Misson

Since most of you (except the trader and possibly the Quartermaster) wouldn't have been very good at writing, I, your fair, decent and beloved ship's Chirurgeon propose these Mercury Articles 1. Every Member of the Crewe has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal title to the fresh Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any time seized, and use of them at pleasure, unless a scarcity make it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment. 2. Every One to be called fairly in turn, by list, on Board of Prizes, because, they are on these Occasions allowed a Shift of Cloaths: If any Member of the Crewe keep any Secret from the Company, defraud the Company to the Value of a Dollar, in Plate, Jewels, or Money, they shall be marroon'd with one Bottle of Powder, one Bottle of Water, one small Arm, and Shot. 3. The Lights and Candles to be put out at ten o'Clock at Night: If any of the Crew, after that Hour, still are inclin'd for Drinking, they are to do it on the open Deck. Or picnic table, as the Case may be. 4. All hands to keep their Piece, Pistols, and Cutlass clean, and fit for Service. Those that shall not keep their Arms clean, fit for an Engagement, or neglect their Business, shall be cut off from their Share, and suffer such other Punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit. 5. Those that shall snap his Arms, or smoak Tobacco in the Hold, without a cap to their Pipe, or carry a Candle lighted without a Lanthorn, shall suffer the same Punishment as in the former Article. 6. To Desert the Ship, or Quarters in Battle, unless there is Cracked Conch in Towne, is punishable by Death, or Marooning or Some Worse Fate if the Crewe cans’t come up with one. 7. No striking another Person on Board, but every Quarrel to be ended on Shore, in the Pub, during a Brawl, at half past two bells on the Afternoon Watch. Not that we be picky. 8. No One to talk of breaking up their Way of Living, till each has shared a £1000 of it be Monday morning, latish. If in order to this, any Member of the Crewe should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, they are to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionably. 9. The Captain and Quarter-Master to receive two Shares of a Prize; the Master, Boatswain, and Gunner, one Share and a half, the other Officers, one and a Quarter, and the chirurgeon five Shares. No, let Us make it eight. 10. If at any time you meet with a prudent Woman, them that offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death. 11. The Chirurgeon shall be considered a minor Deity on Board, answerable to None but Himself and the Major Deity. (With apologies to the chirurgeon who probably wrote John Phillips' and Bartholemew Robert's articles.)

I cast me vote for Captain Jim! The ideal man for the job. (Oh, wait, I haven't signed the articles. I guess it's up to you all. Let me clue you in - he probably won't willingly take the role, but according to the articles and general accept pirate policy (GAPP), the captain is he who is elected by the crew (quick someone make up some articles that say this) . (William, you forgot to mention your role on this happy ship of fooles. Such modesty.)

Now...I just saw Dangerous Beauty last night and...I was wondering...is that what Lilly is? he asks naively. (Catherine McCormack was wonderful. I saw her in something else awhile back and she was wonderful then, too. I didn't realize she was so young.)

This is accurate, but it's done on purpose. Most movies try to have one character that the audience can empathize with. If there is no such character, the movie is less likely to be accessible to modern audiences. So it is also less likely to be a hit and thus it will lose money and...well, Hollywood isn't in business to give us accurate portrayals and lose their shirts. As for human nature... I realize now that I chose a poor example in picking slavery (only because I was reading that thing about Houston and thinking about the exact thing that I later came across in Stumbling on Happiness). It's a poor choice because we're mixing morals and mores and thus the topic has gotten off track. Although, morals are definitely impacted by mores. Thus I would agree if you said, "Keeping and beating a slave" would likely be considered wrong in any century, but "Keeping and treating a slave well" might not be. (Again, not condoning slavery, but you probably see what I'm getting at.) And thus, we come to "truth." Like "facts" I do not believe we can in our minds accurately perceive pure "truth" - we colour it. There is "truth" but it is outside of human perception and thus is also reached by consensus. So what is true to one culture or age is not necessarily true to another. (So let's talk about Global Warming. )

I sorta' remember Stynky telling me it was a guy who founded the pub. He told me the username and I promptly (perhaps, more accurately, drunkenly) forgot it. I'm pretty sure it was in the thread in Beyond that is now gone because they were discussing the founding and kind of joking about how few members there were at that point. I don't recall Jamaica Rose being in that discussion at all, but I figured that since I didn't originally register until late 2004 and thus have no recollection of the actual event and the referent thread was now deleted and gone and I couldn't reference it, I could well be wrong. Maybe I'll ask Jamaica Rose about it.

That's the one! For some reason it surprised me that they would have called someone the "super" anything in the 17th or 18th century. I don't know why.

I have come across something in Rayner Thrower's book I wish to note. He has mistakenly identified Captain Misson as the pirate Mussin and suggested that he was a real pirate. So you may just want to get another confirmation on the whortleberry thing just to be safe. Not that everything in the book has to be wrong, but such glaring errors (with no references to back them up) always make me a bit more cautious of trusting an author.

Ah, thanks Coastie! I may use that in my little tome... There are actually descriptions by surgeons from period of their environment. They do not complain about them or wish for different quarters (at least none I've come across so far have), but they do talk about the lack of light provided by the "lanthorns in the cockpit." The complaints by contemporary authors (which, other than the second quote up there, are unanimous) may be due to the presentism concept I was discussing elsewhere. Or it may also be that the surgeons had no thoughts about moving the surgery quarters because it had never occurred to them. After all, that's where they had always been placed. In fact, most naval surgeons who bothered to write the Naval Board and complain spent their time talking about 1) the cramped conditions that seemed to them to increase illness 2) the quality of the air in the ship, which was blamed for most diseases and 3) the rotten quality of the food. In fact, the food complaints are practically deafening, except when quoting letters written by people who had not been on BRN ships very often. So...does the Mercury have good lanthorns in the cockpit, William?

Yup. I was recently reading about how Europeans were captured and sold as slaves during Tudor times in the Mediterranean. They would then work the middle eastern ships or be sold to sultans. At one point, the book I was reading noted that they captured a fleet or some such large number of prisoners and that European slaves glutted the market. A capable man was selling for as little as a large onion. (If I had the book, I would give you the exact quote...but I don't.) Good point about futurism. That was actually Gilbert's point. He was using past "presentism" as a more tangible way to explain the problem with our limited ability to predict future events. He also humorously noted that one only has to go and look at the graphical representations of the future to understand the prevailing norms of the times. For example, the Jetsons is a pretty good representation of the style of the sixties...right down to Jane's bob...only improved by replacing cars with spaceships and maids with robots.

Since she is traveling, I am guessing that she would be a spice trader, more than a merchant. Merchants stayed at home, arranged shipments hither and thither if they thought it would be possible and so forth. Now why would she be going to the Caribbean? I have a a few thoughts from my limited store of knowledge on the topic... When merchant ships traveled, there was a person on board who represented the company and who performed all trade negotiation. I came across the title for this person in one of the books I've read and now I can't remember it and don't have the book. (It was a curious title, which is why I vaguely recall it. For some reason I keep thinking of the term "supercarrier" but that's not it. I'm pretty sure I came across the term in the interesting book Seawolves: Pirates & the Scots by Eric J. Graham.) Anyhow, this person would negotiate the trade of British goods for the spices and whatnot. They would often do some trading on the side for themselves as well. My understanding, however, is that trade for spices would not normally be done in the Caribbean, it would be in India and the East. The goods would then be brought back to Europe where they would fetch the highest price. Some of them would surely have been shipped from Europe to the Caribbean outposts - which is why some pirates preyed on merchant ships coming from the mother country. Rayner Thrower says that it sort of worked like this - the merchants would send supplies from Britain to the West Indies, the pirates would intercept them and then sell them at exorbitant rates to the W.I. settlers. While this probably happened, it doesn't make intuitive sense to me as a rule - only as one possible scenario. If every or even the majority of ships were captured by pirates on their way to the West Indies, why would European merchants keep sending ships there? So I am inclined to look a bit askance at Thrower's sweeping generalization, but still bring the idea to you as a possible background thought. And that's pretty much all I got.

True. As I noted, it hearkens back to my favorite buzzword: perception. The only real difference I have with you is that I can't quite see how anyone can be objective. But then I will take the side of "no possible way" when we go off and discuss if there are things that are truly factual in the context of a human mind. There are facts, but we can't rightly access them without spinning, shading or otherwise modifying them to suit our purposes. We can only approximate the "fact" by reaching some form of consensus. (Which is how we've come to have "science," "statistics" and "pop culture.") For example, I plan to use (if I can remember it that long) an idea that 17th-18th century physician and author William Cockburn suggested in his book An account of the nature, causes, symptoms, and cure of the distempers that are incident to seafaring people. In there (and that is only about a third of the actual title) he recommends a medicine composed primarily of crab's eyes to treat...something (see what I mean about my memory?)...fever, perhaps. And when he ran out of crab's eyes (and who wouldn't, what with the demand?), he switched to the scraped insides of dried seashells. Now, I plan to use this because it sounds disgusting. (This appeals to modern audiences as I perceive them.) I may even invent a jar full of something that looks like crab's eyes and offer it to the crowd. (And some little jerk in a stripy shirt and knee pants will agree to try it and before I can stop him eat some and get sick causing his parent to sue me for Key West hospital bills.) However, in the context of the late 17th century, it might have been: "Crab's eyes? Yum, love 'em. Can't get enough of 'em," which would explain the difficulty in obtaining them. Except, even then, I am (somewhat humorously, I hope) casting some poor 17th century person in today's language and suggesting they would say, "Yum!" But how can I be trulyobjective about understanding someone who (as I perceive it) thought that the King was deity selected, bathing every so often was a hindrance (or perhaps a luxury) and slops were pretty darned fashionable and/or even comfortable? Not to mention a hundred other perceptions that I don't even know about, except as can be found in books like An account of the nature, causes, symptoms, and cure of the distempers that are incident to seafaring people by William Cockburn, author and eater of crab's eyes.

Nope. I have reprinted everything of merit on purple (so far) from the book. Rayner didn't even give a reference for the info, so I can't cite anything. (I will say this for Rayner Thrower - this is one of the more scholarly works I have seen on piracy. While it does draw from the somewhat sensationalist and notably case-study constrained General History, it seems to draw more from historical period references. 'Tis a tad dry, though. Oh, surely agreed. It was just something that occurred to me when someone was talking about earth tones. Eventually, all paints tend to fade to more earthy tones. I forget where I saw it, but there was some TV thing or another where they had (somehow) scientifically figured out using a computer how to show a painting as it would have been seen the day it was revealed to the public. The color differences, especially in regard to brightness, were marked. One might just as well question how the software was designed, however. (My guess would be that they keyed off whites, but what do I know?)

May I suggest books on the East India Company? I have only recently been looking for books on surgeons on merchant ships (who were the most likely to be captured by pyrates - as opposed to naval surgeons who were probably the least likely). There are scads of books on the East India Company many of which you might find useful. I might also suggest making use of your local public library. I have found several books - some almost a hundred years old - which retail on Amazon for literally hundreds of dollars a piece - that are just gathering dust in libraries within my local branch's network. It takes a week or so to get them, but so far it has been well worth the wait. (I also suggest taking notes - you retain more and you'll have a splendid primer for your character when PiP arrives. )

I was just reading about this and thought it was sort of interesting. I guess I will explain further after people get tired of answering the question. With no further information forthcoming, no matter how relevant it may seem to your decision, what would you answer in response to the following question: Suppose you pay $50 for a theater ticket but you lose the ticket on the way in -- will you return to the ticket window and buy another ticket if you have a $50 bill in your pocket?

I was just this morning reading an article on Sam Houston which was suggesting that Houston was great, but he kept slaves and that was a bad thing. Now, I'm not suggesting that slavery is good or anything, but in Houston's time, it wasn't necessarily considered totally bad. So I thought that the author of the article was making an illegitimate judgment based on his current temporal state creating an error on his part which I hoped he might some day overcome to the benefit of readers everywhere in better understanding the past. And then thought no more of it. Until I found myself reading about the same thing later this morning in a book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Apparently, according to Gilbert, I had noticed that the Houston article author was engaging in something called Presentism, a label of which I had been unaware until that point. Since presentism relates to our little hobby, though, I'm posting this because I thought the whole thing was kinda' interesting. Let me quote the book. "Historians use the word presentism to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards. As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923. And yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming. As the president of the American Historical Association noted, 'Presentism admits of no ready solution; it turns out to be very difficult to exit from modernity.' [L. Hunt, "Against Presentism," Perspectives 40 (2002)]" (Gilbert, 161-2) What is interesting about all this to me (and perhaps you) is that we as re-enactors have to deal with this in the guise of the public - who mostly think that pirates wore bucket boots, bright sashes, hooks and possibly walked around with a dazed look, a swishy gait and their hands roaming aimlessly about, holding on to their long cuffs with all but their middle and index fingers which were extended for no apparent good reason. We must also consider that we ourselves may tend to fail to enact against our own present moment prejudice when presenting "living history." In fact, this all just seems to me to come back to one of my favorite hobby horses, perception, which I think makes it all but impossible for us to do anything remotely true to anyone but ourselves and our little world of mental ideas and constructs. But I am curious what others think, if only to try to be true to something outside myself.

In regard to purples, I just came across something on that in the book, The Pirate Picture by Rayner Thrower. "In the Narrow Seas, as northern European waters used to be called, trade was slow in starting... An interesting local tradition exists in the Quantocks (Somerset) that the whortleberries, which grow there such profusion, were wanted by the Phoenicians for the preparation of the renowned Tyrian purple dye. This dye was was normally obtained from murex trunculus, a shellfish of the Eastern Mediterranean. Still, there are suggestions that the mollusc became increasingly scarce as a result of the continuous demand for it, thus explaining the latter-day, albeit traditional, use of Somerset whortleberries from which an excellent purple dye can be prepared. To help this scarcity of murex trunculus a regular traffic was started c. B.C. 800 from the Levant to the Canary Islands to obtain special lichen for use in dyeing." (Thrower, p. 60-1) So purples goes way back and apparently can be found in berries that sound as if they grew quite profusely in Southern England as long ago as 800 BC. At least that's how I understand it. So all you need now is some whortleberries. (They sound like something from a Harry Potter novel that would be used in Snape's class.) Here's a link, although you can Google for yourself and likely find better info, I'm sure: http://garden.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Whortleberry As for pictures from the period...I am skeptical of openly accepting such. Paints fade, artists choose colours for reasons of harmony and what's cheapest or most available at the artistic paint emporium and similar issues arise. I'd be cautious, particularly in trusting the colours of artistic artifacts as in fact, being fact.

Ah, at last! I want a set. Did you place the T-shirt order yet? Where is the surgeon located? Actually, if anyone's curious, surgery was most typically performed in the what seems to be the most unlikely of places - the orlop deck of a ship. Dark, dank and located at the lowest level (above the hold), which is below the waterline. Stephen Bown states in his book Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medieval Mystery of the Age of Sail, "The surgeon’s mate dwelled within the bowels of the ship, in a six-foot-square canvas enclosure in the cockpit on the orlop deck, directly above the hold in the front of the vessel, where the rocking was greatest, the air foulest, and the natural light faintest. It was barely large enough to contain a sea chest, and a medical chest and the canvas walls pinned to the overhead beams provided scant privacy from the general crew." (Bown, p. 88) On the other hand (there's always another hand), R. S. Allison says in “Chirurgeon: Look to the Wounded,” J Royal Medical Serv 1990 that "…the orlop which lay between the hold and the lower gun deck. It had no gun ports, being below the water line, and in the after part, amidships, the cockpit was placed. This was the principled dressing station for the treatment of the wounded in action. The site was good because it was comparatively immune from direct hits, and not only could the surgeon work uninterrupted, but he was more secure than if he had been on the gun decks above.” (Allison, p. 16) Most writers tend to agree with Bown. John Keevil (who is becoming one of my favorite authors on this topic - he always has loads of period references) said in his book Medicine and the Navy 1200-1900: Volume II – 1640-1714 that “During the three days’ fighting and subsequently at anchor in Stokes Bay, many...candle-lit operations were carried out in the cockpits of damaged ships, where only constant pumping held the rising water in check. In many cases it was a young surgeon’s first experience of amputating, except as an assistant, and also his first time in a cockpit.” (Keevil, p. 43) Note: all of these references are to B.R. Navy ships, which is the only type for which I have found reliable info from period. (Forgive me for blathering on about this. Organizing all this info in bits and bites around here is helpful to me and perhaps enlightening to y'all.)

I am interested in ALL the medical stuff. I'm writing this book, see... However, I checked and I can upload both pdf and tiff files from that EEBO database of this book for free once I get back to the university. This will probably work just fine for my purposes. BTW, I recently found out about another period-relevant on-line database that has more books. It's the Thompson-Gale Eighteenth Century database. You can read about it here if you're interested. I have to pay for access to another university's library to get to this one, though. I may or may not do that, depending on how things go. There are some books in there that interest me, particularly on the 18th century view of diseases, but I have more than I can get through right now anyhow.

Normally I'd want to combine this with the post called What's Your Day Job? that already discusses this question (to keep things consolidated and make sure that that bit of pyracy.com history doesn't get weeded for lack of recent posts.) However, the ever-creative posters 'round these parts have taken this in a different direction, answering the letter of the question, if not the spirit so I'll do nothin'. (I'm good at that.) However, if you want to find out what the pirates of pyracy have said in the past about their day jobs or you feel compelled to explain your day job, please feel free to check out the above linked post. :angry: And I do street theatre for tips to get money to finance my newly acquired surgeon habit. (It's a bad habit.) Patrick, you aarr a pirate rogue to the core...wasn't that a berthed Disney ship you and Captain Jim were eying at PiP? I sense a pattern...

They may also have winged monkeys in Australia, but I didn't see them either. I guess I really should have gone to the Zoo... I did see a whole bunch of really cool Fruit Bats in the park in Sydney. Did you know that Fruit Bats are not considered bats? At least that's what little Fruit Bat stand in Daintree told us. Perhaps they're actually monkeys. That would clear many things up.

Ah, another tangentially related post by me on the topic of colours from John Keevil's excellent book, Medicine in the Navy, 1200-1770: Volume II -1649-1714. This may or may not be useful, but I have to post it. "Regarding slops, the queen’s seamen could obtain on credit against their pay a grey jacket, red waistcoat and breeches, grey stocking and a leather-cap faced with red cotton, the predominant red being designed to conceal blood from wounds. But the fact that no uniformity existed in naval dress and that contemporary seamen were not associated with any characteristic rig proves that their credit was too restricted for them to draw extensively on the purser’s store. The majority were pressed men, who, as already noted were not allowed to buy slops for the first two months of their service and continued to wear their customary dress until it was reduced to rags. This might be a ‘dark coloured Wigg and blew Cloathes, speckled shirt and Handkerchief, white stockings’, the man in this case being a deserter from a merchantman. Only a free issue could have altered this, but although even [physician William] Cockburn referred to ‘the press’d Mens real Want of Clothes’, and in spite of the known association between their rags and contagious diseases, no such order was made because of the expenditure involved.” (Keevil, p. 278) He cites as his source of this info, Edinburh Courant, September 22, 1708 and the second quote in there is from surgeon William Cockburn's book Sea Diseases; or a Treatise of their Nature, Causes and Cure..., 3rd edition (1736), p. 33.

I also have a stuffed wombat that I picked up when I visited Oz. Curiously, I never actually saw a real wombat on that trip. (I declined the Zoo trip in favor of an aborigine forest hike. My loss.) We actually spent more time trying to spot cassowaries for reasons that I'm sure seemed sensible at the time. We saw the remote shadow of one in Daintree Rainforest. (I'd have been better off going to the zoo.)

When I was younger, I wanted a wombat. However, it turned out that wombats can't be legally bought in the US as near as I could tell at the time. Something about how mean they turn and the fact that the tend to dig things up...like house foundations. Oh well.

I wonder if Godwin would be willing to carry them if you could do it? They currently sell their large bone saw for $95. They have the most hit-or-miss supplier of medical instruments I have ever seen. I have had a scarificator on order since November. They just told me that their supplier will get to it when he gets to it. He doesn't like to make them because they take so much time. I was sort of hoping to get a large bone saw for PiP. I need a proper arm and leg bone saw, all I have is that little one (for fingers and such) which, in addition to being too small is not period correct. I need a good blacksmith!!

Sayyyy...no one has died from a sword wound! What?! No swords in the 17th?