Daniel

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.