Daniel

Brethren of the Coast has a nice page of shanties, although unfortunately I don't think A Pirate's Life for Me is one of them. It's at http://brethrencoast.com/Sea_Shanties.html.

It makes me wonder, though. At the time that this scrimshaw was carved, Ms. Pimentel's kind of attitude was pretty prevalent everywhere. Almost all these sailors would have been taught at least by their preachers, and fairly often by their parents, that they could go to Hell for making this kind of stuff, or even for looking at it. I wonder how many of the sailors enjoyed this scrimshaw with the same easy, laid back attitude we have.

Yay for our very own Ed Foxe!

I often imagine pirates as simply sailing the seas, wind in their hair as they scanned the horizon from the foretop, looking for a sail, and just hoping something turned up. And maybe increasing their odds by prowling shipping choke points like the Mona Passage, the Windward Passage, or (at least in the Barbary corsairs' case) the Strait of Gibraltar. But, as Charles Johnson pointed out, scarcity was "no uncommon thing among them." With poverty and starvation very real possibilities, it would help a lot to know in advance where your prey was going to show up.

And at least one source suggests that they did. When George Roberts was captured by Ned Low at Cape Verde in 1722, Low had been tipped off about where to find his victim and what cargo Roberts had on board. He had this information from Roberts' companion Captain Scott, who had earlier been captured on another of the Cape Verde islands.

Benerson Little's The Sea Rover's Practice discusses intelligence collection on pages 79-83. He mentions pirates interrogating their prisoners and examining the "Letters, Papers, Bookes, Certificates and Cocquits" on captured vessels. He says people were the best sources: not only prisoners, but also other sea rovers, , friendly or neutral merchants and warships, Indians, fishermen, tutrtlers, logwood cutters, and smugglers. Torture was usually used only to extract information about the prisoners' hidden wealth; for other sources, bribery or false cover stories were much more common. Most pirates were savvy enough to interrogate their sources (prisoners or otherwise) separately, and compare their stories. But, it was common for the interrogators to credit the person who told them what they wanted to hear, rather than the one whose story matched the others best. (As far too many intelligence consumers still do today!)

Little gives the example of Jean Doublet, a privateer, who went into Ostend under an assumed name and talked with a family he knew there, who told him about a rich vessel at Saltash, which had too few crew to run the guns and whose lower deck guns were unreachable because the deck was packed full of cargo. Doublet went to Saltash and talked with the captain, who confirmed the story, and Doublet captured the vessel when it sailed.

Does anyone have more information about pirate intelligence gathering?

All the best for you, old messmate!

There was flogging in Cromwell's Navy at least as early as 1654, when three men were flogged on a British naval vessel off Leghorn in Italy, according to Rodger's The Command of the Ocean. But I believe naval flogging existed much earlier than that.

Wow, thanks Mission! I'd about given up on this question.

The ajoupa in your picture looks too big to be practical for buccaneers, but I can imagine smaller versions being broken down into pieces and carried. And down in Panama, Nicaragua, or Colombia, rain is your main worry, not keeping warm, so the all-roof, no-walls construction makes sense.

I can see needing specialized language for many of the hard sciences where the concepts are highly specialized, but for history and anthropology? C'mon...)

As a product of that university indoctrination, I quite agree. We soft science folks have long had a bad case of envy for the hard sciences, so we think if we develop our own technobabble and stick to it rigidly, our work will be as valuable as the hard scientists'. In reality, we just make more our work more impenetrable, not more valuable.

This measure is a violation of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.

A Navy ship has diplomatic immunity?

Flashback to Star Wars. "We're on a diplomatic mission!" "If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador?" [neck cartilage breaking].

A couple of weeks ago I went to Mystic Seaport and got aboard the sail-training full-rigged ship Joseph Conrad, where I had the utterly awesome experience of turning a capstan while singing "Santiano."

For the first time ever, I got to see a vessel with running rigging made of old-style manilla rope (most modern tall ships use nylon, of course). I noticed, to my surprise, that the running rigging had no pitch or tar on it; I had always read that the lines on the old sailing vessels were weatherproofed with pitch. The standing rigging was tarred, even though it was made of steel wire, but not the running rigging.

So was this the standard rule on old-style pirate ships: standing rigging is tarred, running rigging isn't? I would see how it would be desirable not to tar the running rigging; imagine how sticky the sailors' hands would get after working it, and it would also tend to gum up the blocks. But on the other hand, how long could the running rigging last if it wasn't weatherproofed by tar?

Interesting contast to Captain Low's crew, twenty-five years later, who would not allow any married men among them (if George Roberts' account is correct). It probably shows how much more desperate and outside the pale of respectable society piracy had become during that time.

It's also Interesting that Sarah Horne knew how to write passably, suggesting that her family had enough money for schooling. Or is there any sign that someone else may have written the letter for her?

I would say that razees made a ship more "galley-built" and less "frigate-built." E.g., Falconer's Marine Dictionary, "FRIGATE-BUILT, (fregaté, Fr.) implies the disposition of the decks of such merchant-ships as have a descent of four or five steps from the quarter-deck and fore-castle into the waist, in contra-distinction to those whose decks are on a continued line for the whole length of the Ship, which are called galley-built."

Aside from Lowther, Every razeed the Charles when he made her into the Fancy, which made her into a veritable speed demon according to an East India Company agent: "having taken down a great deal of his upper work and made her exceeding snugg, which advantage being added to her well sailing before, causes her to sail so hard now that shee fears not who follows her."

I have heard it said that cutting down raised afterdecks and foredecks was pretty routine for pirates, but I don't know any other specific examples right off besides Lowther and Every.

Does anyone have any information on him outside of what can be found on wikisource? Various scurrilous pirate websites who do not bother to list their sources list him as a surgeon, but I can't seem to find any proof of this. Nor can I find where he said much about that topic, even in his book.

Got some information, but it doesn't say anything about him being a surgeon.

Basil Ringrose was born in London and baptized on January 28, 1653, at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. His parents, Richard and Mary Ringrose, lived on a street close to the present site of Charing Cross Station. There is no record of him attending any of the major London schools, but we know that he acquired a working knowledge of French and Latin, and during his travels in South America he had no problem in learning Spanish and was able to act as interpreter for the buccaneers. There is no information in his later writings about his upbringing or early life; nor is there any explanation of how he came to be in Central America with the buccaneers He seems to have been liked and respected by his shipmates, although on one occasion he fought a duel with the ship's quartermaster.

- - Cordingly, Pirates: Terror on the High Seas From the Caribbean to the South China Sea, p. 68.

The Caribbean island of St. Thomas was Danish during the early 18th century, and was a frequent place for pirates (including Captain Kidd) to sell their plunder. Stede Bonnet intended to get a privateering commission at St. Thomas, but never made it there. I don't know if any actual Danes joined the pirate crews there, although "Danskers" were common enough on English ships in general.

I have trouble accepting the Vikings as pirates for two reasons: 1) Norse law regarded Viking raids as simple warfare and entirely legal; 2) Christian Europeans didn't treat captured Viking raiders differently from any other captured Norsemen - i.e. as heathens they could be treated just about any way their captors wanted - so it's not clear that Christian Europeans regarded them as pirates either. I'm not sure you need both of those elements to have piracy, but I do think you need one or the other.

A good point! While coins were the most trusted money, bank notes were increasingly important as the 18th century wore on, and for the colonies, starved of coin by the Navigation Acts, bank notes and suchlike negotiable instruments were particularly important, as well as pieces of eight and other foreign coins.

While I don't know of any specific cases where pirates stole banknotes, in my Commercial Paper class last year we talked about the 1758 case of Miller v. Race, which dealt with a thief stealing a note. When a thief steals a note and uses it as money to pay a debt, the person who receives it is a "holder in due course" and has a legal right to possession of the note and to demand payment from the note's drawer (i.e. the person who wrote the note). Thus, a pirate or any other thief who steals a bank note, or any other negotiable instrument, has an excellent chance of spending it, because the seller who takes the note has no obligation to check how the buyer came into possession of the note. This was essential to ensure that notes could circulate freely as money; if merchants always had to check everybody's title to a note, sometimes back through a dozen or a hundred people between himself and the original drawer, nobody would ever have accepted notes in place of coin.

By the way, Miller v. Race was written by good old Lord Mansfield again.

Away, haul away! We'll haul away for Diosa!

Solving for the Unknown

By Daniel R. Baker

“Hello, Dr. Shaheed. Do you know that this is about?” Jason James said to his archaeology teacher. Even though he was Melinda Shaheed, Ph.D.’s star pupil, and even though her tigress eyes and shining black hair made his very blood ache, Jason had never had the nerve to call her Melinda.

“Jason!” Shaheed glanced over and flashed a pearly smile that inflicted physical pain inside Jason’s chest. “Please, sit down. No, our distinguished department head hasn’t seen fit to tell lesser mortals what’s going on. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have invited any of the faculty but me. I hope I won’t have wasted your time asking you to come.”

A glance around the lecture hall confirmed Shaheed’s words. There were only about twelve people beside himself and his professor, and of those he recognized only the president of the University of Trinidad and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, Jason felt acutely out of place among all the business suits.

Presently, Dr. Gustave Elbert, head of the University of Trinidad’s Archaeology Department, entered the room. Jason knew that Shaheed’s doctoral dissertation had demolished the thesis of Elbert’s world-famous book on pre-Colombian religious cults and raised serious doubts about Elbert’s academic honesty and competence. Elbert had never forgiven her.

Elbert introduced himself and the members of the audience, most of whom were wealthy investors, corporate board members, and college regents. He identified Shaheed last.

“But, I suppose you are all wondering why I’ve called you here,” Elbert said, Shaheed rolling her eyes at the pompous platitude. “I have identified the location of Scar-Hand’s treasure.”

Elbert raised the remote in his hand. The lecture hall’s PowerPoint projector displayed an oil portrait of a long-haired man in 18^th-century costume, balancing a long flintlock musket across his knee.

“This is John Evesham, popularly known as Captain Scar-Hand,” Elbert declared. “Formerly the captain of Queen Anne’s ship of the line Hermione, he is believed to have turned to piracy in 1716, after his lover Susanna Inglehall committed suicide in the wake of his slaying of her father William in a duel. The permanent deformation of his right hand led to his nickname and is believed to have been inflicted by William Inglehall’s pistol. Scar-Hand sacked an estimated fifty ships over the next seven years and ransomed several prisoners.

“The Royal West India Company having placed a bounty of £10,000 on his head, Scar-Hand was betrayed to the governor of Trinidad by his ship’s surgeon. Scar-Hand was hanged by order of Port-of-Spain’s Court of Vice-Admiralty on September 10, 1723. Although tortured repeatedly, he never divulged the location of his treasure, which, judging by the losses reported to Lloyd’s of London, probably totaled £30 million.”

Shaheed whispered in Jason’s ear. “That number’s unlikely. Scar-Hand’s share of the total would have been only half a million or so.” Still, she appeared fascinated by Elbert’s talk.

Elbert went on. “The location of Scar-Hand’s treasure has remained mysterious since 1723. Most recently, Dr. Melinda Shaheed has argued in the American Journal of Maritime Archeology that Scar-Hand threw his plunder overboard somewhere off Trinidad’s east shore while trying to evade capture, and that thesis has remained the most commonly accepted to date. However, I now have proof that Scar-Hand’s loot was not lost at sea, but is buried in Savannah, Georgia.”

Elbert turned to a new PowerPoint slide. “These are Scar-Hand’s bones, now preserved here in the University of Trinidad’s Museum of Archaeology. For the past eight months, I have been studying samples from the bones, using my latest breakthroughs in auric radiometric dating.”

Jason clenched his teeth. Jason himself had developed the latest auric radiometric methods, under his teacher Melinda Shaheed’s direction. It was so typical of Elbert to steal the credit for others’ work.

“. . . and thus,” Elbert was saying, “at the time of the subject’s death, calcified carbonates cease to accumulate around the gold microparticles imbedded in the bone. Therefore, I can determine, almost to the day, how many years before the subject’s death that he was in physical contact with a given quantity of gold. The calculations are fairly complex, but I have computerized the process.

Elbert clicked his remote and a new slide came up showing a series of equations. “In the case of Scar-Hand’s bones, the auric radiometric process reveals that he handled more than 10 kilograms of gold some time before his death. The exact figure is represented in the last equation on this line, y²+297y-900=0, where y is the number of years before the subject’s death that he last touched 10kg or more of gold at a time. From this equation, I can state categorically that Scar-Hand last handled his treasure horde exactly three years before his death – no more, no less. Scar-Hand parted with his gold on September 10, 1720.

“From there, it was a simple matter of research in the Georgia State Archives to prove that Scar-Hand was in Baylward’s Countinghouse in Savannah on September 10, 1720, hiding from royal agents. He must have spent the day burying his treasure beneath the floorboards of Baylward’s Countinghouse.”

Another click, another PowerPoint slide, this time showing a stock prospectus. “Gentlemen, this is the prospectus of the Elbert Prospecting Corporation. The corporate mission is to buy the property of the Savannah Regional Savings & Loan, which stands on the site of Baylward’s Countinghouse, and excavate for Scar-Hand’s plunder. Bidding for the initial stock offering of 100,000 shares will start at $10 per share. What are your questions?”

The audience all started talking at once, Elbert calling them by turns. Jason looked over at Dr. Shaheed. She was oblivious to him, intensely working the keypad of her palm computer. So he raised his hand himself. Only when the flow of questions from the investors and regents had stopped did Elbert call on him.

“Yes,” said the archaeology department head. “You, in the jeans and polo shirt.”

“Professor Elbert,” Jason said, “if you read that article by Dr. Shaheed you mentioned, then you know she went over the site of Baylward’s Countinghouse with metal detectors repeatedly. There was no metal found.”

Elbert shrugged. “It must have been buried too deep. Conventional metal detectors can only penetrate a few centimeters of loam per kilogram metal.”

Jason exhaled through gritted teeth. “Halford’s expedition excavated the site in 1954, before the savings and loan was built. That’s in Dr. Shaheed’s article too. Halford found no treasure.”

“Halford only excavated 36 square meters before his money ran out,” Elbert snapped. “The whole site covers more than 200 square meters. We will do it properly this time. In any case, the auric radiometric method has been tested and proven to a high level of precision. There is no possibility of error.”

Jason had no answer for that. The auric radiometric method was that precise. He knew that; he had developed and tested it himself.

He felt Dr. Shaheed’s hand on his arm. Her touch was gentle, but it sent fire racing through his bones. He looked over at her, and she shook her head at him slightly. Jason lapsed into silence, his heart sinking.

Fifteen minutes later, as Jason was leaving the lecture hall for his dorm, Dr. Shaheed ran up to him. She leaned close to his face, and as her eyes bored into his, he had to struggle to focus on the whisper she directed to his ears alone.

“Jason, meet me at the back door of the Archaeology Museum next Friday at 11:30 p.m., after you finish your marine lab practical. Bring scuba gear for yourself from the lab. Don’t forget the compass or the GPS, and don’t be late. Tell no one. Do you understand?”

Jason nodded. “What is this about?”

Shaheed shook her head. “Too risky to explain here. Just be there.”

* * *

Jason James felt rather silly as he lugged the haversack of scuba gear down the concrete steps to the back door of Trinidad University’s Archaeology Museum. He was going to feel even sillier if his teacher wasn’t there. He checked his palm computer. It was 11:28 pm. He reached for the back door, wondering if he should knock.

The door opened toward him when he touched it. From the darkness inside, he heard Melinda Shaheed’s whispered voice. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Jason.”

“Good. Come inside.”

Jason stepped through the doorway, and felt Shaheed’s hand guiding his arm. A flashlight flared into life, and Jason’s jaw dropped. Dr. Shaheed had a scuba tank and flotation jacket on her back, a face mask and snorkel pushed up onto her forehead, and a pair of swim fins tucked under her arm. Aside from that, she wore a bikini. And nothing else.

Shaheed smiled, obviously amused by the effect her body had on Jason. He blushed.

“This way,” she said. Jason followed his teacher through the darkened halls of the museum. In five minutes, they stood at the glass case in room 21A that held the bones of Captain Scar-Hand.

“Have you thought about what day it is today, Jason?” Shaheed asked. She was smiling, her eyes bright and mocking, her usual expression when trying to tease answers out of a bright but lazy student.

“Friday, September 9,” Jason said.

“Which is . . . “ Shaheed made a coaxing gesture.

Jason thought it over a moment, then it clicked. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of Captain Scar-Hand’s death.”

“You got it,” Shaheed said. “And you and I are about to be very rich. I could have kept all Scar-Hand’s treasure for myself, but since you did most of the work on the auric radiometry dating, I thought you deserved to share it with me.”

“You know where Scar-Hand’s gold is?” Jason’s breath was hushed with excitement.

Shaheed shrugged slightly, which made Jason struggle to tear his attention from the curve of her shoulders. “I soon will. Probably in the next hour or two. Before dawn, certainly.”

“How do you know?”

“Our beloved department head told me. He just didn’t know he had. The solution was right there on his silly PowerPoint slide.”

“He solved the equation wrong? The one calculating when Scar-Hand last touched the treasure?”

“Oh no, he solved it right. He just forgot that every quadratic equation has two possible answers.”

“Two answers . . .” Jason pulled his palm computer from his pocket and called up the equation he had entered on his notebook at Dr. Elbert’s lecture hall. He worked for a moment and looked up at Shaheed.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Elbert’s answer is the only possible answer. Scar-Hand touched the gold three years before his death. The only other solution is negative three hundred.”

Shaheed dipped her head a little while keeping her eyes fixed on Jason. “Negative three hundred is the right answer.”

“What? How can Scar-Hand have last touched the gold negative three hundred years before his death?”

Shaheed didn’t say anything, just raised her eyebrows, as if she expected better than this from him.

Jason’s voice slowed down as he thought out loud. “It’s only possible if . . .” Chills ran down his spine. “Negative three hundred years before Scar-Hand’s death means three hundred years after his death.”

“Precisely,” Shaheed said, and looked at her palm computer. “Three hundred years after Scar-Hand’s death. September 10, 2023. Which comes . . .” she looked down at her palm computer, “. . . fourteen minutes and fifty-six seconds from now. I suggest you get your scuba gear on.”

It was the longest fourteen minutes and fifty-six seconds of Jason’s life. Scar-Hand’s time in the torture chamber, his time awaiting the gallows, could not possibly have seemed longer. It took forever to get his scuba gear on as he fumbled with the straps and buckles. But still worse was the waiting afterward. At every creak, every squeak of a mouse, he whirled around, his heart pounding. Shaheed stood as still and mute as a statue of Venus.

Finally, he heard, distant and muffled, the chime of Port-of-Spain’s old church tower ringing twelve o’clock. As the last chime faded, the bones of Scar-Hand moved. The greenish brown skeleton sat straight up with slow, inexorable power, shattering the glass that contained it. It climbed down to the floor, slowly, as if stiff after three hundred years of slumber. Without the least regard for the two humans in the room, it clacked out the archway into the next hall.

Wordlessly, Jason and Dr. Shaheed followed the spectral creature. The museum’s front door simply unlocked at a touch from the thing. It paused a moment on the outer steps, tilting its empty eye sockets toward the starry sky, then turned slightly and glided down across the deserted University campus. The teacher and her student lumbered behind, struggling to keep up with the apparition under the weight of their gear.

They had gone about a mile when they arrived at the dock. The creature walked to the end of the first pier and vanished into the water without a splash, still following a ruler-straight course. Jason and Shaheed hurriedly pulled their fins on and jumped into the water after it. They followd Scar-Hand’s skeleton from the surface, using their snorkels to conserve their oxygen tanks. The walking ghost did not float; it walked along the sandy bottom, and soon its pursuers were shadowing it from directly above, shining an underwater flashlight on it to keep it in sight.

By Jason’s GPS calculation, they swam out a mile, then a mile and a half, before Scar-Hand reached a depth too great for them to follow from the surface. Mouthing their regulators, Jason and Shaheed kicked down into the murky green water. Deeper and deeper they followed the walking skeleton, through the coral and the schools of fish .

And finally, as their air reached the 33% mark, Shaheed stopped and pointed. At the end of their flashlight’s probing finger of light, through the naked rib cage of Scar-hand’s skeleton, they saw the scattered forms of broken, rotting chests, and the faint gleam of gold.

I wrote this short story for my mother, a teacher of mathematics, who asked me to write a ghost story about numbers. I did - but of course, I couldn't resist including pirates in it too.

I forgot to mention the legal issue at the core of the 1850s trials mentioned on page 2. At the time, it was illegal in South Carolina to teach a slave to read and write above a rudimentary level (one reason being the fear of slave revolt on coastal plantations). There was a series of prosecutions in the Upstate and Catawba River Valley areas where people and institutions were giving high school and even college and seminary educations to slaves, which they legally "owned" . . . Is that pro, anti-slavery, or something else entirely?

I'm not certain about the facts of these specific cases. But recall that one of the chief excuses offered for slavery, both in GAoP and the time you refer to, was to educate and Christianize the slaves. The law forbidding the education of slaves shows that for the majority of the slaveholders who dominated the state legislatures, this was purest hypocrisy. But some slave owners, perhaps including the ones being prosecuted here, took their duty to educate the slaves seriously - so seriously that they were willing to risk legal punishment. Education and Christianization, of course, went hand in hand; a Christian (or at least a Protestant Christian) was supposed to read the Bible.

I agree that it is not obvious whether educating the slaves was pro-slavery, anti-slavery, or neither. One might educate a slave and still intend to keep him and his progeny enslaved, or one might intend to liberate them once they were deemed ready. And by the 1850s, liberation wasn't necessarily easy, as more and more Southern states outlawed the manumission of slaves as the Civil War approached.

In the early 1660s. Mansfield was Henry Morgan's mentor.

Here's a reference from Galvin's Patterns of Pillage, p. 205. "Mansfield's followers are said to have numbered six hundred men of several nationalities, speaking different languages, as among them, besides many English, there were Flemings, French, Genoese, Greeks, Levantines, Portuguese, Indians, and negroes."

Interesting picture. As I said, holding a blade in your mouth keeps your hands free while you climb. But I wonder why one would hold grenade fuses in your mouth?

One Halloween, by the way, lacking an actual cutlass, I carried a machete for my pirate costume, and sometimes posed with it in my teeth while my son knocked on the doors. The thought came swiftly to my mind: one good impact to either end of this thing, and it's coming out of my mouth. A comrade's shoe or hand in the wrong place, a wave making me hit the side of the ship while I step off the gunwale of the assault boat, spinning around a line as I climb, anything like that could make me lose the weapon.

The problem wouldn't be so bad with a short knife. But who wants a short knife as their primary weapon in a boarding fight?

The ruffian who clambers over the gunwale with the blade of his weapon clamped between his teeth is one of the iconic images of piracy. Obviously, there is some advantage to having both your hands free while you climb aboard another ship, but sashes and scabbards would seem to be a more practical solution than your mouth as a place to store your weapon while you climb.

Is there any historical evidence of pirates (or indeed anyone in the Age of Sail) boarding an enemy ship with cutlery in their teeth? I did search the Pub, but darned if I can find any previous threads on this question.

Slavery at sea is an interesting and confusing matter. Lord Mansfield ruled in Somersett's Case that England (as opposed to the English colonies) had no slavery, and that a slave's chains basically fell from his body the moment his feet touched English soil, and that he could not be returned to slavery even if he was captured and brought back onto a ship. But that was in 1772. Was slavery really unrecognized and unenforced in England during the GAoP, as Mansfield claimed it wasn't?

No worries, Cap'n. I only wish I could have given you some help, but my six-year-old younker would have got foul of the cable.

BTW, I misspelled Josephine's name above: it's Legard, not Lamaze; and I can't seem to find the edit function.