Daniel

And here's the part where Hall finally gets his money, albeit a heck of a lot less than he was asking for. Note that almost half the award is court costs: fair wages was just forty-four pounds and change. I have no clue who the "aforesaid Edward" is or what is meant by "merger."

Longarm, I got these by e-mail order from the South Carolina state archives (which are in Charleston, I think). The archives are catalogued on line, and I browsed and found the litigation involving Fayrer Hall, then ordered it for the article I was doing (now completed and submitted) on Stede Bonnet's last battle. These are copies from microfilm.

The previous document, for all its legalese, was fairly simple: Fayrer Hall was suing Richard Tookerman for his wages as master of the Sea Nymph. Below is the judgment in Hall's favor. This is what we would today call a default judgment; Tookerman didn't answer the petition, so Trott pretty well automatically finds in Hall's favor. But Trott won't award any money without a jury trial, so a jury will be summoned to hear the evidence for Hall's damages. Oddly, though the document is handwritten, it is clearly a form, written out in advance with the names of Hall, Tookerman, and Allein written in the blank spots left for them, in a different hand from the rest of the document. *Under the English Julian-based calendar then in use, the New Year officially fell on March 25th, even though the modern custom of starting the year on January 1st was becoming popular. Thus dates between January 1st and March 24th would sometimes be written with two numbers, the lower, Julian number and the higher, modern number. By our reckoning, this would be the court of February 1719 and the judgment would be signed in March of 1719.

OK, I hoped to do some of this a while ago, but fatherhood and two jobs have interfered. Here's Fayrer Hall's petition. Sections I can't read are indicated by an ellipsis (". . ."). The photocopy is clear at the beginning, then gets progressively harder to read near the bottom.

Thank you for the comments. I am transcribing some of the court documents and may post them here later if anyone wants to see them. Unfortunately, the transcriptions may not be very complete; a lot of this 300-year-old handwriting is pretty darn tough to read!

The story of Stede Bonnet's end will be familiar to many of you. To recap the accepted Charles Johnson story: Bonnet's Royal James is hiding in the Cape Fear River when William Rhett brings two sloops up from Charleston: the Henry (captain Masters) and the Sea Nymph (captain Fayrer Hall). Battle breaks out on 9/27/1718, all three sloops run aground, the Sea Nymph out of range, the Henry wtihin pistol shot and badly exposed. Henry and Royal James then pound each other for five hours, until the tide lifts Henry free, leaving Royal James stuck, and soon after the pirates surrender. The court records I have received shed a new light on things. Hall, captain of the Sea Nymph that barely got scratched in the fighting, sued Richard Tookerman in early 1719. Tookerman, himself a pirate who consorted once with Bartholomew Roberts, is believed to have assisted Stede Bonnet in his abortive escape attempt in October 1718. The two slaves who were helping Bonnet when he was recaptured both belonged to Tookerman, and I am informed that Tookerman was jailed on suspicion of helping Bonnet. What I have never seen before is this: Fayrer Hall says that Tookerman owned the Sea Nymph. Hall was suing Tookerman for his unpaid wages as theSea Nymph's captain. Hall asked for the kingly total of 581 pounds, an amount that would have sufficed to buy two average town lots in Charleston and most of a third. The court, presided over by the same Nicholas Trott who hanged Bonnet and his crew, finally granted Hall the much more reasonable sum of 83 pounds for his service as captain. It gets more interesting. In 1720, Fayrer Hall sued William Rhett himself for slander. What had Rhett said? He had publicly accused Hall himself of being a pirate! Hall moaned that this imputation of piracy had destroyed his "hitherto untainted" reputation (in reality, Hall had been convicted of assault and battery for invading a neighbor's home and beating him up only months before the Cape Fear battle). Hall won a default judgment when Rhett, for reasons unknown, failed to show up for court. But apparently, the court never did get around to awarding Hall any damages. These three facts: 1) Tookerman, probable friend and helper of Bonnet, owned the Sea Nymph, 2) Hall expected Tookerman to pay him money vastly in excess of what one would normally expect, or the court would grant, and 3) Rhett, witness to Hall's conduct at Cape Fear, accused Hall of being a pirate, would support a hypothesis that 4) Hall's failure to get into the fighting at Cape Fear may not have been accidental as previously supposed, but deliberate, acting on orders from Tookerman and motivated by the anticipation of a large money bribe from Tookerman that never materialized. Conclusive? No. But interesting.

It was a sailor's superstition at one time that drowning a cat would bring up a wind when the ship was becalmed. I don't know if that tale goes back to the Golden Age, though.

Interesting. Is that a boar spear? And what kind of hat?

One last post, then I promise to leave this subject alone. I got Kurt Stein's Canes and Walking Sticks. It has two more pictures of GAoP and pre-GAoP sword canes. One is a late 16th century German combination sword-and-gun cane. It is mahogany with an octagagonal section hilt, a blade 42.43 inches long, overall length 50.125 inches. The blade is flattened diamond section. Here's the picture. The other is an early 18th-century sword cane. The flat hexagon section of the blade is typical of the period. The shaft is hardwood, the grip polished bone. Ferrules are brass. Here's the picture. There's also some useful information on period sword canes. In sum, sword canes are period, although they were considerably scarcer than they became in the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries.

The only hint I have about that is that Kidd's Adventure Galley did have a separate powder magazine. My book doesn't say whether it was locked. But it would make sense, given that fire was one of the constant fears of maritime life.

My understanding was that the custom came about simply as a symbolic statement that the jurisdiction of the Admiralty started at the waterline. If you saw the tide wash over the executed criminal, you could see that he was clearly in the territory of the Admiralty and thus the Admiralty had authority to execute the criminal.

Well, what clues can we pick up from the naval service? Granted that arms were kept under lock and key most of the time, surely it must have been necessary at times to send navy sailors aloft during battle, after they had been given weapons. Torn sails would have to be furled or cut loose, damaged rigging repaired, etc. Did those sailors go aloft armed, and if not, where did they leave their weapons meanwhile?

I am not sure what the most common practice was. I do know that in August 1718, Stede Bonnet's crew did a share-out aboard their sloop while at sea.

The articles of John Phillips and Bartholomew Roberts both lead me to believe that pirates usually did tend to their own weapons and were held responsible for doing so. Phillips' article 6: "That Man that shall not keep his Arms clean, fit for an Engagement, or neglect his Business, shall be cut off from his Share, and suffer such other Punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit. " Roberts' article V: "V. To keep their piece, pistols, and cutlass clean and fit for service. [in this they were extravagantly nice, endeavoring to outdo one another in the beauty and richness of their arms, giving sometimes at an auction (at the mast) thirty or forty pounds a pair for pistols." The reference in Roberts' articles to the pirates actually buying their pistols suggests that, at least in that crew, the pistols were not under the Master at Arms' control. LadyBarbossa, pirate captains didn't always know how to navigate, viz. Walter Kenedy, described as a mere "pretender." On merchant ships, the mate sometimes knew navigation. Merchant captain George Roberts, known for being captured by pirate Capain Low, once got sick on one of his voyages. When he recovered, he went at once to his mate and demanded to know the latitude (dissatisfied with the answer, he then worked it out for himself).

A share is one equal part of the plunder available for distribution after expenses are paid. It works something like this, assuming John Phillips' articles. Ship has plundered 6,000 pieces of eight. 1,200 pieces of eight are spent on food, cordage, beer, water, sails, etc., and one pirate has lost a limb and is paid 800 pieces of eight, leaving 4,000 pieces of eight to be shared out. We will assume that there are 99 pirates aboard, and for the sake of making the math easier we will assume the boatswain and gunner are dead. Thus the treasure will be divided into the following shares. 99 shares (one for each pirate). One half share (the captain's extra half share). Two quarter shares (the master and carpenter's extra quarter shares). Total: 100 shares. 4,000 pieces of eight divided by 100 shares equals 40 pieces of eight per share. Thus each pirate gets 40 pieces of eight, except the captain who gets 60 pieces of eight, and the master and carpenter who each get 50 pieces of eight. In practice it wasn't always this easy. Gems have been recovered from the wreck of the Whydah bearing knife marks from where the pirates tried to cut them up to make the shares come out even. Doubtless there was cheating sometimes; accusations of fraud dogged Henry Morgan long after the sack of Panama. Hence the severe punishments provided for bilking the company. Some 18th-century privateers provided in their articles for extra "null shares," which would be awarded by vote at the end of the cruise to the crewmen who had done the best job. I don't know if outright pirates did this also.

Um. Did you mean me, Mission? I got your PM, and I'll help as best I can, but in the name of accuracy I must say that my novel is still unpublished, and unlikely to be published in the near future. Kendra, I am not familiar with American Publisher. There is an outfit owned by C. Lee Nunn called American Book Publishing; Writer Beware has issued a warning against its dishonest practices. You might want to check and be sure that your publisher isn't the same one. PublishAmerica, of course, is infamous for misleading authors, printing shoddy books, and then browbeating authors into buying their own works. Again, though, your group might simply suffer from an unfortunate resemblance of names. My understanding from authors who've been around the block and got published the hard way is that the main thing you have to watch out for is the vanity publisher who masquerades as legitimate, charging you a setup fee, monthly fee, advance fee, or something else cleverly disguised to hide from you the fact that you are paying to have your own book printed. Bogus literary agents operate the same way, charging an outright or disguised reading fee, which is forbidden by the Association of Authors' Representatives. The most skilful frauds will lead you along for a while, and spring the fee on you at the last moment, when they have you convinced that publication is just around the corner. Of course, as Mission says, you can self-publish on purpose if that is your desire and you have the money. The usual result of this is an attic full of unsold books, but one time in a million a self-published book (e.g. The Joy of Cooking) is a success. Just make sure you see some examples of the printer's previous books so you know that they'll give you a quality book for your money.

Arrr, I've been unmasked! Now I have only one choice. Dead men tell no tales, matey!

I think your choice of a birth year is a good one; you'll reach age 10, a typical starting age for a ship's boy, in 1694, the height of King William's War, so there's a better chance of landing a berth in a Navy ship. I think midshipmen sometimes started at 10 also. It does pose problems for your hometown, though. Yorktown, Virginia wasn't founded until 1691. May I suggest Norfolk or Jamestown? Or if Yorktown is really important, there was a small farming village next to Fort York in your time period, very close to the site of later Yorktown. Early career sounds plausible, provided you've been midshipman from warly on. Age 19 (or 20 as Foxe recommends) is 1703 or 1704, the early days of Queen Anne's War, so there might be a demand for lieutenants, assuming you had become midshipman early on. If you want to keep the age of 19 for turning lieutenant, you can get around Foxe's obstacle by just lying about your age to your superiors. I have to agree with Foxe and capnwilliam that you have yourself becoming captain unrealistically soon , even if you don't work your way up through the enlisted ranks. Is it important that you have been a captain? It seems to me that the story could run the same way with you as a third or fourth lieutenant. Furthermore, that allows you to circumvent Foxe's valid statement that a captain worth his salt would do everything possible to avoid a suicide encounter; you could be serving under a captain who was alcoholic, incompetent, etc. Although, as Benbow could say, it was more common for incompetent captains to hold back cravenly from battle than to charge in carelessly. I would suggest adding more detail at some point on how you joined your pirate crew, but maybe it's wise for the moment to leave that open until you find out who your crewmates are.

Cut and Run - When an anchored ship, pirate or otherwise, was surprised by the vessel of a potential enemy bearing down under full sail, there often wasn't time to haul the anchor up before getting under way. So the captain would simply order the anchor line cut and proceed to perform "the classic military maneuver known as getting the hell out of there." Hence "cut and run." (Speaking of anchors, here's an amusing nautical phrase not in common use on land. Sailors used to tell of a Dutch captain who explained after his ship was wrecked that he had a very good anchor but had left it at home. Thus English-speaking sailors used to call anything left at home a "Dutchman's anchor.") Scuttlebutt - The scuttlebutt was originally the barrel in which the day's supply of drinking water was kept. Sailors drawing their water at the scuttlebutt while off watch would often take advantage of the opportunity to exchange gossip. Thus the modern meaning of "scuttlebutt."

Here are some pictures. Not very clear, I'm afraid, but should give the general idea to someone who wants to describe or make one. Caption from Monek: "Old French ivory and horn L handle sword cane wih cherub on handle, partridge wood shaft, c. 1600. 35 3/4" high. Caption from Monek: "Bec de Corbin antler handled sword cane, c. 1730, malacca shaft, very old, etched blade, eyelets, 35 1/4" high, ferrule 3 1/4" high.

Back east? I'm from Missouri too, and I think that's the first time I've ever heard my home called "back east." Wild Bill Hickok once killed a man in the Springfield town square, barely 100 miles from where I live. Captain Bo, I won't be able to go pig-hunting this weekend. But I told the wife and kids that we'd go camping this summer, so if you do another hunt or something in the summer, drop me an e-mail; I might be able to talk them into it.

One thing I want to get clarified; was "midshipman" an exclusively naval rank during the Golden Age, or were there midshipmen in the merchant service also? Addressing the original question, here are some further known instances of boys on pirate ships. Other contemporary reports in Jameson give Every's whole crew as either 130 or 150 in strength (p. 154-55), so if Middleton's reckoning of 100 adults is correct, it is possible that as many as 30 to 50 of Every's crew could have been boys.

Customs inspection could be a major headache for pirates. Several of Henry Every's crew landed in Ireland with their loot in 1696, only to have the customs inspectors discover and seize their loot. The inspectors' suspicions had been aroused by the many foreign coins the pirates carried, their willingness to pay exorbitant prices for horses, and the like.

I agree with Foxe and Capn Enigma with one small addition. There is an excerpt from Blackbeard's "journal" in Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates. If it is real and not a fancy of Johnson's, then it runs as so: Since Blackbeard's sloop Adventure was taken largely intact, with even his letter from the deputy governor of North Carolina recovered, Johnson's statement that Blackbeard's journal was captured is plausible. But except for that one excerpt, the journal is apparently lost to history. Nowhere have I seen any portion of it reproduced except the one Johnson reports.

I ordered Francis Monek's Canes Through the Ages through interlibrary loan. The bad news is that it is not, as the title suggests, a history of canes, but mostly pictures of the author's cane collection. Thus there is nothing confirming the story of sword-canes in 16th-century wills or 17th-century legislation. The good news is that, among the several dozen sword-canes Monek collected, there is one that is listed as dating from about 1730 and another (French) that is listed as dating from about 1600. If I can figure out my new digital camera, I may put pictures here. Thus it seems probable to me that sword-canes existed during the Golden Age, though how popular they were remains debatable. That makes me breathe a sigh of relief; in my novel, set in 1716, a sword-cane features in a climactic scene.