Daniel

Novelty may have been one reason for setting up shops on the ice. But you also have to remember how intensely crowded London streets were, and how tough it was to find selling space there. The frozen river would have been a brief opportunity for craftsmen who couldn't afford shop space on regular streets to grab some for nothing.

Link here: http://chicagoist.co...owed_to_sue.php

To sum up: in 2006, two Americans were working in Iraq for an FBI investigation of a security company suspected of corruption. They were seized and held by U.S. forces, during which time they say they were kept in freezing cold cells, deprived of sleep for days on end, deliberately slammed into walls, and threatened constantly with additional violence.

They are suing the former Secretary of Defense among others. A federal court has ruled that they are allowed to sue, disagreeing with the government's argument that no one working for the U.S. government can be sued for anything that happens in a war zone. This is still a long way from a trial, so nothing has been proven yet, but a leaked U.S. government document matches the two Americans' story of how they got into military custody. http://www.iraqwarlo...m/PDF/25/13.pdf

So far, so depressing, but the main thing I wanted opinion on was about how the two guys were first seized. They were working for a security company that was suspected of corruptly trading alcohol to U.S. soldiers in exchange for weapons, which weapons the company then sold to God-knows-whom. The two men say they were secretly sending information on the company to the FBI; I'm not clear on whether the FBI confirms this. The security company got suspicious of our two whistle blowers and yanked their Green Zone passes, effectively confining them to the company's compound. When they called the FBI for help, they say they got this answer: "they should interpret [the company's] actions as taking them hostage, and should barricade themselves with weapons in a room of the compound."

Does that strike anyone else as incredibly bad advice? If you do that, isn't there an excellent chance that the company will report, "We have two heavily armed terrorists barricaded in our building with lots of weapons," and that the two guys could well have simply been killed before anyone figured out that they were actually FBI informants? Indeed, wasn't there a very serious threat of the company sending goons with grenades to kill the two guys themselves, and later explaining it as as a necessary response to a life-threatening emergency?

The story seems so strange that only two explanations come to me. First, our two guys might be lying, at least about the part where the FBI told them to barricade themselves. Second, if they are telling the truth about it, whoever they were talking to might have been trying to set them up to be killed. At any rate, the fact that our two whistle blowers first came to the attention of the military while barricaded with guns in a security firm's arsenal might explain, though not excuse, the abominable way their captors treated them.

OK, I have no trouble accepting that a true-bored gun with a tightly fitting ball will be more accurate than a loose-fitting ball fired from a bad bore. But no matter the ball's fit or the quality of the bore, a smooth bore ball still won't spin, at least not on an axis parallel to the ball's flight path. So how can a smooth bore achieve comparable accuracy to a rifled bore?

Wow. I didn't know the idea of animal transplant surgery was that old. Also, I didn't know that the phrase "robbing Peter to pay Paul" was over 300 years old. Now that I look it up, I see it may go back as far as 1380: John Wyclif reportedly wrote: "Lord, hou schulde God approve that you robbe Petur and gif is robbere to Poule in ye name of Crist?"

Apparently, it was no romantic fiction or P.C. kowtowing when Master and Commander showed the Surprise's sailors as every color and nationality you can imagine. According to Woodes Rogers, the privateer crew of the Duke and Duchess on leaving Bristol in 1708 numbered "333, of which above one third were foreigners from most nations." That begs some questions. How did so many foreigners get aboard? The obvious answer is from foreign ships docking in England, but that explanation won't do because the Navigation Acts didn't allow foreign ships to sell much of any important commodity in Britain. Were English ships picking up foreigners in foreign ports and then bringing them back to England?

Then also, how did they deal with the language problem? Did most of the foreigners speak English, or the English officers speak the crew's languages? On Navy ships, which were required to hold services in the Anglican rite every Sunday, did Scottish Presbyterians, Dutch Calvinists, Danish Lutherans, Portuguese and French Catholics, or even African Muslims participate?

And knottiest of all: it must have been inevitable, what with Europe's shifting alliances and the long communication lags, that England would occasionally go to war with a country whose sailors were still on English ships. What happened then? Did the foreign sailors consent to fight against their native countries? Were they imprisoned as "enemy aliens?" Traded for English seamen in foreign service?

Mission, here's another paragraph from Rodger's Command of the Ocean that I thought might be particularly interesting to you, dealing as it does with Navy surgeons and medical care.

In the long term one of the most significant developments concerned the Navy's relations with the rival medical corporations: the College of Physicians of London, the Barber-Surgeons' Company and the Society of Apothecaries. By demanding practical remedies for mass outbreaks of disease (something impossible and disreputable according to orthodox Galenic medicine), by distributing its official favours between the medical bodies, and by requiring (in 1709) that naval surgeons undergo a qualifying course in medicine (the physician's preserve), the Admiralty and Navy Board began to undermine the official divisions of the medical world. This effect was reinforced by an act of 1698 permitting 'discharged soldiers' to practice outwith [sic - probably should say "without"] guild regulations, which led to a growing number of ex-naval and military surgeons, trained to some extent as 'general practitioners', taking up practice ashore.⁶⁵

Rodger, p. 196.

⁶⁵ Cook, 'Practical Medicine'. Rodger, 'Medicine and Science'. KMN II, 202, 265-76. Holmes, Augustan England, pp. 193, 197 and 203.

While reading through Rodger's Command of the Ocean I found a paragraph on slops on pages 190-91. A lot of it is redundant with what Gentleman of Fortune put in his first post, but a couple of items contain additional detail, such as the mention of shoes having buckles. I didn't read every word in the thread, but I skimmed and this doesn't appear to have been posted yet, so here goes.

There was another sort of problem with slop contracts. Good, stout working clothes were essential to seamen's well-being, and as commissions increased in length,it became necessary to make them available aboard ship. These slops were supplied by contractors, issued by the purser and charged against men's wages. In the 1690s they included blue waistcoats and kersey jackets, white 'petticoat breeches' (a sort of canvas divided skirt) with red stripes, red caps and white neckcloths. Richard Harnage's 1706 contract specified grey kersey jackets lined with red cotton, fifteen brass buttons and the 'buttonholes stitched with gold-coloured thread'; red kersey breeches, red flannel waistcoats, red or striped shag breeches, blue and white check linen shirts, linen drawers, leather caps, grey woollen stockings, gloves and mittens, shoes and brass buckles. In 1711 the range of sizes was increased from three to four, each bale of fifty suits being made up of eight of the smallest size, then seventeen, seventeen, and finally eight of the largest. It suited the Navy to draw contracts by which the clothes were shipped at the contractors' risk until the moment they were issued, though the bales passed out of their control as soon as they were delivered to the Navy Board. Aboard ship they were subject to many hazards: 'he verily believes it is impossible for pursers to prevent such damage, but that slops will become damnified either by the rats eating them or by water coming to them in leaky ships and in hot countries.'⁴⁵ Though pursers were allowed one shilling in the pound on slops issued undamaged, it was the contractor who bore most of the risk, with no control over conditions of storage. Damaged slops were returned for full credit in large and unpredictable quantities, 'so eaten or rotten that it hath not been presently discoverable whether the remains were parts of waistcoats or parts of breeches.⁴⁶ What was issued was paid for long in arrears; in 1709 Harnage was owed £44,553 9s 1d for three years' supplies. So onerous were the terms of this business that no one would undertake it but by selling shoddy slops (as it was complained) at high prices. Public money was saved, and the risk was offloaded on to the contractor, but in the process the actual object of the exercise was lost sight of: giving the men access to the good clothes at fair prices which they needed.⁴⁷

His endnotes, on page 679:

45 PRO: E 134/1 Geo I/Hil/27; Deposition of William Franklin, 10 Jan 1714/5.

46 PRO: E 134/2 Geo I/Mich/27; Deposition of Nathaniel Cutler, 23 Nov 1715.

47 Merriman, Queen Anne's Navy, pp. 191-2. Ehrman, Navy, pp. 121-4. Manwaring, 'Dress of the British Seaman'. PRO: E 134/13 Anne/Trin/10, 1 Geo I/Hil/27 and 2 Geo I/Mich/27, depositions in suit Braddyl, Gough and Dawsonne con Franklyn.

PRO means Public Record Office, so you pretty well have to be in the UK to get at some of these sources.

Notice that at this time the contracts were not in fact Admiralty at all. Rather, the Navy Board was entirely responsible for these contracts to supply the pursers, the Admiralty now being at the lowest ebb of its power and responsibility.

Thank you, gentlemen; your findings match very well with mine. Apparently when Weaver invented his two-handed stance in the late 50s, the dominant method was point shooting, which is the exact method that Captain Bo described, and which is generally done one-handed, just as he does. I'm not sure how old point shooting is, but an 1835 self-defense manual by the Baron de Berneger shows him suggesting a similar method to point shooting, and clearly suggesting practicing with one hand; indeed, he recommends learning to shoot left handed so as to keep the right hand free for other work. Can't find any paintings of pistol duels older than the 1804 Burr-Hamilton duel, but that too represents a one-handed grip (and if I were a second in a pistol duel, I would definitely not be standing that close to my principal). Another point: when WIld Bill Hickok fatally shot Davis Tutt in 1865 in Springfield, MO, at a range of 75 yards, he steadied his Colt revolver by laying the barrel across his forearm, not by gripping the butt with two hands. This would be further evidence against the popularity of the two-handed technique before the 20th century. I suppose this doesn't prove 100% that the one-handed technique was already dominant in 1700, but it seems likeliest.

As for the accuracy of black powder weapons, my understanding was that it wasn't so much the black powder itself that made it inaccurate, although old style black powder didn't burn as uniformly as modern commercial black powder. But the smooth bore I have universally heard as being very inaccurate. If a Brown Bess can only hit a 12-inch gong at 150 yards 2 out of 3 times, that's quite consistent with what I've heard about its inaccuracy; when I was in practice with a quite ordinary Savage .30-06, I could put three bullets in a 4-inch circle at 200 yards, and shooters with actual talent (unlike me) can do much better than that. On the other hand, sniping squirrels at 50 yards one-handed with a smooth bore black powder pistol is way, way better than anything I've ever heard of. I think both your brother and his pistol must be well above average, considering how often pistol duelists missed each other completely at 10 to 20 paces.

I was taught to fire a pistol two-handed. I was always a lousy pistol shot even that way, but at least I could group 7 shots about 3 to 6 inches low and left of the bullseye at 25 yards. With one hand? Fuhgeddaboutit: I'd be lucky to put the shots on the paper at all. Basically every manual I've ever seen about modern handgun shooting agrees: use two hands, whether in the squared off police stance or the sidewise Weaver stance.

In the movies, handguns used to be invariably shown used in one hand. Since about the '90s, films set in the modern era more often show an accurate two-handed use of handguns, at least by police and other trained shooters, but Westerns and movies of the 17th-18th centuries still pretty much always show people firing handguns one-handed.

So, do we know anything about whether people in the 17th-18th centuries actually fired flintlock pistols one-handed or two-handed? I realize that with a smoothbore flintlock, a loose-fitting ball and black powder, the flintlock pistol isn't accurate beyond 10 yards or so even in the best of circumstances. But does that mean it's not worthwhile to use two hands? If you add muzzle wobble from a one-handed grip to the aforementioned problems, wouldn't the effective range be even less than 10 yards?

On the other hand, we're not concerned with whether shooting one-handed was a good idea, but whether it was done. The contemporary practice may not have been the ideal practice.

I personally doubt that Dana is worth the effort. He has a very labored, Victorian prose style that, for me, is tougher to penetrate than Charles Johnson or Daniel DeFoe. And it's so far removed from GAoP in both time and location that the book's pure research value is questionable. But it didn't help that I listened to the book on CD read by a very poor narrator; with a hardcopy that allows you to go back and reread some of Dana's more cumbersome locutions, it might be more bearable.

Barlow's journals are coming up now in my reading of Rodger's Command of the Ocean; he seems to have been quite the pessimist, and he has a hilarious quote disparaging physicians and surgeons. Just to be clear; is he the same Barlow whose East Indiaman tangled with Captain Kidd at the mouth of the Red Sea?

Just a thought here, (devils advocate if you will) Franklins autobiography was laid out by him to be an instructional text more so than a normal biography. I won't say he shaded the truth on this point but it does seem to be the only point in his life where he was a T-totaller.

That could be. You are certainly right that the book is intended to be didactic. Although the message I got from it was not so much that Franklin was a teetotaller, much less that others should be, but just that making beer your principal beverage was a needless expense.

Then too, I don't know if Franklin appreciated the fact that for poor Englishmen, beer was an important part of the diet, worth several hundred calories a day, while water has none. 18th century American workers typically ate a lot more and better than English workers did, and could better afford to dispense with those beer calories.

The article is 80% canting nonsense and 20% obvious banalities. Witness this sentence:

There was a certain incommensurability about the sailor, which necessitated his exclusion from society in order to be accommodated within it.

"Incommensurability?" Incommensurate with what? Like most Foucault-citing poseurs, he just hopes the word is steep enough to deter the reader from climbing to the top and finding no meaning there. The fake paradox of "exclusion from society in order to be accomodated within it" depends on the false assumption that society stops at the water's edge.

As for artists representing sailors out of their element, I can open Rodger's Command of the Ocean and instantly find five paintings of sailors aboard ship on the water. True, sailors were more often shown on land than at sea, for the obvious reason that painters didn't often go to sea, and when they did (like Willem van de Velde) they were often being paid to paint large battle scenes rather than individual sailors. No fearful or ideologically driven desire to "show him as distant from it as possible" is necessary to explain sailors being painted on land.

The reference to the "commodification" of sailors' labor, a tortured way of saying that sailors were paid for their work as being somehow a new development of the 18th century proto-capitalist world is ludicrous. Sailors have sold their labor since classical antiquity; even slave-manned rowing ships like galleys and biremes needed wage labor to run the lines topside. I smell Rediker's propaganda at work here.

The statement that sailors didn't represent themselves artistically is true enough, I guess; not all were literate, and those that could write usually lacked leisure to paint, draw, or write about their lives. Dampier, Ringrose, Wafer, Exquemelin and the like wrote about their sailing experiences, but none of them was an ordinary "tar." So there's an obvious banality, but at least it's not absurd like the rest of the article.

Interesting. What does he say about the prognosis of confluent smallpox? Wikipedia mentions a set of confluent victims of whom 62% died; I wonder if that was typical.

Also, do you know anything about laudanum addiction and abuse in GAoP? All the instances I've heard of are from the 19th century.

But Philadelphia passed a law in 1683 forbidding "smoking seegars on the street." Dan Ahrens, Investing in Vice, p. 83. It was apparently common enough to be a fire hazard, because the fines were used to buy firefighting equipment. So I would say yes, a cigar would be period, although I don't have anything to show how cigars then differed from cigars now.

Here's a picture of a woman lighting up on a pipe from the mid-17th century. I love this picture because of the guy sitting with her who is so obviously smitten with her. He has this look on his face that's like, "My girlfriend is so cute when she's lighting her pipe."

One of the first cases they teach you in Torts class: Scott v. Shepherd, aka the Squib Case, decided by the Court of King's Bench in 1773.

On the evening of the fair-day at Milborne Port, 28th October, 1770, the defendant threw a lighted squib, made of gunpowder, &c. from the street into the market-house . . . which lighted squib, so thrown by the defendant, fell upon the standing of one Yates, who sold gingerbread, & c. That one Willis instantly, and to prevent injury to himself and the said wares of the said Yates, took up the said lighted squib from off the said standing, and then threw it across the said market-house, when it fell upon another standing there of one Ryal, who sold the same sort of wares, who instantly, and to save his own goods from being injured, took up the said lighted squib from off the said standing,and then threw it to another part of the said market-house, and in so throwing it, struck the plaintiff then in the said market-house in the face therewith, and the combustible matter then bursting, put out one of the plaintiff's eyes.

Squibs. Not to be trifled with.

The question was whether the guy who first threw the squib could be held to have directly caused the plaintiff's injury or not, in which case he could be sued in trespass rather than "trespass on the case" (a distinction long ago vanished from our law). The majority held that the first thrower did directly cause the injury and could be sued in trespass, but no less a figure than William Blackstone dissented.

From The Sea-Man's Vade Mecum of 1706: "An Awning, a Sail set up like a Canopy to prevent the scorching of the Sun."

ISo complicated operations were often risky (although he doesn't actually provide proof of this, it does make sense.) I do recall reading that anyone with severe damage to their torso (the area protecting the organs) were usually thought to be beyond hope and the best remedy was to dress their wound and make them as comfortable as possible. On the other hand, they had procedures for repairing intestines and lithotomy. We don't really have collected data on survival rates or anything like that. (I had heard somewhere that someone was working on creating some sort of database of the results of 17th and 18th century medical treatments based on the naval surgeon's journals that the Royal Society has, but I don't know if that is still going on, abandoned, finished or what.) I do recall reading that 50% of the people being ...here it gets somewhat hazy... trepanned or perhaps amputated... survived, but I have not since been able to find that quote in my notes. (I used to use it in my presentations, but I stopped when I couldn't find the source. It was probably referring to trepanation because amputation was a pretty common operation at this point. A surgeon's worth was often judged by how fast he could do an amputation - 2 - 3 minutes being usual.)

I may be confused here, but I thought that lithotomies (Samuel Pepys was successfully cut for a kidney stone), intestinal repairs, trepannings, and amputations were all done by surgeons, not physicians, and that the social and professional gulf between physician and surgeon was huge. There's no doubt surgeons did a huge amount of good: setting broken bones, relieving concussions, lithotomies and trepannings as you mentioned, amputating gangrenous limbs, extracting bullets and arrowheads, even pulling teeth in some cases. The surgeons' operations were extremely dangerous and painful, but a lot of them clearly worked.

But I thought physicians didn't do any of that; they prescribed drugs or therapies, like cupping, bleeding, mineral baths, etc. And it's in the drugs/therapies department that I have a really hard time thinking of anything effective Western physicians did before the smallpox inoculation.

I think you're being sort of harsh on the poor physicians of old. They were doing what they knew and were taught. The only way you can go beyond what you know is by taking risks - and we're talking people's lives here, so the concern about risk-taking would necessarily be heightened. Medicine was (and in some ways still is) a half-step behind other experimental pursuits, most likely because of this.

I agree. I'm sure the physicians were doing the best they could and knew how, and had good reasons for believing what they did It's just that the best they could do and knew how was, as we now know, worse than useless. A person back then who studied the outcomes of physicians' treatment versus magic and quackery could rationally conclude that the magic and quackery worked better. You couldn't come to the same conclusion about modern medicine; some individual treatments we use now will likely turn out to be harmful or useless, but medicine as a whole has worked huge reductions in morbidity and mortality.

On reflection, I guess there were a few things the physicians did that worked. As you mentioned below, they knew how to use Jesuit's bark for malaria; that's actually quite significant. And some of them stressed the importance of cleanliness, right? But is that enough to refute my statement that doctors on average harmed more than they helped, even if they had the best of intentions?

Wow! Abracadabra amulets! I was expecting some primitive things would be used, but I confess I wasn't expecting quite that primitive. Thanks, this is very much the sort of thing I wnated to know.

I would think that the people who "hated" medicine in the Golden Age would largely be different from the crystal fans, magnet users and faith healers of today. In our age of medical wonders, I think people who use such things mainly do it from a desire to feel they are privy to secrets that ordinary people don't know. But back in the 1700s, magic charms and quack medicines were sometimes less harmful than the treatments used by real physicians or surgeons - notably bleeding and searing wounds, prescribing lethal doses of mercury for venereal disease, or, as you mentioned in the other thread, prescribing tobacco as a sight restorative or a dentifrice! The sailors' belief that scurvy could be cured by breathing from a hole in the ground was useless, but no more useless than oil of vitriol or sauerkraut, which was the best that any health care professional could recommend before Lind, and often after him as well.

I don't mean to say Golden Age physicians and surgeons were all bad. Surgeons at least could do episiotomies, set fractures, and their amputations reduced gangrene's death rate from 100% to 50% or so. On the other hand, I'm damned if I can think of anything physicians did that compensated for the harm they caused. Certainly you know more about physicians' and surgeons' overall effectiveness in the 18th century than I do; would you say they were a net benefit or a net harm to their patients?

Like I said in my first post, if you can find the period evidence, then by all means go ahead and do what you please. But I'm not the sort that likes the really stretched "it could have happened" stories.

Rarely have I seen such unanimity from all sides of pirate scholarship. Don't worry, I had no plans whatsoever to integrate knife throwing into a persona - I'm much more a writer than a re-enactor anyway, and the main result here is that I'm going to have to write an episode of knife-throwing out of my book. I had my doubts about it to begin with, as my first post makes clear, and the responses I see here only confirm those doubts.

So, given that combat knife-throwing is completely unhistorical not only for pirates but for just about everybody, what COULD one do in the Golden Age to eliminate an opponent stealthily at range? With throwing axes also ruled out, the only remaining alternatives I see are the bow, crossbow, and spear! The bow and spear were used by Indians, but not so far as I know by pirates; but some Miskito Indians were pirates, or at least worked with them, and were legendary for their prowess hurling the harpoon. Drake's men used crossbows, but I've not heard of them being used during the Golden Age. Is there any record of pirates or other sailors using boarding pikes as throwing weapons?

Not for throwing, and people don't die from knife wounds in the torso in just a few seconds as in the movies. Using a knife for combat requires you to be up-close and personal about it and deadly serious. Wit and stealth are the two key components to successful knife fighting. Agility is third and equally important to success.With a firearm you have one shot (in the GAoP) usually, rarely a double barrel will be a factor, but a knife does not need to be reloaded, and once you get inside the 'personal space" of yopur opponent, he's in serious trouble. Knife fighting is something I can say I am completely familiar with. throwing knives is just as I said before, mostly pure fantasy and an entertainment venue. If you miss, you're shite outta luck, and if your opponent is not effectively disabled, you are also shite outta luck and may get your blade served back to you "in spades."

I don't doubt you're right. Especially about people not dying in just a few seconds from a knife wound.

I've never seen a person die from a knife wound, and don't want to, but twice I have seen sheep slaughtered with knives. Even with the entire throat cut clean across to the bone, they both physically struggled for about two minutes.

D -

In Swashbuckler, the knife thrower Cudjo (Goffrey Holder) wasn't mentioned as a pirate only a previous acquaintance of Nick Debrett, that had a talant for throwing knives perhaps as an entertainer (given the knife carrying rig he wears) with a checkered past.

Ah, I had forgotten that. It's been many years since I saw the movie. Thanks for correction.

the question remains why throw away a perfectly good knife?

Well, the theoretical reason would be so you can kill or disable your opponent without getting close enough for him to hurt you. Although a pistol does the same thing, the thrown knife is cheaper and doesn't give away your position with a muzzle flash. And it is often said that the knife is silent, although I question that idea: the knife itself may be silent, but the guy you hit with the knife would probably make quite a lot of noise!

So the thrown knife has two or three theoretical advantages, but I don't see any evidence that those advantages have ever been consistently successfully put into practice.

Hi, I don't wander into this part of the forum much. How y'all doing?

Anyway, we've all seen movies where a person is killed, or almost killed, by a thrown knife. There's at least one pirate movie where this happens, Swashbuckler, where the black pirate is an expert at knife throwing. He's also one of the few knife throwers in movies that's a hero; knife throwing seems to have been something of a bad boy's sport in movies ever since Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda.

However, in all my searches I have been able to find two (2) nonfiction reports of a human being killed by a thrown knife. Ever.

The first appears to be legitimate: the New York Times reported that on March 25, 1898, "Jew Gus" Eckhart killed his live-in girlfriend "English Mary" Ward with a hurled knife from a range of eight feet at New York's Beehive Saloon. The knife blade was only two and a half inches long. He threw it from his open hand, hit Ward in the left breast and cut an artery. She was dead in five minutes. It was the opinion of showman knife throwers that Eckhart, who had no training, could not have fatally struck Ward again in a thousand tries.

The second report is from Harry McEvoy's Knife & Tomahawk Throwing: The Art of the Experts, p. 93. McEvoy claims that Sergeant Skeeter Vaughan killed a German sentry during World War II with a thrown 16-inch bayonet from a range of 87 feet in the dark that penetrated the base of the sentry's skull. My response, frankly, is: Bullsh*t. Skeeter Vaughan was a real man, and had a real career in the movies, but I don't believe he ever killed a man that way. McEvoy does not cite to any source for this absurd story, and I see no reason to believe that Vaughan himself had any hand in writing the book. Such an amazing feat should have led to a citation for distinguished service, and without seeing such a citation I don't believe a word of it. An expert knife thrower

So there we have two reported deaths from knife throwing: one a freak accident, and another that better than even money says is a fabrication. Are there any other substantiated instances of knife throwing deaths that I don't know about? Is there any group of soldiers that manage to make the thrown knife consistently lethal? And if not, why not? The Franks did a number on their enemies with throwing axes that only weighed about 21 ounces. I would have thought you could make a throwing knife of a similar weight to the francisca, so why not a throwing knife of similar lethality?

Thanks for the info, Mission and Dutch!

I've written the Smithsonian to try to get some additional information on the Chesapeake pipe-smoking evidence.

In the meantime, I've found some interesting information in this well-referenced article: "The Social Dip: Tobacco Use by Mid-19th Century Southern Women. The article makes it clear that the antipathy toward women smoking was not very old at all in the 1920s. Two presidents' wives smoked pipes: Mrs. Andrew Jackson and Mrs. Zachary Taylor! But the article also mentions that women did not smoke cigars "in a century increasingly concerned with maintaining distinctive spheres for male and female"; apparently the pipe was considered more respectable for women.

At some point, tobacco use became more common among Southern women than Northern, as by the American Civil War the Northern soldiers campaigning in the South were shocked to find the Southern women using tobacco. This may have had something to do with the fact that the temperance movement was under way in the North by the time of the Civil War, and the temperance activists, many of them women, tended to be anti-smoking as well as anti-alcohol.

Also by the time of the Civil War, many rural Southern women had begun dipping and chewing tobacco, which could be incredibly disgusting, not only to Northerners but to Southern urbanites unused to what the country folk did: "[On the train there was] a very pretty young lady . . . I noticed that she was constantly spitting some dark colored fluid from her mouth. . . . I looked on the floor and there was a great puddle at her feet. It resembled tobacco juice very much, and by George it was tobacco juice, for I saw her spit out the old chew and put in a fresh one." There are limits to how far I will go for historical accuracy; in no circumstance could I entertain the thought of making my heroine do this.

Wikipedia claims that an 18th century women's magazine suggested using snuff to restore eyesight, although I cannot track down the original reference. On GoogleBooks, I find a passionate pro-smoking history of tobacco from 1901 by W.A. Penn, called The Soverane Herb: he reports that in 1671 Worcestershire, it was customary for women and men both to smoke pipes after dinner; another observer had women as well as men using tobacco all over England in 1697 (in what form, he does not say).

I am now strongly leaning toward making my leading lady a tobacco user of some sort. I'd prefer to make her a cigar or snuff user rather than a pipe smoker, but the evidence I've seen so far is much more supportive of pipe smoking for women than snuff use, and there is some clear evidence against female cigar use at least in the 19th century.