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“The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates” from the book “Under the Black Flag” by David Cordingly. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Black-Flag-Romance-Reality/dp/081297722X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1

#the tryals of john rackham and other pirates #under the black flag #david cordingly #naval book #pirates #history #reference #age of sail #18th century

||September BPC: Just One Word|| 29. Recap. Hey so fun fact, y’all, but when you catch the Sads a couple weeks into the month and Cannot Do Anything Else, it’s possible to read a metric fuckton in efforts to escape from your own head. This is also how you end up watching the entirety of Stranger Things in a twenty-four hour period. I do not recommend the process for most people, but the books were good and so was the show! If anyone wants to freak out about Sleeping Giants or my daughters Nancy or Eleven, hit me up.

72. Heroines and Harlots, by David Cordingly

Owned?: Yes Page count: 334 My summary: The story of women in the Age of Sail has been condensed to a short one - there were no women at sea, women were not allowed to be sailors. And while women were, in fact, not meant to go to sea, that doesn't mean that none of them did. In this 2001 look at the history of women on the ocean in the Age of Sail, David Cordingly tells us about the women who pioneered sea life - the pirates, pro-stitues, wives, nurses, helpers, and others who took to the sea in this period. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

I've been looking forward to rereading this. I think I got it at a charity shop, a long time ago. David Cordingley is meant to be one of the foremost authorities on pirates in his generation, and a lot of his information is solid. Even apart from that, he's writing about women in the sailing world, a demographic who often get ignored. Oh, sure, you have your Anne Bonny and your Mary Read. Maybe, if you're knowledgable on the matter, we can throw a Mary Anne Talbot in there. But women's roles in naval life tend to get overshadowed by the vaster majority of men who were out there, and the fact that none of them were there officially. And it's not just the classic 'woman dresses as a man to go to sea' trope. Lots of women went to sea as women, which was against the rules but was still tolerated, for certain classes of women. The wives of officers on ship could be brought on so that they actually got chances to see their husbands, and so that they could have something resembling a normal life even though their husband was at sea for many moths. This book spans the Age of Sail, so a lot of it wasn't useful for my setting (1711), but it was still really good, really interesting look at women's lives on deck in this kind of period.

Now, this book is from 2001, so both scholarship has advanced since its publication and some aspects of it are looking a bit dated these days. For example, the book is largely focused on women, but there's chapters where that focus slips, and we're back to talking about Important Men (one specifically is John Paul Jones, apparently a famous womaniser, but he gets more focus than the women he's with). Oftentimes women-in-general are discussed rather than specific examples, but to be fair I imagine that we don't have a lot of first-hand evidence of what it was like to be, say, a working class sex worker at a random dockside in the 17/1800s, so you have to generalise at least somewhat. In fairness to it, too, this book is pretty comprehensive, chronicling women across class boundaries and in different nautical settings - pirates, the wives of officers, the wives of common sailors both at sea and at home, the 'girls in every port', women who served in battle, women who kept lighthouses…there's a lot here for a relatively slim volume, and it's good to see! I did enjoy this book, and I'm glad I had the chance to reread it.

Next, a brief excursus into webcomics!

#Heroines and Harlots #David Cordingly #bookblr #book blog #book blogger #3.5

“The reason why pirates on both sides of the Atlantic were hanged “within the flood marks” was to stress the point that their crimes had been committed within the jurisdiction of the Lord High Admiral. He was responsible for the punishment of all felonies committed on the high seas and waterways up to the low-tide mark. Above the tide line, the civil courts took over.”