Tartan Jack

-Double Post-

15 or so years ago, Sutler John make my beloved Quakers

Since getting kicked back into pirate stuff, it’s great seeing old names & lost friends.

Congrats on the position, but hate to learn about the loss.

If I recall stuff correctly, you should do an amazing job.

Great to see it’s back, after so many of us wondered off in our real-lives.

Interesting to see how much the research has advanced since what was discussed on here.

I can say that much of the work on here & members from here helped what came later. Maybe, it’s the foundation of it. Looking at old posts has been interesting.

Thanks for putting it back up for the 20th Anniversary!

Our flag, from Dr Benjamin Schaffer, surgeon.

I hear he interned under Mission …

(I’ll leave it you if that is a good or bas thing for our crew’s health … hehehehe)

New Crew just formed (2023)

Crewe of the Charles Revenge

Generally, Out of Charleston, SC & the first members from SC, NC, & GA.

Captain Adam Marrow is sailing with us too.

Looking for interested member not in another group. We seek to work WITH other groups, not against them-as Brethren, not Enemies.

Just now, Tartan Jack said:

I’m just glad it’s resurgent!

 

Long may it remain 

 

(Too much good & interesting stuff to be gone)

Mission, thanks for telling us it’s back & for Benjamin Schaffer (mini-Mission) getting me back into this & doing an event.

Damn I got fatter in the last 10 years

I’m just glad it’s resurgent!

Long may it remain 

(Too much good & interesting stuff to be gone)

Mission, thanks for telling us it’s back & for Benjamin Schaffer (mini-Mission) getting me back into this & doing an event.

Thanks.

Good to know.

Am I in the fiction?

Any assigned roles or just "seaman?"

[Edit: should have mostly been a PM. Please respond that way.)

Just offering an idea. I'll shut up now and depart . . .

The name was for documentation, figuring it could be a snickering joke as another name was substituted. Not interested, fine by me.

Oh, and I WANTED to partake, but life and work (got a job in retail soon after I met Mission- the related requirement destroys my weekends) prevented it. Not by choice . . .

SutlerJohn delivers even the odd-request in a reasonable time.

I love my 2' long quakers.

Though I am not actually part of the Mercury goings on, though friends w/ all of them . . .

I HAVE to throw this in:

Hermes McHugh.

Why?

Hermes: the Greek name of the messenger god Mercury (Roman).

McHugh: Derived as a British name inspired by the chemical name of the element mercury Hg. Plus, sometimes McHugh is abbreviated as McHg.

Plus, Hermes McHugh sounds plausible for the period w/o being to bluntly the play on the name "Mercury" that it actually is.

http://www.uscgnews....from-HMS-Bounty

The Coast Guard released pictures of the foundered Bounty.

Thanks for those. It makes it even more real . . .

HATE to see it, though.

My heart goes out to them all.

Ships:

Best to look at ship lists, as there are MANY on this site in the Capt Twill section

The names are too varied to list any conventions . . .

Hoped for results

Hoped for blessing or safety

A person, place, or combination

Animal

Poetic

Mythical or legendary allusion

Political or social message

Some are seemingly random . . . the meaning lost in time

I'll have to let someone else add meat to those bones.

For places, many names were rooted in something.

In the Colonies, towns were named after:

Physical traits: Long Cane, White Point, Oyster Point (where Charleston, SC's Battery is today), Little River, Leveland

Variations of native names: Saluda, Cataba, Pee Dee, Jalapa

Named after specific people, often ruling monarchs: Jamestown, Charles Towne/Charleston, Williamstown, Williamsburg, Georgetown (post period)

Named after a hoped for blessed future or prosaic: Port Royal, Providence, Hope, Pleasure, LightTown, Prosperity, Columbia, Mount Pleasant, PromisedLand, Greenwood (derived from the RobinHood stories)

After a specific place "Back home" or a variation: Plymouth, Tidmouth, Birmingham, Darlington, New Sterling, New Perth, Newberry, Dublin, Loundon, Jedburg, Abbeville, Beaufort

Some are cryptic to outsiders, but are based directly on the specific history of that town: Six-Mile, Union, Ninety-Six, North, Due West, Corner, Frog Level

ALL of those are all actual places in South Carolina, founded between 1680 and 1770, mostly in the early 1700s. Naming convention didn't change that much between 1700 and the American Revolution, so that is a good representation.

Cookies?

I want one!

As for names:

Personal names where largely biblical at the time for Christians, which the Boston names mentioned in the first part reflects. Eunice is the name of the mother of Timothy (the young man who worked under Paul in evangelism), as mentioned in the Epistle of Timothy (2 Timothy 1:5).

The same us true across Europe, each in the appropriate language translation. For example, Jahannan (Hebrew for "God is Gracious) became: John, Sean, Ian, Jean, Juan, Ivan, Johann (German, with Hans and Jan as variations), Giovanni, Jovan, and many more. (out of curiousity, I typed "John Language variations" in google just now-> this wiki showed by that illustrates my point: http://en.wikipedia....hn_(given_name) )

In the 1500s-1700s, John was so common in Scotland that it spawned the switch of "Jack" (derived from Jacob) into a nickname for John and the usage of "Jock" for Scots (there is a bit of history involving the James-line of kings in that too, but not needed here).

Other names come from past kings and heroes that pasted into common usage, like Charles (from Charlemagne), Arthur (from the KIng Arthur legends, which was probably a title rather than an actual name-> like ***** the Arthur, originally based on a real person's exploits, as it appeared suddenly and commonly in the 500s as s given name), Edward, Richard, William and many, many more.

Last names are largely the same as in the US, just much, much more isolated in place-of-usage. From a surname, one could often tell where a person was from. If you go or are from a place with deep roots, the surnames around you are also common in the early 1700s. In my small town and the one just below it, the most common surnames are:

Cooper, Bishop, Jacobs, Rogers, Musgrove, Hall, Vaughn, Stewart, Kitchens, Suber (a HUGE extended African-American family), Todd, Wilson, Neel, Banks, Wallace, Renwick, Allan, and others of Scottish or English origin. The Scottish part was an Associate Presbyterian group moving together from Antrim Co, Ireland around 1770 (and some that came just afterwards) I also know folks with the name Parr, Bland, Young, King, Moore, and others. There was also a HUGE German Lutheran settlement from Saxony in the 1760s, bringing the names Boozer, Bedenbaugh, Halfacre, Shealy, and a bunch more that pretty much ID one from a particular county in South Carolina, but are common enough here that most think nothing of it. Not far was a large French Huguenot settlement, so there French-rooted names are extremely common- even if they think they are English or "Scotch-Irish" in origin.

My own roots include a number of those family names. The names also now overlap and seem "common" where I live, even if many are rather odd and "unique" elsewhere.

So, picking a name for literature or a persona, look into settlement areas and specific towns-of-origin for surnames. Also, remember that in trading cities, people were almost just as mixed as today, as people DID move around in the period and travel and settle far from home. That said, settlers often moved in-clump to areas, so the names of an area often reflected where they came from.

My prayers are with the survivors, missing and the dead, and their families.

This is very, very sad news.

Besides that . . .

There is a question as to what the "English" accent actually was in the early 1700s. In fact, is was FAR more diverse than today (even with all the various accents presently IN England. A/The prominent idea is that the various east coast and mountain/Appalachian American accents may be far more like the colonial-era British accents than anything in Britain today besides small community-specific ones that survived.

The theory is that the more interaction with other accents and languages, the more an accent changes. Meanwhile, the inverse is also true, meaning that the more closed-off and remote an area is, the less it changes and mutates. By that basis, the accents in England today are more a product of the Victorian and Edwardian eras than anything else, while the American ones in more remote remained more in a stasis until the 1930s-1950s. Why? Well, people moved to the remote "frontier" areas and pretty much stayed with each other and the accents didn't change much or not at all in the remote, former colonial areas. Yet, in the "home country," the British Empire brought a massive seismic shift in accents.

If that theory is accurate, then the various region and local accents of the Eastern American settlements are reflective of the accents spoken at the period of settlement- being maintained from the place-of-origin as people moved as communities from the home areas to the colonies. That accounts for the literally hundreds of specific "Southern" accents from Louisiana, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Virginias, and the "old" towns of Maryland and the very specific "New England" accents from the Philly to Maine.

Good point.

The later frigate was a merger of the frigate and galley concept. At this time, there were more differences than just oars/sweeps and no sweeps, despite them looking a lot alike.

IF I recall correctly, that is basically taking a commercial/trading vessel and making it "frigate-like" in deck configuration.

That primary consisted of razing (cutting down) the fore and aft parts above the deck, lowering the center-of-gravity and allowing guns (cannon) to be used where they otherwise wouldn't have been able to operate due to space and the deck-strength itself.

Also, there is the "knocking down" of internal partitions. that is mainly for 2 purposes: 1) allowing the gun crews freedom of movement without hitting a non-structural wall and 2) allowing crew to quickly move around during battle.

Those are the same reason combat vessels of the era were configured that way, esp. small ones. Small vessels, like sloops-of-war and frigates had to be optimized for combat movement of the crew, of which many pirates had been during Queen Anne's War (The War of Spanish Succession).

As the idea was for a pirate ship/vessel to operate, functionally, as a privateer commerce-raider. Accordingly, the crews set out to covert their vessels into what they knew worked well.

Neat stuff.

On this stuff, I am a bit of mixed mind. It's neat it gets out to the public, as opposed to being in a props storeroom or storehouse or being destroyed. But, I wish it was in a public display rather than on a collector's home or office shelf.

One of the WORST monikers we are stuck with . . . Dark Ages.

It completely misrepresents the period.

GAoP is much better than that!

In 1713, Col. James Moore II, with his younger brother at his side, became noted for leading the southern colony’s militia, bolstered by a force of friendly Indians, in the defeat of the Tuscarora in North Carolina.

Never thought I would see anyone reference the assault on Fort Noherooka in North Carolina (where hundreds of Tuscarora Indians were killed and hundreds taken prisoner and sold into slavery). Dr. Larry Tise at East Carolina University is actually working on getting public awareness of that event since next year is the 300 aniversary of it (I've been working on it with him)

Anyway, I love stuff like that Kevin, for it adds so much context to the pirate events of the time. Some writers on pirate history make pirate history feel like it took place in a vacuum and had minimal influence from the outside world. Thank goodness recent scholarship on pirates is finally tying in the politics of early eighteenth century world into this. Recent work by Ed Fox and Arne Bialewshewski have discussed the role of the Jacobite rebellions within the pirate world for example. Thank you for pursuing such history Mr. Duffus, and I hope to see some publications on the subject soon.

But back to the thread topic of Defining the Golden Age of Piracy. Has anyone proposed that maybe we should do away with the term "Golden Age" outright? I feel like by this point in pirate historiography that the term "Golden Age of Piracy" has almost lost its meaning and is used to give the era a romantic feel to it (and an easier way in which to remember when this all took place). I think a more interesting question that might help people undestand and learn more about history during the period is - what allowed and what caused pirates to go sea, do so in large numbers, and operate over significant periods of time from the 16th to early 19th centuries? If answered correctly, one can learn a lot about the development of colonies, economics, politics, and more during this very important period in world history.

What?

History doesn't happen in a vacuum?

Events in one place affect others?

Really?

Oh and the term "sea peoples" is a typical Egyptian written description of foreign peoples. Their hieroglyphics are quite blunt and rather NOT politically correct. They termed the peoples that lived south, up the Nile (the African-Africans) the "kinky-head peoples" and another culture the "stinky peoples." There were others that were even worse!

NONE of the names were what the other peoples called themselves or what other records would have had. The ancient Egyptians were a rather odd and interesting culture!

There are theories linking the SeaPeoples to all sorts other cultures, which have varying degrees of probability. I'm convinced that the SeaPeople ARE the superpower culture behind Plato's Atlantis, but one that was fractured and broken in one massive volcanic explosion, which also decimated their entire Aegean-based settlement. The tsunami moved the palace in Crete many feet back and wiped out anything actually on the coast. The same was for the entire sea basin. But, as that WAS the main settlement areas for a sea-based culture.

There are also LONG lasting legends of the origins of the Scoto-Irish (the Scots were immigrants from Ireland in the mid first millennium AD, who merged with the Picts already in the Northern part of the Britain island) were originally from Egypt. That is taken further back that they were royal Sea People refugees who intermarried with Pharoah's family then left with Egyptian blessing, by sea, to settle a new area-> Spain then Ireland. Obviously, only the leaders would have been royals, but the idea was that the rest were those under their leadership.

The coracle technology is one of the tangible links between the Sea Peoples and ancient Ireland . . .

Today, the Egyptian connection of Ireland was discounted as complete myth, but is being revisited as having some truth-> the debate is how much.

I know this will sound either cool or nutty on here, but I've been rereading "Batman: The Long Halloween" and its sequel "Batman: The Dark Victory," mainly because they are Nolan's primary inspiration for his Batman series, along with various other Batman stories (esp. Knightfall/KnightQuest/KnightEnd for this summer's "Dark Knight Rises" film.

Rereading them, I realize how much dialogue was adapted straight from The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, esp. in The Dark Knight.

Oh, and I am a HUGE Batman and Joker fan . . .