The Book of Pirates

by Jamaica Rose

  Sketch out your design on your cloth using a piece of chalk.

  Use the bleach pen to draw your design. Watch out for accidental drips. Be aware that, the longer the bleach sits on the cloth, the more it lightens, but it also continues to spread the design wider.

  After you finish drawing your design and the color has been removed to the way you want it, rinse the cloth in water right away.

  Next, put it in the stop-bleach bath and follow the instructions on the package. If you are using hydrogen peroxide, let the fabric sit in the mixture for five minutes or more.

  Rinse with clean water and let the cloth sit in the clean water for ten minutes or more.

  Lay your flag out flat to dry.

  Pocket for the Pole

  After you have hemmed the edges of your flag (for a one-layer flag) or sewn the two layers together, you can make a pocket for a pole. Fold over the fabric 1 inch on the left side to make a pocket. Sew it down along the edge. Sew it closed across the top. Slide the flag onto a 3/4-inch diameter wooden dowel.

  Variation: You can put metal rings (grommets) in two of the corners of your flag to attach it with ropes to a flagpole. If you (or someone you know) have a grommet tool, then sew down the pocket on top AND bottom (so it is closed). Put a grommet near the top left corner, through the extra layers formed by the folded-over pocket (these extra layers will give it more strength from pulling out easily). Put a second grommet near the bottom left corner.

  Note: Grommet is also a term for a ship’s boy.

  Give ’Em a Broadside!

  “The Arabella seemed to explode as she swept by. Eighteen guns from each of her flanks emptied themselves at that point-blank range into the hulls of the two Spanish vessels.... From the grim confusion and turmoil in the waist below arose a clamor of fierce Spanish blasphemies and the screams of maimed men. The Milagrosa staggered slowly ahead, a gaping rent in her bulwarks; her foremast was shattered, fragments of the yards hanging in the netting spread below. Her beak-head was in splinters and a shot had smashed through into the great cabin, reducing it to wreckage.”

  —From Captain Blood, by Raphael Sabatini

  Cannons Through the Ages

  Even though the Chinese first invented gunpowder, the Moors were the ones who first brought cannons to Western Europe.

  Ring and Stave Cannon

  The fourteenth century is when cannons first showed up on European ships. One of the earliest designs was called a ring and stave cannon. There were two main types of these early shipboard cannons.

  The first type was made up of wrought-iron bars welded together to form a tube. You could imagine a blacksmith of old, sweat pouring down his brow, as he worked away over his forge.

  For the second type of ring and stave cannon, a thick sheet of iron was bent around a rod to form a tube. It was then heated and welded together. This tube was surrounded by a single layer of widely spaced heavy iron rings that were shrunk in place over the tube.

  In either case, the resulting gunbarrel was bolted down to a heavy rectangular oak bed that had been grooved to receive it. The rear of the barrel was closed off. Just forward of this point an opening was cut into the top of the barrel. This opening was called a breech.

  This type of cannon was a breech-loader. It was loaded from the rear end. The gun crew could quickly load it using a removable round chamber that fit into the cutaway breech.

  Firing the ring and stave cannon.

  Cap’n Michael says:

  Aye, the flash, the roar—if the cannonball didn’t get ye, the murderous rain of wooden splinters often did. Sometimes just the sight of a pirate ship with her gunports open and her cannons run out, bearing down on a hapless vessel, was enough to make a ship surrender. Aye, ye’ve heard of these fearsome weapons of old, but do you know where they came from or how they were made? Pull up a keg, set yerself down, and let me tell the tale.

  Muzzle Loading Cannon

  The first major improvement in cannon design came in 1543 when they started casting cannon as one piece instead of building them up from smaller pieces. These cannon were the muzzleloaders (front-loading cannons). The workers cast the cannon as a solid piece, then drilled out the bore (the hollow inside) using treadmill or water-powered drills. A touchhole (for lighting the powder) was drilled out by hand after the cannon was finished.

  Second type of ring and stave cannon, in the form of a swivel gun.

  Parts of the Cannon

  Cannons were made from cast iron (a mixture of iron, carbon, and silicon), brass, or bronze. Bronze was preferred for shipboard cannons. It was lighter than iron, it didn’t rust as much, and when the cannons wore out, the metal could be easily recast to make new ones. The disadvantage was that bronze cannons were twice as expensive.

  Cap’n Michael says:

  There’s some confusion between the words “cannon” and “gun.” Dependin’ on who’s talkin’, both words are used to describe them big iron or bronze monstrosities onboard ship. I ain’t sayin’ which one is correct, but gun is probably more proper for the shipboard weapons.

  And if there is more than one of them (which ya really need if yer goin’ into battle), then ya can call them cannon or cannons. Both ways are correct. Also, it was sometimes spelt with only one “n” in the middle: “canon.” And ya wonder why I have problems spellin’!

  Real Pirate History to Visit:

  Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine, Florida

  St. Augustine is the oldest European-founded city in the United States. This is a great spot to get a glimpse of the pirate era. The seventeenth-century fortress was attacked a couple of times by pirates, including Robert Searles. The fort still looks pretty much as it did in those times. The big cannons are still there and are fired on special occasions. Outside the fort, you’ll find the Taberna del Gallo nearby at 35 St. George Street. It’s a 1740s Spanish tavern with no electricity, just flickering candles. Hang around; the city’s nightly ghost tour starts at the Taberna in the evening.

  800-653-2489

  www.getaway4florida.com

  http://ghosttoursofstaugustine.com

  Cutaway View of a 32-pound Naval Cannon

  Carronades

  The next major improvement in cannon design came with the invention of the carronade, first produced by the Scottish foundries of Carron in 1779. This piece threw a very large shot from a stubby barrel. These carronades needed a much smaller powder charge, and at short range they were more accurate than regular cannon. Carronades came in many sizes. Some larger man-of-war carried carronades capable of firing a 68-pound ball!

  Types of Cannon

  Culvern — 15 feet in length

  Cannon — 11 to 12 feet in length

  Pedrero — 10–11 feet in length

  Mortar — 3 feet in length

  Aiming the cannon at an enemy vessel.

  Swivel Guns

  Swivel guns appeared on sailing vessels in the fourteenth century, around the same time as their larger brothers, the cannon. (The second type of ring and stave cannon shown above is a swivel gun.)

  Swivel guns are small lightweight cannon mounted on a horseshoe-shaped pivoting mount. This mount ended in a post, which fit into a socket on the railing (similar to an oar-lock on a rowboat). This made it extremely easy to aim. These guns were used mainly to destroy or disable ships.

  Ship’s mortar, showing the additional bracing required for artillary of such massive force.

  Mortar firing at a fortress

  The French fleet demands return of the French consul. The Algerians willingly comply by way of a mortar.

  Mortars

  One of the most devastating weapons carried aboard ships wasn’t a cannon—it was the mortar. These monsters weighed up to 3 tons or more, and ships had to be specially built to carry them. The tremendous forces these giant guns generated when they fired would have caved in the deck on a regular vessel. These special ships were called “bomb ketches.” They were usually named after volcanoes.


  Cannons were highly prized aboard pirate vessels, as they were the deadliest weapons of the time. Whenever prizes were taken, one of the first things they took aboard were cannons from the captured vessels. This resulted in a hodgepodge of many different types and sizes. Since accurate firing of these pieces was more art than science at this time, trained cannoneers were highly valued and were often “persuaded” to join the crew.

  With their highly mobile vessels and heavy armament, pirate vessels virtually controlled the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. Aye, cannon were a major factor in helping create “The Golden Age of Piracy.”

  In the heat of battle, with vast clouds of smoke blowing in through the open gun ports, the flash and roar of the cannons, the screams of the wounded, and the sulphurous smell of burning gunpowder, the cramped and overcrowded gun decks must have seemed like hell itself to the valiant gun crews. Ships lived or died depending on the bravery and skill of their gun crews. They were the true heroes of the great age of sail.

  Recipes from Gaston’s Galley

  Make Yer Own Cannonballs

  This easy-to-make no-bake recipe will give you plenty of ammo for your next party or get-together.

  You will need:

  1 cup creamy or chunky peanut butter

  1-1/2 cups powdered milk

  1 cup honey

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  Shredded coconut, optional

  In a medium bowl, combine the peanut butter, powdered milk, honey, and vanilla. Roll walnut-sized pieces of dough into balls and set on waxed paper. Refrigerate until firm. Makes 24 to 30 balls.

  Optional: roll in shredded coconut before chilling.

  Pastimes for Scurvy Dogs

  Pass the Cannonball

  An outside game on a warm day.

  Players will get wet!

  You will need:

  8 or more balloons per team, preferably black to look like cannonballs (have extras ready due to breakage)

  2 big laundry baskets or cardboard boxes per team

  Divide the pirates into two or more crews. The members of each crew should form a long line, with the crewmen standing about 5 feet apart (or more for a greater challenge). At the start of the line, place one basket with all the balloons.

  At the end of the line, place an empty basket. When the captain blows the whistle, start tossing the “cannonball” balloons down the line. When one makes it successfully to the end, place it in the basket at the end of the line.

  The winning team is the one with the most “cannonballs” in their basket when time is up.

  Variations: Use raw eggs instead of water balloons (definitely an outside game).

  The Gun Captain

  (Drawing by Richard Becker)

  What Table Manners?

  If, for just one week, you had to live on the food that sailors ate, you would never again complain about having to eat broccoli. The food aboard ships was probably bad quality to begin with. To save money, shipowners scrimped where they could. Then, after weeks at sea, the food got worse and worse.

  May you never get weevils in yer biscuits!

  Bread did not last for long without getting moldy. Instead, ships brought along barrels of “ship’s biscuit” or “hardtack.” It was also called “sea biscuit” or “ship’s bread,” and a whole lot of other names, some not fit to print here. They baked the biscuit twice to make it hard and dry (the drier the biscuit, the less likely it was to get moldy). For really long voyages, they might bake it four times! This biscuit was so hard you could hammer a nail with it. A sailor had to soak a biscuit in water, ale, or other liquid to soften it enough to eat without cracking a tooth.

  Not only was the hardtack hard, but soon bugs started living in it. The weevil is a small little beetle that laid its eggs in the hardtack. Soon, little maggots were squirming around, living off of the flour in the biscuit. That is why many sailors ate their food when it was nearly dark so they didn’t have to look at the maggots. Some sailors didn’t mind too much. The little wrigglers did provide extra protein. Some sailors collected a handful of maggots, then browned them in some fat over a fire, and spread them like paste onto a biscuit (a poor man’s peanut butter ...YUM).

  Certain types of cheeses could last a long time without spoiling. The harder the cheese, the longer it lasted. The cheeses were so hard, there are stories of sailors carving buttons out of cheese.

  Before a voyage, meat was dried or salted and brought aboard in casks. Dried meat was similar to a very dry and tough jerky. Salt beef, salt pork, and salt fish (and even salt horse) was preserved by soaking it in brine. It was so salty, bugs and bacteria could not live in it. And people could not eat it. The salt had to be removed before cooking by soaking the salted food, then changing the water, and soaking it again. Even so, it was still very salty. Sailors also used hard salt beef to carve buttons.

  Sometimes live meat was brought on board (goats, chickens, pigs, even cows were kept aboard; it got pretty stinky). Live animals usually provided meat for the officers. Once in a great while, the sailors might get some fresh meat.

  At the start of a voyage, there were fresh vegetables—peas, beans, onions, and turnips. But as the fresh food ran out (or went bad), dried vegetables were used. Dried peas were the most common.

  There are many stories of long voyages where food ran short. Here is an example from the explorer Magellan’s Pacific crossing: “We ate only old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking. We also ate the ox hides which were under the main yard so that the yard should not break the rigging [the ox hides were used as cushioning]...also the sawdust of wood, and rats.”

  Not only did food run short, many times so did the water. The water or wine casks sprang leaks. Water stored in wooden barrels turned green and became infested with bugs and green slime. Sailors tried to catch rainwater during storms by using buckets and by collecting the runoff from the sails. There were some trips where water ran out and the crew had to drink their own urine to survive.

  After all this, I bet that broccoli on your dinner plate is looking better and better.

  An Authentic Old Salt’s Recipe

  Traditional Hardtack

  Make hardtack with the following recipe and see what it was like to eat what the sailors of old often ate. There’s only one ingredient missing—the weevils!

  You will need:

  1 cup water (or less)

  4 cups flour

  Salt to taste

  Add only enough water to the flour to make a stiff dough. Roll the dough out on a floured surface about 1/2 inch thick. Cut it into square pieces about 2 1/2 to 3 inches. Place each piece on a baking sheet. Poke holes in the top with a fork. Bake at 250 degrees F for one hour, or until lightly browned. If you want it to be really authentic, you can bake it a second time. But watch your teeth! It will be really hard.

  Eat a Lime

  “You scurvy dog!” How many times has a pirate heard this phrase? So what is scurvy, and how does a “dog” of a sailor get it?

  The Elizabethan Sea Dog Richard Hawkins, son of John Hawkins, called scurvy “the plague of the sea, and the spoil of mariners.” He knew it was the cause of thousands of deaths at sea. But he also knew what helped prevent scurvy: “...that which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour oranges and lemons.”

  In 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s crew got scurvy. He reported on his voyage to India that his men “suffered from their gums, which grew over their teeth so that they could not eat. Their legs also swelled, and other parts of the body, and these swellings spread until the suffered died, without exhibiting symptoms of any other disease.”

  A doctor in the 1600s wrote: “The disease brings with it a great desire to drinke, and causeth a generall swelling of all parts of the body, especially the legs and gums, and many times teeth fall out of the jaw without paine.�
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  Scurvy is a terrible disease. It saps your strength. It makes your gums swell and your teeth fall out. Dark blotches appear on your skin. Your legs swell up, and old wounds that have been healed for years reopen as if new. Bones get brittle and break easily. If the disease continues, it gets worse and worse until the sailor dies from it. There are many reports of ships on long voyages losing large parts of their crew to scurvy.

  It took awhile for people to figure out how and why sailors got scurvy. From the 1400s, people knew scurvy had something to do with the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. They knew eating these could reverse the disease.

  Today, we know our bodies need vitamin C and the other vitamins that fresh fruits and veggies give us. If you don’t get these vitamins, strange things begin to happen to your body. Scurvy is a disease that results from not getting vitamins.

  People had not yet learned good ways to keep food fresh for long periods. They did not have freezers and refrigerators. This was a problem for sailors who went on long voyages across big oceans without having a chance to get fresh food along the way.