Daniel

Thank you very much!. I'll PM you my address.

Everyone, I didn't know when I started this project that Bilgemunky has done good reviews of quite a few pirate movies on his website, here: http://www.bilgemunky.com/category/pirate-reviews/movies-tv/. I will eventually cover all of Bilgemunky's movies - his reviews are not at the same depth that I want to reach, and I did say I would review every pirate movie ever made. But I'll concentrate first on movies that he didn't write about.

Daniel, do you have Polanski's movie Pirates! ?

No, I don't. I saw it on rental many years ago, but I won't review any movie until I've had a chance to see it fresh. Pirates doesn't seem to be on Netflix; I may have to obtain it by interlibrary loan.

TREASURE ISLAND (1999)

Directed by Peter Rowe.

Featuring: Jack Palance, Kevin Zegers, Malcolm Stoddard, Patrick Bergin, David Robb, Al Hunter Ashton, Christopher Benjamin, Cody Palance.

Daniel’s rating: 2½ out of 5.

Synopsis: Jim Hawkins runs an inn for his ailing grandmother. One day, Billy Bones comes to stay there, warning Jim to watch out for a one-legged seafaring man. When Bones’s old pirate crewmates attack the inn, Jim escapes with Bones’s treasure map, although both Bones and Jim’s grandmother die in the fracas. Dr. Livesey, who took care of Jim’s grandma before her death, partners with his friend Squire Trelawney to charter a ship to find the treasure. Trelawney charters the ship and raises the crew with the help of an old salt named Long John Silver. But when he meets Silver, Jim discovers him to be a one-legged seafaring man.

Evaluation: Peter Rowe’s version of Treasure Island, based on his own screenplay, is easily the darkest ever filmed. Much as Steve Barron did later, Rowe decided to subvert Stevenson’s black-and-white morality tale by making Jim Hawkins the victim of treachery by the “good guys.” But where Barron recoiled from the consequences of this choice, Rowe took it to its logical conclusion: Jim Hawkins joins the pirates and fights against his former comrades. It’s still a coming of age story, but in a much less wholesome way – at the end of the story, Jim Hawkins has irrevocably started down the road to becoming another Long John Silver. If you’re a purist, this movie will shock and anger you.

Not being a purist, I wasn’t angry, but neither was I fully satisfied. The movie’s greatest weakness is Jack Palance’s performance as Silver. Although Palance made a living as a professional villain, and could have done the role justice if the movie had been made by 1990, he was eighty years old and obviously in declining health by the time Rowe got around to casting him as the sea cook. He gives an impression of forgetfulness, shortness of breath, and frailty in almost every scene. When he isn’t given a hand up after parleying with Captain Smollett and his allies, he doesn’t fight to his feet and storm off with the immortal threat, “Them that die will be the lucky ones!” Instead, he is forced to crawl on his belly to the edge of the stockade, where Jim Hawkins curses his erstwhile friends for not taking pity on a man in need. Fair enough, but pity kills respect, and Silver is simply not dangerous or charismatic enough here to command respect.

Palance does manage to shine in two moments, both when he is sitting down and has a chance to catch his breath: when Jim overhears him plotting mutiny in the hold, and when he tries to persuade Jim to join his pirates. Then his gravelly bass voice takes command and he shows what he might have been able to do with the part if he had received it a decade before. But two scenes do not a performance make.

The rest of the actors are quite good, especially Keven Zegers as Jim Hawkins. Timid and deferential at first, Zegers lets Jim’s resentment of the adult characters’ patronizing treatment of him grow convincingly into fiery rebellion. Malcolm Stoddard’s Captain Smollett is alert, opportunistic, and ruthless: a much more exciting foe than Rupert Penry-Jones’s Squire Trelawney from the 2012 version. Al Hunter Ashton does a very good George Merry; he’s palpably gormless, but cruel, ruthless, bullying, and ambitious. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to believe that Merry could dethrone Silver at will.

Back in 1986, Peter Rowe directed Splatter: Architects of Fear, a cheap, lurid documentary about horror film special effects. Looking at Treasure Island, it is easy to see that Rowe lost none of his fascination with blood and gore in the intervening 13 years. The violence is very explicit: we see Silver’s leg chopped off in gory closeup in the opening scene, numerous swords run redly through people’s bodies, and most horrible of all, a major character gets a pistol shot directly in the eye. I actually approve of this. Pirate fighting wasn’t fun and games; it was serious, terrifying stuff, and at least some movies ought to show it that way. Even so, the fact that this movie got a PG-13 rating shows that the MPAA really doesn’t take screen violence seriously.

The cinematography and the set of the inn are beautiful, with the Isle of Man standing in for both Treasure Island and England. But Rowe makes a serious misstep in the Bristol scenes; his budget only allowed for a tiny set that makes Bristol look like it has just one street. A wise director would have stuck to closeup in these scenes and hustled the city off the screen as soon as possible. Instead, Rowe indulges here in an incredibly tedious and prolonged chase scene between Jim Hawkins and Black Dog that magnifies the weaknesses of the Bristol set threefold. Compounding the problem is a tinkling, brassy musical soundtrack by Neil Smolar, who seems to think he’s scoring the 1934 Treasure Island instead of this morally ambiguous, violent production.

Piratical tropes and comments: This is Treasure Island, folks. Nearly all the pirate tropes are here, because this is where they came from: the map to buried treasure with X marking the spot, the black spot, the one-legged sailor, the parrot on the shoulder (a scarlet macaw here, much like in the 2012 version), excessive rum drinking, colorful tattoos, cutlasses. The tattoos are especially emphasized; not only are Billy Bones’s tattoos from the book recreated, but Jim Hawkins himself gets a tattoo from a pirate showing the Admiral Benbow Inn, and this is shown as marking his initiation into the brotherhood. The major tropes that are absent – hooks, long periwigs, justaucorps, and plank walking – are those that come from Peter Pan.

Besides the curved cutlasses, long thrusting swept-hilt rapiers appear a lot here, and do some deadly work of running people through. This anachronism has a long pedigree (it goes back at least to The Black Swan and probably further), but not to Stevenson’s original novel, where cutlasses are the only swords used. Real pirates viewed the rapier with contempt, viz. Benerson Little’s The Sea Rover’s Practice (“he had no Arms to defend himself with, save only Rapiers”). Some attention is paid to how flintlocks work; in one sequence, Merry threatens Jim with a pistol, until Silver forces him to admit that it isn’t primed. Also retained from the novel is Flint's crew's ahistorical tendency to use the Jolly Roger as an open declaration of criminality to all the world, rather than as a warning to their prey.

The Hispaniola here, as in the 2012 version, is a full-rigged ship; I doubt the producers knew the difference between a schooner and a three-masted square rigger. She’s a magnificent vessel, although the wake she leaves behind reveals that she has a hidden screw propeller somewhere.

This Treasure Island adds a piratical element that doesn’t often appear onscreen: torture, as Merry menaces Jim Hawkins with a “poisonous” snake to get him to talk. Even this is mild enough compared to the tortures real pirates used, but it’s something. Also, in the movie, just as in the novel, the pirates are accurately shown electing their own captain.

Meanwhile, in an authentic period touch, Dr. Livesey uses leeches on Jim Hawkins’s ailing grandma, which we have to look at in closeup. Indeed, we are left to wonder whether Dr. Livesey, as much as the pirate attack, is the ultimate cause of poor Grandma’s death.

The movie sacrifices a good deal of Stevenson’s nautical language, assuming that we won’t understand it. At one point, Billy Bones even sings, “Drink and the Devil took care of the rest” instead of “drink and the Devil had done for the rest,” although Silver later sings the original version. Likewise, the nautical touches like “Silence, there, between decks” and “I’ll shake out another reef” are discarded. We don’t even get to hear any timbers shivered. Sigh.

Palance looks like he needs Zegers to keep

him from falling over.

Don't mess with George Merry, bucko.

Israel Hands doesn't care much for Captain Smollett

Here is the newest review.

Meanwhile, I am changing my plan to start with all the versions of Treasure Island I can find. Reviewing the same story over and over again several times in a row will be monotonous both for me and for anyone who bothers to read this. I do still intend to review all the Treasure Island movies, but I'll spread them out instead of dong them all together.

So my son and I went to Rock Hall and had a great time. It was much bigger and better attended than Lockhouse PirateFest, and I saw many of the folks who had been at Lockhouse up there, including Crimson Corsair and his excellent kit. I didn't bring salmagundi as I had hoped to, but I did bring my rum punch, which was popular among all the samplers. I met Steve Buckley and bought his children's pirate book Blackbear, in which adults may have fun by spotting all the names of historical pirates hidden in the book.

Here are some pictures.

Pretty darn good. This is in the top 25% or so of the pirate fiction I've read on this board, and has some definite potential. I was particularly pleased with the prologue, which gives the illusion at first that this is going to be yet another rebellious-daughter-versus-heartless-domineering-mother story, and then immediately upends my expectations. Anne Bonny promises to be a unique and unpredictable character; I'm not at all sure that I like her, but I am quite sure that I am intrigued by her. I'm not going to say that this would be publishable as yet, which requires quality in the top 5% range or so, and even then is as much a matter of persistence and luck as quality. It sure does stand out, though.

I would be willing to offer you some line by line criticism, if you would like to have it. I want to ask first, because my criticism can be pretty bruising on the ego. But please understand that I wouldn't be offering this if I weren't pretty impressed with your work and consider it worth the time and effort to improve. And I am certain that I can help you improve your dialogue and avoid certain anachronisms.

Hope you'll enjoy your time here. Good to meet you.

Those statues are called figureheads. Most likely they were once thought to help the ship find her way, much like the eyes that used to be painted on ancient Greek and Phoenician ships, and over time they evolved into general symbols of good luck. They were individual to each ship, no special relationship to the country the ship sailed for. They were occasionally related to the ship's name; I have seen a painting of Drake's Golden Hind with a golden deer (hind) for a figurehead. The Golden Hind's name was changed from the Pelican, and I don't know if they changed the figurehead when they changed the name. But that was unusual; seamen thought it was bad luckt o change a ship's name, so it was rarely done.

While you're doing that, can you see where the earliest examples of each Hollywood pirate trope occurred? Like bucket boots, earrings, shoulder parrots, hooks, peg legs, eye patches, gold teeth, the terms Jolly Roger, scalliwag, Arr! and using 'me' as a possessive adjective and so forth, the use of domed chests, Spanish galleons as pirate ships and buried treasure? Oh, I know some of it came from drawings and the bane of PC accuracy, Treasure Island, but it would still be neat to see where Hollywood first co-opted these myths.

Sure. I'll add a list of tropes to the end of each review, and then after some time I'll be able to trace the emergence of some of the tropes. (I still do not recall ever having heard "scalawag" in a pirate movie before POTC: The Curse of the Black Pearl).

TREASURE ISLAND (2012)

Directed by Steve Barron.

Featuring: Eddie Izzard, Toby Regbo, Rupert Penry-Jones, Daniel Mays, Philip Glenister, Donald Sutherland, Elijah Wood, Shirley Henderson, Nina Sosanya, Geoff Bell, Shaun Parkes, David Harewood.

Rating (from 1 to 5): 2

Most adaptations of Treasure Island have stuck to well-charted waters, with low risk and low reward. Steve Barron strikes out into unknown soundings, which makes for a more exciting voyage at first, but ultimately he strikes a reef and sinks.

Stevenson’s story is still there in outline. Young Jim Hawkins finds Captain Flint’s treasure map, evades the pirates who are looking for it, and takes it to his friend Dr. Livesey. Livesey in turn takes it to Squire Trelawney, who is not Livesey’s friend here, but instead a rich merchant and the financial backer of Jim’s Admiral Benbow Inn. Livesey turns to Long John Silver to hire his crew, not knowing that Silver is one of Flint’s pirates. Silver prepares to take the treasure for himself and his old comrades. Trelawney cheats Jim and Livesey out of their share in the treasure, and the embittered Jim agrees to steal the treasure map for Silver.

Barron makes an incredibly bold decision here: to dethrone Long John Silver, one of the iconic villains of English literature, from his place as the story’s antagonist. Trelawney, not Silver, is Barron’s true villain, essentially a Lehman Brothers executive of the 18^th century driven mad by greed and, like a Lehman Brothers executive, ruining everybody around him as well as himself. By the end, the movie seems to be saying more about the 2008 financial meltdown than about Jim Hawkins’s battle for manhood.

This is certainly an interesting tack to take on Stevenson’s old story, but unfortunately, Barron did not fully calculate the consequences of his decision. By making Trelawney the villain, and further reducing Livesey to an emasculated, hollow shell of himself, Barron has deprived Jim Hawkins of his role models. In the novel and in most previous film adaptations, Jim’s supreme moment is when he stands by his word to Long John Silver, even at the risk of torture and death, because he knows it is what the squire, the doctor, and the captain would do in his place. Jim becomes a man by the stockade wall when he rejects Dr. Livesey’s offer to relieve Jim of responsibility for his own actions. This scene never happens in Barron’s movie. Instead, Jim’s defining moment is at the very end, when he apparently decides that the corpses floating in the story’s wake were caused not by human greed and disloyalty, but by the treasure itself. He then acts accordingly. This is just stupid, and the fact that most of the other characters go along with it is stupider still.

Meanwhile, Trelawney’s shoulders are simply not broad enough to carry the dramatic weight that Silver carried. A story is only as good as its villain, and Trelawney is too weak, hysterical and irrational to make us truly fear and respect him the way we feared and respected Silver.

Another major change in this version is the new prominence of Silver’s wife Alibe. Stevenson stints her a name; she is just called Silver’s “old Negress,” and I imagined her as a plump, matronly woman of Silver’s age. It was fascinating to see her rendered as a slender, sensual, though slightly worn beauty. Mrs. Silver here joins Jim’s mother at the Admiral Benbow and the two of them struggle to survive without the men they depend on. This was an interesting idea, but it goes nowhere: the two women achieve absolutely nothing, and do not affect the plot’s course at all.

The final nail in the coffin is how this movie treats Silver. It’s not Eddie Izzard’s fault; he plays the role well, with a soft-spoken deference that makes Jim’s and Trelawney’s trust in him entirely believable. But Silver, a cripple, controls his old mates by two means – menace and brilliance – and the decision to soft-pedal the menace makes the brilliance absolutely essential. But instead of brilliance, we get tactical chump moves, the worst of which is Silver’s decision to ask Jim Hawkins for the map while still en route to the island. Silver never takes this huge risk in the novel, because he doesn’t need to. He intends to let Trelawney and Livesey find the treasure themselves, load it on board, and then slit their throats – an admirably simple plan that would have worked but for the lucky chance of Jim Hawkins overhearing it. Too, Barron’s Silver is vacillating and indecisive in the face of the premature mutiny aboard the Hispaniola, lacking the sure intelligence and instinct of his counterpart in the novel.

In another interesting but poorly handled decision, Barron decides to make three of the major officer characters black: Billy Bones, George Merry, and Mr. Arrow, all of whom are first mates. This could have worked, but Barron simply ignores the elephant in the room. The story is set in the 1740s, when racist justifications for slavery and the slave trade had taken full hold in England and America. The vast majority of European whites at that time believed that black people were inferior and unfit to command white men. The fact that we have three black mates anyway is conceivable, but it requires explanation; there has to be some reason why these three black men are not being treated the way most black men were at the time. And we are never told that reason, leaving an anachronistic flavor in our mouths. This is unfortunate, because the decision to show the ordinary seamen themselves as ethnically diverse is quite historically accurate (the crews of Woodes Rogers’ Duke and Duchess were over one third non-English), and a welcome change from previous movies.

It’s a shame to see such a beautiful set of production values stranded on the rocks. The Hispaniola is magnificent – a full-rigged ship rather than a schooner here. The sequence of her setting sail for the island as her crew chants an Afro-Jamaican sea shanty is unique and stunningly beautiful. The costumes are magnificent and colorful, aided by the good decision to portray a motley crew from all over the world (although it is a bit strange to see Israel Hands apparently wearing chain mail). The fight scenes are well choreographed, with Trelawney’s panic amusingly portrayed.

I hate to knock Barron’s Treasure Island so hard. In a time when artistic boldness is so rare in movies, Barron really made a lot of gutsy moves. But if you want to be captain, or director, you need to be cunning like Silver, not just brave like Trelawney.

I have the modest goal of seeing and reviewing every pirate movie ever made. I will try to post one review a month. I will start by reviewing as many versions of Treasure Island as I can.

Edward Low used a green flag with a yellow trumpeter on it to summon his ships together for conference. At closer range, his quartermaster John Russell used a speaking trumpet to shout orders at his victims, and I would assume that would be used to communicate between ships also.

That's the only example I know specifically of pirates communicating with other pirate ships at a distance, but there were several methods of signaling other ships that were commonly understood long before the Napoleonic-era signal flags were introduced. For example, tying a "wiff" knot in one's flag was universally understood as a signal to come aboard and give help; Stede Bonnet's pirates mocklingly used this signal to their enemies aboard the Henry in the battle of the Cape Fear River, as a challenge to board them. Rhett's men understood the signal and shouted that they would come aboard by and by.

In another case, Henry Every wished to avoid confrontation with the Royal Navy, so he left a message for English ships to signal their identity by rolling up their ensign into a bundle and flying it at the mizzen peak, so he would know to leave them alone. I don't know if this signal was ever actually used, though.

Of course, if we credit Richard Hawkins' old story that the black flag was a promise of mercy while a red flag meant no quarter, then the red flag would have functioned as a signal to any other pirate ships in the fleet that they too should offer no quarter. It doesn't make much sense to warn your victims that you're going to offer no quarter; all that does is steel them to fight to the last man, so it only makes sense as a signal to fellow pirates.

I will be there, possibly with family. I intend to bring salmagundi and a bottle of rum punch. Any Pubsters going too?

Foxe and I talked a little about this in this thread: https://pyracy.com/index.php/topic/16862-prize-money-questions/ . He said that before 1708, privateer prizes were normally condemned to be sold in a regular Vice-Admiralty court, as opposed to the specialized prize courts set up by the Cruizers and Convoys Act. We didn't actually discuss whether naval prizes were condemned in the same way, but I assume they must have been.

On privateers, though, the distribution of the money would have been regulated by the articles of the individual privateer, which always guaranteed a large portion for the men (no purchase, no pay and all that). On naval vessels, there weren't any individual articles on each ship, and I'm not sure Blake's Laws of War and Ordinances of the Sea said anything about how to distribute money from captured prizes.

The two press men were drowned on July 7, 1696; the trial was held that September. I forgot to include that in the original post; will edit to include the dates.

Here is another very interesting and tragic case: The Crown v. John Neal, where three men were tried for murdering Thomas Nogan, a pressed man who was trying to escape.

The setting: HMS Phenix, a hospital ship* docked under the Tower of London, September 27th, 1759. There were about 20 pressed men aboard the Phenix. The pressed men were kept separate from the other men, twelve to fourteen in the sick ward, and six in the hold. Thomas Nogan, a pressed man, had been brought aboard no more than three days before his death. It was common for pressed men to walk about on deck (perhaps to avoid seasickness, which is often worse below decks), and Nogan was doing just that when he somehow got over the side and into a boat, and tried to row himself to Tower Stairs. The Phenix's waterman rushed down into the press gang boat and set off to chase after Nogan.

Two marines, John Neal and Samuel Black, had just arrived on board the Phenix, bringing with them four imprisoned pirates (!) who were kept below. These two marines were standing on the Phenix's poop deck when Nogan tried to get away; incredibly, these stalwarts had left their loaded muskets unattended, leaning against the wheel. At the moment Nogan tried to escape, the chief officers were all ashore, and the senior officer aboard was only a cook, who was below. Various sailors shouted at the marines to shoot Nogan. Neal, new to the ship and doubtless confused, grabbed his loaded musket and shot Nogan at a range of twenty to forty yards. A steward named Squire shouted at Neal to shoot again; Neal grabbed the other musket and shot at Nogan again, but missed. The waterman grabbed Nogan's boat and managed to pull Nogan into his own boat, then carried him back aboard the Phenix to die.

Neal, together with Squire and another steward who were blamed for ordering him to fire, were convicted of manslaughter and branded.

Pritchard, the waterman, was an experience press gang member. Was it necessary to shoot Nogan when there were people waiting on Tower Stairs who could have stopped him? Pritchard said that "people are willing to give a pressed man as much quarters as they can." Pritchard also noted that his press gang never carried firearms.

* Spelled "Phenix" in the original record. Despite being a hospital ship, Phenix mounted 20 guns.

Another story, this from the heart of the Golden Age. Thirteen men were tried for murder for drowning two men of the Impress Service, but all were acquitted.

"It appeared, that Burnifold having a Warrant to Impress Men for His Majesty's Service, and that both the Deceaseds and their Gang went on Board the White-Hart Barge belonging to Abingdon, about one in the night, and asked for the Master of the Barge: and then he asked them if they were Priviledged, but they made no Answer; then he had two of them to go into his Boat, which they refused; when on a sudden came Men from behind the Barge, and cried, Knock them down, and beat them with Staves into the Boat, and made several holes in it, whereby it sunk and they were drowned, and a Fisherman's Boy took up the rest of the Men that were floating upon the Water. The Prisoners alledged, That when they came aboard, they did hold Pistols at them, and cut at them with Swords, and never gave them the word that they were Press master s, and did think that they did come with an intent to rob the Barge, they having a great charge of Money in it; So after all, the Jury found them not Guilty , but ordered to give Sureties for their Behaviour for a Twelvemonth "

To which I say, "Huh?" You go on board a boat of rough sailors who outnumber you, point guns and try to beat them into submission, but don't say you're with the Impress Service??? And none of the sailors gets shot? Not bloody likely. The fact that the jury pretended to swallow this cock-and-bull story says something about what the ordinary people of London felt about the press gangs.

___________

Another story appears of Richard Eades, who like Rochead was both victim and participant of the Impress in the 1730s. Joining Captain Rook's press gang in the Channel on the HMS Sunderland, he went to London after his ship was paid off, and there was caught by press gangs five times, but always managed to get away.

The Old Bailey Ordinary tells about Robert Rochead's adventures with the Impress Service. It's not totally clear when it happened, but probably in the mid-to-late 1730s, judging by the guy's age.

Rochead, a Scotsman born in 1716, was mate of a collier when he was impressed. "[T]here being an Order from the Admiralty, that no Person belonging to any Ship coming on Shore without their Protection, should be exempt from being press'd; and as he was found on Shore without his Protection, he was accordingly Impress'd, and carried on board his Majesty's Ship the Cumberland . . . as a Foremast Man." This was probably in or near London, as he had just been in London on the collier, and the Cumberland then went "down to the Nore," which is at the mouth of the Thames. Rochead was later assigned to lead a press gang himself, aboard a tender which conscripted men into service at London's Wapping Stairs and then in Scotland. Rochead turned this into a thriving business, rounding up men to be pressed and then extorting money from them in exchange for letting them go. (You get one guess about how much he cared whether they were over 18 or not). He was caught and sentenced to the Marshalsea prison for five months, which was only the beginning of his long and colorful criminal career.

I just ran across what might be the origin of the term salamagundy (and all it's variants). Charles Carter was a cook for various high status people including an ambassador to Spain in 1710, and wrote "The Complete Practical Cook" 1730, later on in his career. In one of his accounts of the King's meals (George II?), he mentions "Sallad Morgundy". Considering how words get muddled from one form to another, Sallad Morgundy to Salamagundy doesn't seem a far stretch. Salamagundy being a form of salad we've established. Tracing it back to something actually called a salad makes a lot of sense. I'm going to investigate further and see where this goes.

Before I start reinventing the wheel, though, is there anyone on this forum who has already run across this?

Douglas Botting's The Pirates, p. 45, gives a French origin for the name, several centuries earlier than this. "The name is thought to be a corruption of the medieval French salemine, meaning salted or highly seasoned, and to have evolved to salmagonde by the gourmandizing Rabelais in the 16th Century." Botting doesn't cite any exact sources, but translations of Rabelais definitely show him using the word "salmagundi" in Gargantua and Pantagruel, so it goes back at least to the 16th century. http://books.google.com/books?id=Hl6PtUdIFawC&pg=PA264&lpg=PA264&dq=Rabelais+salmagundi&source=bl&ots=XPHT5tR0KD&sig=pTZAgioNUg8YdN1q8wIoRBgSrYQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KSXcUaqWJdKYrgGxv4GIDg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=Rabelais%20salmagundi&f=false

Of course, once adopted by the English, salmagonde might turn into "salmagundi," "Solomon Gundy," "Sallad Morgundy," and any number of other versions, just as coutlas became cutlass, cutlash, etc.

Well, I finally managed to reach the Museum on the phone. Turns out, no alcohol is allowed on the encampment (darn). Food is permitted, though, so I'll see what I can whip up. And maybe I'll see some of you for punch off site!

BTW, while Rob Roy is set during the GAoP, and is an excellent movie, it doesn't actually have any pirates that I know of. Just a very, very deromanticized version of the aristocratic highwayman.

So I missed Hampton this year, but I and my whole family are going to come up to Havre de Grace for Piratefest. Yo ho!

Anyway, I thought I'd like to bring some Pirate food and drink to share, which leads me to ask - what are the rules at Piratefest about such things? Particularly, is alcohol allowed on site? I was thinking of making a genuine Bowl of Punch, which is so often mentioned in Johnson's General History as the setting for piratical revelry and plotting. Maybe some salmagundi also.

Here's an article by Benerson Little on eyepatches http://undertheblackflag.com/?p=2904〈=en. He says Captain Colepepper wore an eyepatch in Walter Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel, which may have been the first appearance of a pirate eyepatch in fiction.

Oddly, I can't think of an eyepatch being shown by any of the famous old-time pirate illustrators: Pyle, Schoonover, or even Wyeth.

NetFlix also has Hero's Island, starring James Mason. Definitely not for everyone, although I enjoyed it; it kind of takes a lot of Western movie themes (landowners vs. squatters who turn to "hired guns" to sort out their conflicts), and applies them to a pirate story.

So, it's been a long three years during which I haven't been around here as much as I'd like. But as of Sunday, I'm graduating from GW law school. Got straight A's and A-'s my last semester. No job yet, so I may have to turn to piracy to survive (not!) Hopefully I'll have a little more time to hang around until I have to start getting ready for bar exams.