creations of yours? Or point out where to find such instructions?