Daniel

Well, I see that there isn't any footgear in the inventory whatsoever, so be it sandals, buckle shoes, or bucket-topped boots, it went over the side with him. I doubt a master would have been barefoot... What about the sea book? Would that have been a log/rutter? Or a manual?

Not only do I read Military History, I have submitted an article to it on the capture of Gibraltar and am preparing another on the battle of Cape Fear river where Stede Bonnet was captured.

Congratulations! I'll drink to that! Where might the script be staged when perfected?

Incidentally, Cordingly also mentions that while the death penalty was authorized for sodomy, imprisonment or the pillory were more common punishments for this offense. (He is referring to the Golden Age of Piracy; in the 1750s the Articles of War imposed a mandatory death penalty for "buggery").

Well, OK, but there are other studies that show a little more gay action than that. Cordingly reports that there were 11 courts-martial in the British admiralty courts for sodomy in the Seven Years' War (with seven convictions for "indecency" resulting). He also mentions that there were 50 documented cases of homosexuality amongst Chinese pirate defendants, 1796 to 1800. I think it's pretty clear that the majority of pirates were straight, though.

Note: John Russell was not a captain. He was Low's quartermaster, though Roberts estimated that his influence with the crew was greater than Low's. However, even Russell was not always able to sway the crew to agree with him, as in this case.

I have bought this one and read it. There's a fair degree of overlap between it and Konstam's previous Osprey book, Pirates: 1660-1730, but I still found it well worthwhile, especially for the beautiful illustrations that Osprey is so good at providing. Lots of new information on the Adventure Galley and the Fiery Dragon, plus much more detail on Captain Edmund Condent than I have encountered anywhere else. Like all Osprey books, this one is short, so there's no space to include small technical details or info on sailing techniques of pirates. That's the other major drawback. For the price, I would say it is definitely worthwhile.

All I can tie is a square knot/reef knot, sheet bend, bowline, sheep shank, clove hitch, and cow hitch. And I can only tie the bowline by the lubber's method, not the sailor's method. I learned a roband knot once, the kind they used to tie sails to the yards, but I forgot how. I own an Encyclopedia of Knots, which has lots of neat knots in it that I don't know how to tie. One of the neatest I think was called the thief knot, which leaves two ends, one secure and one not secure. So you can tie it at the top of a wall or cliff, throw both ends down, climb down the secure end, and then jerk on the insecure end to undo the knot and bring your rope with you. Unfortunately, I never learned to tie it.

Since so many o' ye all are re-enactors, can ye tell me if swinging aboard on a rope is actually a practical way to get on board the other ship? Where do you anchor the rope you're swinging on? Do you throw it onto your own yard, or the other fellow's yard? It seems to me that if you stood at the gunwale you'd almost have to throw the rope onto the other ship's yard, because otherwise you'd swing backward instead of forward. And if you don't swing aboard, how do you do it. Jump from one gunwale to the other? Get down in boats and use ropes to climb up the hull? Throw planks down from one gunwale to the adjacent ship's gunwale and charge across?

Was the Mary Rose the one that sank when she heeled over and took water through her lower gunports?

Claire, that's a magnificent picture. Ye done well, mate!

OK, I'm back home and have access to Cordingly. My memory was wrong; Cordingly talks about bows and arrows, but I see no reference specifically to longbows. Page 27, describing the 1572 Nombre de Dios raid: "When the rain ceased, many of Drake's men found that their guns and bows were useless because powder, matches, and bowstrings were soaked." Page 30, describing the attack on the treasure ship Cacafuego in 1579: "The first bombardment from her guns...was followed by a withering fire of arrows and musket shot." I assume at least some of these were ordinary longbows and not crossbows, because crossbow projectiles are normally called bolts or quarrels, not arrows.

"SInce medieval days...no contrivance for fighting has matched in discomfort and inconvenience and use contrary to nature the floating castle called a ship of the line in the age of fighting sail. With its motor power dependent on the caprice of heaven and direction-finding on the distant stars, and its central piece of equipment - the mast - dependent on seasoned timber that was rarely obtainable, and control of locomotion dependent on rigging and ropes of a complexity to defy philosophers of the Sorbonne, much less the homeless untutored poor off the streets who made up the crews, and communication from commander to his squadron dependent on signal flags easily obscured by distance or smoke from the guns or by pitching of the ship, these cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle." - - Barbara Tuchman, "The First Salute."

I believe I read about Drake's bowmen first in David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag, but I don't have it ready to hand. However, my local library has a copy of John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990, and on page 55-56 it describes the weapons handout in Drake's expedition right before the Nombre de Dios raid of 1572. "He [Drake] got his assault force to an island at Cativas, where each man was issued a principal tool or weapon. There were six shields, twelve pikes, six firepikes which could also act as torches, twenty-four arquebuses, sixteen bows, six spears, two drums, and two trumpets." Apparently some of the "bows" referred to may have been crossbows rather than longbows, because on page 57 Sugden says that "even the strings to their crossbows were too wet to be efficient." But I am pretty sure I recall Cordingly referring specifically to longbows being carried by Drake's men. Sugden gives his source for this as an account written about 1592 by Philip Nichols, the Rector of Mylor, who compiled it from lost eyewitness reports. This account was published in 1626 under the title Sir Francis Drake Revived.

I think my favorite really bad movie was Burial of the Rats, putatively based on something Bram Stoker wrote. I somehow doubt that it bears any resemblance to anything Stoker ever dreamed of.

I'm assuming movie stars are the main focus here. Maureen O'Hara was the pirate and generalyy swashbckling wench nonpareil. Against All Flags, The Black Swan, and At Sword's Point prove it. Too bad her movies were never as good as she was. Geena Davis would be second. Morgan the Pirate is a laughably bad movie, but Chelo Alonso with her wild dancing was certainly the most memorable part of it. Keira Knightley, of course, is beautiful; she needs to be more piratical though. That's about all the movie stars I can name. But I'll match the stars of The Cutlass' Daughters - Maureen MacLinden, Mary Tyrconnell, Gwendolyn Rivermere, Celeste l'Arromanchienne, Djongila, and Lily Ashton - up against any other pirate wenches from the world of film and fiction.

Yes, I see that not only was Will Adams referred to as a pilot, but apparently also William Dampier served as a pilot to Woodes Rogers during Rogers' privateering foray against the Spaniards up the west coast of the Spanish Americas. So I guess pilots indeed are not limited only to the guys who help you get in and out of a harbor.

I don't know of any use of archery in the Golden Age. I do recall that Francis Drake's men used longbows during their raids in the area of Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello. The longbow had apparently passed out of use in the English army by that time (the last battlefield won by the longbow was Flodden in 1513), but still saw some use amongst sea-rovers like Drake's. The longbow was a devastating weapon, but was hampered somewhat by the heavy tropical rains; wet bowstrings do not function well. I believe that the Barbary corsairs used some archery in the 16th and 17th centuries, as did their Christian opponents the Knights of Malta. I don't recall what kind of bows these were, though. Bows would have been logical weapons for pirates to use: they're cheaper and easier to make than guns, they require no exhaustible gunpowder or fuse, and their ammunition, unlike that of guns, is often recoverable, and at the time they had a much faster rate of fire. Their major drawbacks were that they were less effective against armor than muskets were (not usually an issue at sea), and they required much more strength and training than muskets. But perhaps the most important fact is that a weapon that goes whissss-thock is not as psychologically intimidating as a weapon that goes BOOOMMMMM! Pirates often lived by intimidation as much as by combat; most of their victims did not resist because they were cowed by the fear the pirates generated.

Westyn, that's an interesting coincidence. My novel, too, involves a crew of female pirates (the working title is The Cutlass' Daughters). It's not a romance, though; it's a pull-no-punches historical novel with a heavy strain of tragedy. There is, of course, nothing so unfair as to ding somebody points merely because you hate their genre. That editor was an idiot, certainly. I'm told, though, that there are a few good ones out there. That's what one of my favorite authors, George R.R. Martin, says, and he certainly ought to know.

Who really flew the first known skull-and-crossbones-on-black Jolly Roger? A lot of websites say it was Emmanuel Wynne, who flew a black flag with a white skull, crossbones behind the skull, and an hourglass below around 1700. Something doesn't jibe though. A lot of websites (and books too!) show Henry Every's flag as black with a white skull in profile and crossbones below. Since Every's final cruise was in 1696, his flag would have had to come before Wynne's - if the flag we see in the books is accurate. Then there's Ned Low's flag, which the books today show as a black flag with a red skeleton in full face. If I'm remembering right, Johnson's General History of the Pirates also describes Low's flag as the red skeleton on black that we all know. But when George Roberts wrote his account of being captured by Low in 1722, he doesn't say a bloody thing about any red skeleton flag!!! By Roberts' account, Low's flag was green with a yellow trumpeter on it. In fact, I've never been able to tell what the source is for most of the commonly pictured flags (Tew, Every, Wynne, Teach, Bonnet, Condent, Moody, Worley, Rackham, England, Roberts, Kenedy, Quelch, and Low). Some of them originate in Johnson's General History, and in the case of Roberts there is an engraving in the book that actually shows him with his two famous flags. But some don't originate with Johnson, and some are even contradicted by Johnson's engravings; Johnson's picture of Bonnet shows a black flag in the background with a skull and crossbones behind it, much like the traditional representation of Worley's flag, and nothing like the skull, heart, bone, and dagger traditionally attributed to Bonnet. Where do these traditional versions of the pirate captains' flags come from?

My reading suggests that when most people talk about a "pilot" on a ship, they mean a guy who lives in a port and, for a fee, will go out to your ship in a small boat, guide you out of (or into) the harbor, avoiding all the shoals and reefs and other dangers you don't know about, and then goes back to shore again in a small boat. He does not seem to be a member of any one ship's crew at all, but just helps any ship that needs him and is ready to pay, and doesn't normally voyage far from the harbor whose safe channels he knows. However, in James Clavell's novel Shogun, a rather different picture of the "pilot" is painted. It "was the pilot who commanded at sea; it was he who set the course and ran the ship, he who brought them from port to port. . . . At sea the pilot was leader, sole guide, and final arbiter of the ship and her crew. Alone he commanded from the quarterdeck." Now, I know Clavell made some errors about sailing in Shogun (he equips the ship Erasmus with a wheel in the year 1600, when whipstaffs were still used, and has the crew drinking grog 140 years before Edward "Old Grog" Vernon introduced that drink to the Royal Navy). So is this just another mistake? Or were there "pilots" who were actually part of the crew and navigated the ship from port to port?

El Pirata, thank you for the offer, but I prefer not to transmit my manuscript in electronic form at this time. My e-mail is not secure and pirates (heh heh) are everywhere. Westyn, fear not, I won't be giving up my day job. I agree, editors are notoriously unhelpful, at least when they reject you. But I am proud of my baby, and I will still be proud no matter how many editors reject it. Thanks for the suggestion of Herman, Touring Gentleman. May I ask what you meant by a "strict historical bent"? I did take pains to be as historically faithful as I could to the setting of the 1716-1717 Atlantic world, but all my chief characters are imaginary, so maybe that disqualifies it from having a "strict historical bent"?

I have just completed my novel, The Cutlass' Daughters, 350 pages of pirates, blood, sails, cutlasses, gunpowder, sea spray, and all the grand things about the 18th century Spanish Main. I have submitted the first three chapters and a synopsis to Forge, the mainstream fiction division of Tor/St. Martin's Press. Having no illusions about the acceptance rate of beginning novelists, I realize there's a good chance I will end up submitting this book several dozen times. I would love it if anyone can suggest any agents who might be interested in piratical historical fiction, or any other publishers who have published good books of this genre.

Congratulations to you, Raeadh'ani. As re your question, a good deal of pirate dialect is authentic. "David Jones' Locker," for instance, was real pirate speak, as reported by George Roberts when he was captured by Ned Low's pirates in 1722. So was "dog" as an insult. A good deal of pirate dialect comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which is probably a very accurate representation of sailors' dialect in the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell if the same style of speaking was used in the Golden Age. Nobody really knows if "yo ho" was authentic pirate speak, but something like it certainly was: "hoa hoa" was definitely a way of greeting another ship in the early 1700s, before the word "ahoy" was invented. I'm pretty sure "avast" is authentic pirate talk also, although it is almost never used correctly in the movies. "Avast" in its proper use is a command to stop whatever you are doing immediately.

Thanks to Royaliste and Claire for their clarification on linstocks, and especially to Claire for the pictures.