Daniel

I'm doing a detailed* character sketch of the heroine of my novel, who is an 18-year-old white female living in New York City in 1714, the orphaned ward of a rich shipping magnate. And the question occurred to me, would she use tobacco?

Immediately before Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds started pitching cigarettes to women in the 1920s, it's pretty clear that smoking was considered beyond the pale for women; those companies went to great lengths to convince buyers that "decent, respectable women" could smoke. But I'm not sure how far back that attitude goes. I followed one of Mission's posts to this site, which shows a skull of a woman who died aged 55-60 sometime around 1660 to 1680 in Maryland, whose teeth prove that she was a regular pipe smoker. The anthropologist suggests this was commonplace, that almost "everyone in colonial Chesapeake, young and old, men and women, was smoking." But I'm a little hesitant to stick a pipe in my heroine's mouth 44 years later in a different colony based on this single skull of a woman of unknown class origins. Is there any further confirmation of female tobacco use going on into the 18th century? If so, when did tobacco become scandalous for women to use? Was it yet another hangup inflicted on us by the Victorians?

Then also, supposing my character might have used tobacco, in what form would she use it? My research suggests that tobacco was used in this period in at least three ways: in cigars ("seegars," as spelled in a 1683 Massachusetts ordinance), in pipes, and in snuff. Snuff was supposed to be very aristocratic. If women did use tobacco, would they have used it in all three of these ways? Is it more likely that my heroine, being rich but not of noble blood, would have been a snuff user rather than a pipe or cigar smoker?

* When I say "detailed," I don't just mean that I know what her morals, ambitions, fears and loves are; I mean I know which side she sleeps on and the name of her first horse.

Mission, or anyone who can chime in, were there popular quack medicines or magic charms (or possibly even something that worked?) that were popular by 1714 for preventing the scourges of the age like smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, gangrene, tetanus/lockjaw, etc.? I see no reference to the smallpox inoculation being used in America before 1721, but if I know anything about human psychology, I would guess something was used before then, even if it was completely ineffective, just to reduce the sheer anxiety of getting the disease.

Walking the plank could be considered a form of psychological torture. It wasn't done during the Golden Age, but there are several verified 19th century instances of it. It was normally just a prelude to murder, but it could be used by itself as a psychological torture.

If I recall rightly, actual mock executions (a tactic that is still with us) were inflicted on some prisoners, who in some cases were required to pick their own executioners.

It may not have been intentional, but Blackbeard's locking the captured prisoners of Charleston together in the dark below decks, the high class folks with the servants, was considered clear evidence of murderous intent, and Blackbeard threatened them once that they had not two hours to live. The effect on the high-class prisoners was fearsome.

The 1706 Sea-Man's Vade Mecum calls the binnacle a "bittack." "Bittacle" is also a common 18th century word for the binnacle.

I'd like to refresh my memory about the Guadeloupe event. What is your source for the statement that Blackbeard attacked Guadeloupe?

As for Charleston, I don't think it can be said that BB attacked the town. None of his vessels crossed the bar and entered the harbor.

The attack on Guadeloupe is from Woodard, p. 216. He says Blackbeard sailed into the harbor, captured a ship, and set the town afire with cannon shots. His endnote for that page is not particularly good; it cites Thomas Knight's deposition, but only specifically mentions Nevis rather than Guadeloupe.

As for attacking Charleston, Blackbeard reportedly did enter the harbor with the intention of bombarding the town until dissuaded by his men's report that the ransom chest of medicines was forthcoming. No dispute, this was not a storm-the-town-and-loot-it operation on the lines of Woodes Rogers at Guayaquil or Henry Morgan at Maracaibo. But it certainly is a good deal more aggressive than anything Blackbeard (or anyone else from the Flying Gang) had yet attempted.

an ordinary number of slave deaths (11.9%, compared to an overall average of 12.1%)

Where did you get that? (And for what period of slave trading are those numbers valid?)

On slavevoyages.org (great, great resource, I tell you). It's for the entire period, 1514-1866. You are, of course, quite right to point out that the mortality rate was not steady throughout the entire history of the trade; it went down over time. For the time period 1708-1728 (about three thousand recorded voyages over a twenty-year period), the database says the average death rate was 15.3%; factoring out voyages where the ship sank with no survivors or otherwise didn't make it to the Americas cuts the mortality rate down to 15.0%. Any way you slice it, though, the Concorde's 11.9% death rate was no worse than average.

The aforementioned "evidence" cited in Woodard (p.213) hardly makes the thesis "very dubious." The statement that because Blackbeard did not retain all 455 slaves means that his interest in La Concorde was in "it's combat and sailing capabilities" can be said to be just as speculative. No author or historian has yet to cite source documents that prove one way or the other why Blackbeard sailed from the Delaware capes directly to the north of Barbados in November 1717 and captured an inbound ship from Africa. Woodard's notes offer no sources for the statement, "As he looked over his new prize, Blackbeard knew he had finally found a proper flagship..." There also seems to be little consideration as to how the addition of 455 slaves to Blackbeard's company of 200 to 250 pirates (letter of Charles Mesnier, Intendant of Martinique, and deposition of Thomas Knight,Jan. 6, 1718, CSPCS Vol. 30, #298. ii) would have stressed the ship's provisions and water, nor does it take into consideration the physical condition of the majority of the slaves. It is possible that the value of the 61 slaves Blackbeard's company gleaned from the La Concorde's cargo were worth considerably more than a greater number of slaves they left behind with Captain Pierre Dosset.

We have one irrefutable fact that is not speculation: Blackbeard abandoned at least 82% of the slaves. Assuming that sixty to eighty slaves outvalued the other 374 would be speculation, and there is nothing to support it. Concorde had had an ordinary length middle passage of 66 days, and an ordinary number of slave deaths (11.9%, compared to an overall average of 12.1%), so there is no reason to infer that four fifths of them were too sick to sell for ordinary values. Dosset successfully transported all 374+ remaining slaves to Martinique using just the 2-3 tons of beans that Blackbeard spared him from the sloop's supplies; had he taken those beans aboard the Concorde instead, Blackbeard could have transported the slaves himself.

You are right that there is no direct evidence that Blackbeard's interest in the Concorde was her combat and sailing capabilities, though Blackbeard's considerably more aggressive behavior after obtaining her (attacking Guadeloupe and Charleston, although he had never previously directly attacked port cities) is certainly consistent with that theory. However, abandoning a cargo is direct evidence against his wanting that cargo.

Just happened across a possible example of the Jonah superstition. While in the hands of Cocklyn's gentlemen of fortune at Sierra Leone, William Snelgrave encountered a pirate named Ambrose Curtis, who said that Snelgrave's father 11 years before had "used him severely for being an unlucky boy." This is in Stephens' Captured by Pirates, p. 122. It wouldn't make much sense to abuse a boy merely for having bad luck himself, so that would suggest that by "unlucky" Snelgrave's father meant that he brought bad luck to others.

The commander of the Rising Sun was William Moody, not Christopher.

Stephens' notes say it was Christopher. Sigh - add that to about thirty other errors I've found in Stephens' notes.

But actually, that's good news: it means that the Moody reported off Charleston in October 1718 by Captain Johnson's correspondent may in fact be La Buse's captain. The Moody at Charleston was reported in a fifty-gun ship. Since William Moody was already in the Rising Sun in June 1718, and kept it until he forced Cocklyn into it somewhere near Africa in early 1719, then he would have had it off Charleston. If the Rising Sun were a fifty-gun ship, that would clinch the identity of the Moody off Charleston as being La Buse's Moody. I don't see anything in Snelgrave about the size of the Rising Sun, though.

PoD: The voyage you identified is indeed the voyage where Blackbeard captured La Concorde. Woodard clearly identifies Pierre Dosset as the captain and Rene Montaudoin as the owner, matching the data from the Slave Voyages database.

There were 61 slave deaths crossing the Atlantic: 516 slaves were loaded at the Bight of Benin, but only 455 were left when Blackbeard captured the ship, which again matches Woodard. Blackbeard captured the vessel on November 17, 1717 Old Style (Woodard, 210). Woodard says that Blackbeard gave Captain Dosset a sloop in exchange for La Concorde, and left all but 61 of the slaves with Dosset at Bequia. Dosset renamed the sloop the Mauvaise Recontre ("Bad Encounter") and transported the slaves from Bequia to Martinique in two separate voyages (presumably the 40-ton sloop couldn't carry all the slaves at once).

As you point out, the Slave Voyages database suggests that 374 slaves were left with Dosset on Bequia, and thus that Blackbeard kept 81 slaves (455 minus 374) aboard, not 61 as in Woodard. The database further would seem to suggest that Dosset landed 313 of the slaves on Martinique, but that when he went back to Bequia he then took the last 61 slaves to Grenada, not to Martinique as Woodard would have it. Another possibility is that Blackbeard did indeed take 61 slaves aboard the new Queen Anne's Revenge, leaving Dosset with 394, and that twenty of those left with Dosset died or escaped on Bequia, so that Dosset only managed to get 374 of them to market on Martinique and Grenada.

In any event, Woodard quotes verbatim from the depositions of Blackbeard's crew to show that, when Blackbeard offloaded the treasure of Queen Anne's Revenge onto the sloop Adventure after the wreck at Beaufort Inlet, "'forty white men and sixty Negroes'" went aboard the Adventure. Woodard, 256. So I would conclude that Woodard's figure of 61 slaves aboard Blackbeard's vessel is not based just on the slave trading documentation: it's based on eyewitness evidence. We're really just missing 20 slaves: either 1) Blackbeard took 81 aboard at Bequia and somehow lost 20 of them between there and the loading of the Adventure at Beaufort Inlet, or 2) Blackbeard took only 61 slaves aboard at Bequia, and Dosset lost 20 of the remainder while bringing them to Martinique and Grenada. If the first option is correct, the missing 20 slaves could be among the more than 200 crew that Blackbeard abandoned at Beaufort.

She may be born under the sign of the twins, but there's no one like the Duchess!

Currently reading "Mao's Great Famine : the History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962"...madness, I tell you, utter madness...

Indeed. Ever read Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao? It paints a pretty nasty picture of the famine too, and how indifferent Mao was to what he was doing. And Mao's wife Jiang Qing is in some ways even scarier than Mao is.

Believe it or not, in the '80s you could still find American college textbooks that tried to blame the famine on the bad weather. Leftist apologetics at its worst.

and of course, things just get worse during the "Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution" just a few years later...

Personally, given the choice, I'd much rather try to survive the Cultural Revolution than the great famine. If you kept your head down, parroted the party line, and jumped whenever the Red Brigades said "Frog," you could live through the Cultural Revolution not much worse than at any other time in China before the 1980s. And even if you were unlucky enough to get singled out for "re-education," it most often meant that you were very, very miserable on a remote farm for several years, rather than being murdered outright. The worst risk, of course, was to fall into the hands of the peasant "doctors" brought down from the countryside. Not a pleasant time to live, but much easier to withstand than simply starving to death as millions did in the Great Leap Forward.

I've been listening on CD to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Because Franklin is so deeply associated with the American Revolution, it's easy to forget that he came of age at the height of the Golden Age of Piracy. He had an early hankering to become a sailor, wrote a poem about Blackbeard's final battle in 1723, just five years after the event, and later worked for Blackbeard's nemesis, Alexander Spotswood.

An interesting period point I found in the book: we often hear that people in the Golden Age drank beer because water was too dangerous. But Franklin says that he drank water daily and shunned beer when he worked in London, and apparently remained in excellent health and (he claims) substantially stronger than the beer-drinking London printers, who spoke in amazement of the strength of the "water American."

OK, here's my preliminary timeline of La Buse's pirate career, based largely off four sources: Colin Woodard's Republic of Pirates, Stephens' Captured by Pirates, Johnson's General History as reproduced in the Eastern North Carolina Digital Library, and hints from Foxe's posts. I hope to fill in the gaps with edits over the next few months.

Most of the details are from 1716 during La Buse's cruise on the Postillion, alongside Bellamy and Hornigold. There are three major gaps: nothing whatsoever about La Buse's life before joining Hornigold, very little about his activities between separating from Bellamy in the Caribbean in January 1717 and replacing Moody off Africa in early 1719 (?), and essentially nothing after La Buse's parting company with Taylor in 1722 until his execution in 1730.

A goodly part of the middle gap could be filled in if we knew more about Moody's movements before La Buse replaced him. My understanding is that this is Christopher Moody, who was a different person from William Moody. Johnson's second volume has a letter from a reader mentioning a Moody who threatened Charleston in 1718, but I think that was William, not Christopher, because the writer mentions him taking the Act of Grace, and Woodard refers to William Moody taking the Act of Grace. Aside from that, I cannot find anything about Christopher Moody's career before 1719.

Incidentally, Snelgrave thought that Christopher Moody died when his men set him off on a boat, which was obviously a mistake given that a very much alive C. Moody was hanged with others of Roberts' men at Cape Coast Castle in 1722. Since Roberts' predecessor Howell Davis shows up in the Sierra Leone river in April 1719 at the same time that La Buse does, it would appear very likely that Davis rescued Moody and Moody was aboard Davis's ship all along, unknown to Snelgrave, and perhaps unknown to La Buse.

TIMELINE OF LA BUSE'S ACTIVITIES

April 1716: Joins with Hornigold and Bellamy off Cuba in the sloop Postillion. Woodard, 135.

April/May, 1716: La Buse and Hornigold capture an English ship, followed by two Spanish brigantines near the Yucatan channel. Woodard, p. 135.

May 1716: La Buse, Hornigold and Bellamy careen on Isla de los Pinos. Woodard, 135.

End of May, 1716: La Buse stays on Hispaniola while Hornigold and possibly Bellamy proceed to Nasau.

June 1716: La Buse and possibly Bellamy capture English ships on the south coast of Cuba. Woodard, 144.

Late June/early July, 1716: Belllamy and Hornigold rejoin La Buse on Hispaniola. Woodard, 144.

August, 1716: Bellamy and La Buse expel Hornigold from Hispaniola. Woodard, 145.

September, 1716: La Buse and Bellamy battle a French frigate between Puerto Rico and St. Thomas. Woodard, 146.

October-November, 1716: La Buse and Bellamy prowl the Virgin Islands. Woodard, 146.

November 9, 1716: La Buse and Bellamy capture the Bonetta sloop between St. Thomas and St. Croix. La Buse flies a flag "with a death's head and bones across" on the Postillion's mast. Woodard, 147.

November, 1716: La Buse and Bellmay careen on St. Croix. Woodard, 148.

November/December, 1716: La Buse and Bellamy capture the Sultana and another ship belonging to Captain Tosor, southwest of Saba. Woodard, 149.

December 19, 1716: La Buse and Bellamy capture the British ship St. Michael, 27 miles from La Blanquilla. Woodard, 151.

January, 1717: La Buse parts company with Bellamy and Paulsgrave Williams at La Blanquilla. Woodard, 151.

May/June, 1717: La Buse appears in Nassau with a new 250-ton, 20-gun vessel and recruits new pirates. Woodard, 194.

November, 1717: La Buse evades the Seaford off St. Thomas, reported in a ship of 26 guns and 250 men flying a white ensign with a figure of a dead man. Woodard, 221.

Sept. 1717-May 1718: La Buse reported at Nassau, but was afterward "cast away." Johnson, 35.

June 12, 1718: The Scarborough attacks La Buse at anchor near La Blanquilla. La Buse abandons his ship and escapes in a prize sloop. Woodard, 321.

Before April 1, 1719: La Buse, aboard a brigantine, is elected captain to replace the marooned Captain Moody. Stephens, p. 101. He then joins forces with Howell Davis, and together they go to Sierra Leone, where they join with Cocklyn. Johnson, 184-85.

After April 1, 1719: La Buse's brigantine and Cocklyn's ship attack and capture several ships in the mouth of the Sierra Leone river. Stephens, 119-20. La Buse and his crew abandon their brigantine in the Sierra Leone river and take over a prize ship (the Defence?)taken with Thomas Cocklyn and Howell Davis. Stephens, p. 118. Paulsgrave Williams has become La Buse's quartermaster. Stephens, 123-24. After departing Sierra Leone, La Buse separates from Cocklyn and Davis. Johnson, 186.

After June 27, 1719: La Buse encounters England near Whydah harbor. Johnson, 117.

August 17, 1720: La Buse and England fight Jame MacRae's Cassandra off Anjouan. Johnson, 119, Rediker, 183.

1720: La Buse replaces Jasper Seagar as a captain. Foxe.

April, 1721?: Taylor and La Buse capture the Nossa Senhora do Cabo. Botting?

August 18, 1722: La Buse attempts to abandon Taylor, but is caught and flogged. Bucquoy, per Foxe.

After August 18, 1722: La Buse and Taylor part company, with La Buse remaining in the Indian Ocean. Bucquoy, per Foxe.

1730: La Buse hanged on Reunion island. Woodard, 321.

I found some evidence in Woodard's Republic of Pirates, p. 213 yesterday that makes part of Duffus's thesis very dubious.

When Blackbeard captured La Concorde, he set its master ashore at Bequia and turned the vast majority of the 455 slaves over to him, keeping only 61 for use as laborers, although "a few may have been inducted into the company." If Blackbeard had captured the slaving vessel for the main purpose of selling the slaves, it makes no sense whatsoever that he would simply throw away 87% of his "loot" at the very moment he captured it. His interest in La Concorde must have been its sailing and combat capabilities, not its human cargo.

Duffus is still very likely right in his theory that Blackbeard later sold most of the sixty Africans in North Carolina. The only other reasonable possibility is that the slaves escaped en masse, but if so, their escape was improbably successful; one would expect at least some of them to be caught. But if Blackbeard sold them, it must have been opportunistically; it couldn't have been his main goal when he captured La Concorde in the first place.

Thanks, Foxe. I am going to try to put together a timeline of La Buse's known activities, using Woodard, Johnson, and other sources; anyhting you can add to it after I put it up will be welcome.

A unique thing about La Buse: he never seems to sail alone. Every mention I find of him has him sailing a ship in consort with at least one other pirate ship. Most of the famous captains spent at least some time alone, but the only time I can find where La Buse may have been alone was a short time in June or July 1716 when Hornigold and possibly Bellamy went to Nassau, leaving La Buse alone on French Hispaniola. And La Buse seems hardly to have budged from the spot, because Bellamy and Hornigold met him there again a month or two later to resume their ravages.

I'm reading Colin Woodard's Republic of Pirates (good stuff, that) and came to thinking: Olivier La Buse* was cruising in 1716 with Hornigold, and was later with John Taylor at the capture of the Nossa Senhora do Cabo in 1721. That's a piratical career of five years as captain. Bartholomew Roberts, often cited as one of the longest serving Golden Age captains, lasted less than half that long.

Of course, the fact that La Buse was a captain in 1716 and was one in 1721 doesn't mean he spent the whole intervening time as a captain; he could have been deposed and re-elected several times. Foxe mentioned in another thread that La Buse at one point replaced Jasper Seagar as captain on the ship that ws formerly England's, which raises the possibility that La Buse was serving under Seagar in a post other than captain. However, every other reference I've read to La Buse: as captain of the Postillion with Hornigold and Bellamy in 1716, a captain with Cocklyn and Davis on the African coast in 1719, commanding the second ship of England's two ship group in 1720 in the battle with the Cassandra; it seems La Buse was usually, if not always, a captain. The extremely poorly sourced Wikipedia article on La Buse claims that he was hanged in 1730; if that were true, his pirate career could have lasted as long as 14 years.

So was La Buse truly the most durable pirate captain of his age? Are there any other conteders for the honor? If so, it is all the more amazing that he is so little known and so poorly documented.

*Or Le Buze or La Bouche or Levasseur or whatever.

It makes me wonder if many African pirates managed to escape hanging by claiming to have been slaves.

All the blacks on Bartholomew Roberts' Royal Fortune were ordered into slavery, but I don't think it was because they claimed to have been slaves. They didn't stand trial at all, as I understand it, so they never really even had an opportunity to plead that they were slaves.

Blackbeard's crewman Caesar and Bellamy's crewman Hendrick Quintor were both hanged. Caesar had been a slave before joining the pirates, I think, but Quintor had been a free man since his birth in the Netherlands.

Piracy and the English Government: 1617-1642. David Hebb.

Hebb studies how the English government handled the rising threat of the Barbary corsairs, who expanded beyond the Mediterranean to raid the shores of England in the 17th century. Hebb builds the story around two major anti-pirate expeditions: Mansell’s attack on Algiers in 1620-21, which ended in humiliating failure, and Rainsborough’s blockade of Sallee in 1637, which succeeded remarkably.

The Barbary corsairs’ reach expanded because they adopted tall ships instead of galleys, whether by developing themselves or by adopting them from Christian renegades like Simon Danser or John Ward. King James I passionately hated pirates, and since he deliberately avoided fighting any wars in Europe, his navy was free to concentrate on the corsairs. It still didn’t work out.

Getting money to build and fit out the ships was one of James’s biggest problems. The corsairs were seen as the merchant shipping interests’ problem, and the Privy Council went to the merchant companies and the port towns to ante up the money for the anti-corsair fleet. The merchants refused to cough up more than £40,000 to attack Algiers, which was pretty stingy considering that the country sustained at least £1 million worth of losses to the corsairs. Still finances only delayed the attack on Algiers; they didn’t cause it to fail.

James also had trouble getting other countries to cooperate with him. It was agreed from the start that England couldn’t suppress the pirates alone. Only the Dutch and the Spanish were considered potentially useful allies (special points for anybody who knows why Portugal wasn’t considered!) Unfortunately, the Dutch and the Spanish hated each other and their truce was about to expire. The Dutch didn’t want to destroy the corsairs at all, because they figured that Spain suffered worse from their attacks than the Netherlands did. The Dutch pretended to want to help England anyway, because England had been their best ally against Spain and they were worried that an Anglo-Spanish pact against the corsairs could draw England onto Spain’s side, but when it came their turn to put up naval forces, the Netherlands folded.

Spain eventually agreed to cooperate, which was more important because Spanish ports were needed to supply and repair any blockading force in front of Algiers. But Spain and England never worked out any plan of joint naval operations, so when the English admiral Mansell finally arrived at Gibraltar to meet the Spanish fleet, he just left the Spanish to patrol the western side of the Straits and went on to Algiers by himself.

What really doomed Mansell’s mission, though, was that he had the wrong ships for the job. Not only were half of them unseaworthy, but they were big, lumbering warships, too slow to catch pirates on the open ocean, and too deep-draughted to properly blockade Algiers; the Algerines could simply sneak into and out of port in the shallows along the coastline, where Mansell’s ships could not follow. Worse still, the Algiers harbor was so open and unsheltered that Mansell didn’t dare try to ride out any serious storms there.

Interestingly, Mansell apparently thought he could negotiate a diplomatic cessation of the Barbary raids on English ships. The pasha of Algiers negotiated with him, but it was just a ploy for time. Mansell tried a direct assault and a fire ship attack, but both were costly failures. After months shuttling ineffectively between Spanish ports and Algiers, Mansell ran out of supplies and had to return ignominiously to England.

This failure was redeemed by some surprisingly successful diplomatic negotiations with Algiers the next year, with the help of the Ottoman government, which England successfully maneuvered into ordering the Barbary ports to cease their attacks. England managed to successfully ransom all English prisoners at a much lower cost than a naval expedition. Realizing that the Algerines would not long honor a treaty that called for them to simply sit in their ports and starve, English diplomats encouraged them instead to focus their attacks on France. This worked well for several years, but eventually France reached its own accommodation with the corsairs and turned them back against the English, even allowing the Algerines for a short time to operate out of France’s Channel ports and march their captives overland to the Riviera to be shipped across the Mediterranean!

When Algiers became reconciled to England, many corsairs in search of plunder moved to Sallee, which by the 1630s became a threat to rival Algiers. Because Sallee lay on the west side of the Straits of Gibraltar, Sallee ships could not be confined to the Mediterranean as easily as Algerine ships, and the town was full of Moriscos, Muslims and Christian converts from Islam who had been expelled from Spain after the 1587 rebellion and were thirsty for revenge. As England began to suffer increasingly from their attacks, pressure began to build for a new expedition.

Rainsborough’s blockade of Sallee in 1637 was much more successful than Mansell’s attack on Algiers. He correctly calculated that a smaller force than Mansell’s would be more effective, because it would use fewer supplies and thus could be kept at sea longer. He used ship’s boats, Spanish galleys, and eventually specially built English pinnaces to interdict the coastal shallows either side of the port. But mostly, he just kept on obstinately being there every day, month in and month out, until Sallee got sick of him. The old-timer inhabitants overruled the Moriscos and sued for peace with the English. Rainsborough got back all the English prisoners, except the ones who had already been sold to Algiers or Tunis, and a peace treaty. Sallee predictably broke the treaty after some years, but never posed the same threat again.

It’s tempting to imagine that the Barbary corsairs ultimately caused the English Civil War, by forcing Charles to impose the hated “ship money” taxes that helped provoke the war. The reality is a bit more complex than that. Charles’s government used the Barbary raids to justify ship money, but he didn’t actually use ship money very much on anti-corsair activities. Most of the funds went to huge warships like the Sovereign of the Seas that were intended to overawe, deter and defend against continental powers, but were much too big and slow to catch corsairs.

There’s also a lot of information about life in Barbary captivity. It was not all being chained to galleys; you could be used for a lot of different jobs in the city or the countryside, and you could well be sold far across North Africa. But wherever you ended up, it was pretty brutal; not quite as bad as being a black slave in Guinea or the Americas (no human sacrifice as in Dahomey and no mention of deliberately torturous executions), but plenty bad enough. Overwork, beatings and tortures were routine, and the captors commonly raped men and women both. Many ransomed prisoners reported efforts to force them to convert to Islam, and while some of those reports may be intended to cover up willing conversion (converts were treated much better than Christians, and compelled conversion is forbidden by the Qur’an), it’s clear that many, probably most, of the reports were true. Being ransomed was no picnic either. If you did “turn Turk,” you couldn’t hide it, at least if you were male: converts were circumcised. Repatriated prisoners who had accepted Islam in captivity, or had been forced to convert, were subjected to public humiliation by their churches and excluded from communion at first; Archbishop Laud later made up a penitential ritual specifically for ransomed prisoners to cleanse them and bring them back into the Anglican church.

I highly recommend this book. It is very well researched, clearly written, and the author is delightfully pugnacious, eager to take on other historians. It is, of course, well pre-Golden Age, but the tactical, technological and financial nature of fighting piracy in the early 17th century is similar in some ways to that of the early 18th century, and the risk of Barbary corsair attacks was still a reality in our period.

The first edition of the General History of the Pyrates of 1724 retailed for £0.2 according to Colin Woodard's The Republic of Pirates, Harcourt, 2007, p. 34. If that literally means two-tenths of a pound, that would be four shillings. On the same page it says a Royal Navy sailor earned £11.5 to £15 per year, so the book's price represented about five to seven days' wages for a sailor.

Part 2 of the Hampton Blog is up and includes a bar brawl :)

Blog Link

Oh yeah. I wanted to see that bar brawl, but I was over in the Pirate Hunters camp being enchanted by Calico Jenny and Jack, and couldn't bring myself to leave before they were finished.

When you get down to it, slavery was part of human history from the beginning of recorded history and wasn't ended until the 1800s.

In period, we need to study what was ACTUALLY thought and done, not what we wish had been thought and done from out POV 300 years (and a key 300 years in all of human history on that specific issue) later. To impose late 20th and 21st century morality on the early 18th C IS "politically correct" revisionist history. At the time, it wasn't nearly as clear as we today would like it to be. AT THE TIME, slavery was morally ambiguous.

No. That is like saying that the Sun orbited the Earth in the 12th century, because most people AT THE TIME believed that it did. People in the 12th century had many good reasons for thinking the Sun orbited the Earth, but they were absolutely, 100% wrong, just like those in the 18th century who failed to recognize that slavery was evil.

Granted, good and evil are not as objectively verifiable as the Earth orbiting the Sun. Good and evil refer only to some moral standard; if you take as your standard that people should deal with each other by brute force, and that no concept of human rights should interfere with the use of brute force, than of course slavery would be good by that standard. But even in the 18th century, that was not the standard of morality most people adopted. It was generally considered wrong to seize white people against their will and sell them, or force them to work without giving them anything in exchange. An exception was made for slaves, and that exception was based on three demonstrable falsehoods: 1) that slaves were happier enslaved; 2) that black persons were naturally inferior in intelligence and morality to whites; and 3) that God had decreed the world must be forever ordered in this way. We know each of these to be false because 1) the "happy" slaves ran away in huge numbers even at the risk of hideous punishments, 2) no genetic difference is discernible between black people and white people that would cause one to be less moral or intelligent than the other, and 3) God did not prevent humans from reordering the world to eliminate slavery when humans chose to do so.

If all you are saying is that the vast majority of people in the 18th century did not consider slavery wrong, or at least not so wrong that it should be abolished, you are of course correct. When I write my novels, I don't put abolitionists on every street corner; slaveowners are respected people in society in my fiction as they were in real history. Indeed, the heroine of one of my novels is a slaveowner, and while she is not willfully cruel, she treats her slaves with about the same care and respect that she gives her horses, because that's how her society has taught her to act and it has never occurred to her to question it, any more than it occurs to us to question whether the computer objects to being typed on. I try to represent the past as it was, with its ugly parts as well as its beautiful ones.

On the other hand, if you are saying that slavery is wrong now, but was not wrong then, merely because slavery is less popular now than it was then, I still must object. Even if you believe that morality is a matter of majority vote, which I don't accept but I suppose I cannot disprove, the beliefs on which the 18th century moral attitude toward slavery was based (the natural inferiority of blacks, the happiness of the slaves, and the divine ordination of slavery that I mentioned earlier) were objectively false. Even at that time, the belief in slavery's goodness persisted mostly through astonishing self-delusion: I've read a Barbadian slave owner from the late 18th century swearing up and down how the slaves were all universally happy and just a few pages later describing large numbers of slaves being executed by slow torture to punish their revolt against their "happy" conditions; others insisted that slavery was a necessary means of giving slaves the education they needed, while knowing full well that it was illegal to teach slaves to read.

As for slavery being legal in the 18th century; of course it was, in most places, but that's irrelevant. Lots of things that are evil are legal, even today. It's legal in most states to cheat on your wife; it's legal for the Westboro Baptist Church to exploit the grief of dead soldiers' families for publicity. That doesn't mean they're not evil.

I agree with you that the idea of all men being created equal was more of an Enlightenment view than an early 18th century one: Fontenelle and Montaigne had laid the foundation, but it was certainly still a small minority viewpoint in our period. I meant that more to show that you don't have to accept the extremist leftist prejudices that are properly called "politically correct" to declare slavery to be evil: 18th century slavery is considered evil by people from every conceivable band of the political spectrum. Indeed, the idea that it is inherently wrong to impose our ideas of morality on other cultures is exactly what real politically correct "scholars" routinely use to bash Western culture. Lots of leftist academics treat it as morally leperous cultural chauvinism to grant Western civilization any credit over other civilizations for getting rid of human sacrifice, allowing women to vote and own property, destroying slavery, developing antibiotics, enacting religious tolerance, etc. So, even if I am wrong in believing that what is evil today was also evil yesterday, that does not make my mistake inherently "politically correct."

I realize that the morality of a person's ancestors can be a very touchy subject. So let me just say that believing that slavery was evil does not necessarily mean that every person who ever practiced it was evil. There are no perfect people; everyone does something morally wrong at some point in their lives. If we say a person is evil, we mean that he was evil on balance; that his evil actions outwieghed his good ones. I do not presume to pass such a judgment on every single slave owner. To return to Thomas Jefferson; he enslaved a few scores of people, but he liberated millions, and provided inspiration for the ultimate end of slavery and for the survival of liberty in many countries today. I would say on balance he was a good person.

that would be John Martles men......January of 1717 , st. Croix...John Martel and his gang had gone apirating, and come to st. croix for a careening......unfortunately(for them) the HMS Scarborough spotted them and began firing upon them......when the warship retreated slightly, the pyrates tried to flee in Martels 22gun galley John & Marshall...but ran aground...so capt. martel ordered the ship burned...with 40 slaves in the hold

There was another case also. In 1722, Bartholomew Roberts' pirates burned the Porcupine in Whydah roadstead with 80 slaves aboard, because the captain refused to ransom the ship. Note in each case there were serious obstacles to marketing the slaves. Roberts was on the African coast, the ultimate buyer's market for slaves, and would have had to go all the way across the Atlantic to reach a good seller's market. Slaves on the African coast were so little valued that several pirates (notably England) gave them back to the captains they robbed. In Martel's case he was under attack and was about to lose the slaves anyway.

The "classic" politically correct view of all slavery is inherently evil is NOT something a person of the early 1700s would have understood.

It troubles me when viewing slavery as inherently evil is dismissed as "politically correct." Slavery is evil, and one need not adhere to any one right wing or left wing political viewpoint to think so. The term "political correctness" is better reserved for the rigid lockstep postmodernist political orthodoxy that prevails in certain universities, which analyzes everything in terms of ethnic and religious groups' grievances and "power," dismisses everything created by the "powerful," (i.e. whites, Christians, capitalists, Americans, Europeans) and automatically validates everything produced by the "powerless" (everybody else).

I reject political correctness in the sense I just described, but that doesn't stop me from considering slavery as evil: ALL slavery. To take the contrary view requires you to reject not just political correctness, but the Western democratic tradition that views all men as created equal, the Western capitalist tradition that regards society as happiest and most productive when everyone is free to pursue their own wealth and prosperity.

I understand that in the 1700s slavery was a widespread and accepted institution, not just in the Americas and Europe but all over the world, and that most people wouldn't have thought to question it. That mitigates the evil, but doesn't make it right. Many of those who did think to question slavery, even in the 1700s, recognized that it was wrong, noticeably a large number of the Quakers, Benjamin Franklin, and (ironically, since he was a slave owner) Thomas Jefferson.

More from Hampton!

Okay, I admit it, I just think women with swords are cool.

Ditto.

Callenish Gunner!

Fireworks are not as cool as Callenish Gunner!