Booze and Boat Bits #7 (5 Short Items of Interest)

And now it's time to return to Blue Lou's quick entries on happenings in the world of piracy, vessels, and alcohol!  It's been a while for some of these topics, starting with...

washed up?

1.  Somalia update:  There are numerous signs that piracy in Somalia has been, if not eradicated, at least brought under a reasonable amount of control.  Signs of its demise began earlier this year.  A September 25th article for the Huffington Post described how Hobyo, historically one of the key pirate dens, is now back on hard times.  You know the boom is over when "most of the prostitutes are gone and luxury cars (are) repossessed."  At that time, 5 vessels had been seized in 2012, compared to 25 in 2011 and 47 in 2010.  December 17th news was even better:  NO ships have been seized by the Somalis in the last 6 months!  Many factors have been credited for the increased success in averting successful pirate attacks--on-board defenses, better and more constant communication between merchant vessels and naval patrols, and air reconnaissance over the shoreline.  Nevertheless, Somali piracy is far from over.  5 ships and 136 hostages are still being held.  In an article for Reuters, Dutch Commodore Ben Bekkering, now commander of NATO's Operation Ocean Shield, told the press, "I am convinced, if navy ships would disappear, the piracy model would still be intact."  He insisted that a minimum of 16 to 18 ships need to be on patrol at any one time just to cover the broad area of the pirates' hunting ground.  Out-of-work pirates, meanwhile, are not treated warmly in the towns where they live, many citizens blaming piracy for what Hobyo mayor Ali Duale Kahiye calls "inflation, indecency, and insecurity."  Even the investors that used to fund pirate expeditions are backing off, seeing decreasing returns.  It is important to keep in mind that poverty and instability will still make the pirates' life appealing.  Yet it seems that...just maybe...we're winning.

washed up?

2.  Kalakala update:  Our dear old ferry has entered a new phase of limbo.  As reported at the Tacoma News Tribune, in November the Kalakala passed from Steve Rodrigues to Karl Anderson, who owns the moorage where the ferry resides and who invited Rodrigues and his boat back in 2004.  The transfer was a "quietly arranged lien foreclosure sale," as Rodrigues owned $4,000 in past due rent.  Kalakala remains in its conundrum:  The Coast Guard still considers it "a hazard to navigation," but, at the same time the Coast Guard has declared it too fragile to move, environmental regulators have forbidden repairs on the water.  Call me a perpetual optimist, but, honestly, I am hopeful about the new ownership.  Rodrigues' heart was in the right place, but he was a dreamer not a planner, and certainly no businessman.  Anderson has made clear that he'd rather restore than scrap, and, besides, the only graving dock up to the task of dismantling the big ferry--a dock that also happens to be owned by Anderson--is tied up with making pontoons for the 520 floating bridge for two years.  Anderson may not be the one to bring back the Kalakala to its former glory, but, at the very least he seems to care about her.  The waiting game continues, same as it ever was.

washed down!

3.  'Tis the season to give beer.  Last week at work, we had "Secret Santa" exchanges.  My Secret Santa scored perfectly, supplying me with toys, a huge one-pound bag of Pirate's Booty cheese puffs, the book Dead Men Tell No Tales on the 18th century pirate Charles Gibbs (a book I didn't even know existed), and finally a gift box with three pint glasses she hand etched with skull and crossbones and two big bottles of ale!!  The beer was from a brewery I was unfamiliar with, Minhas Craft Brewery of Monroe, Wisconsin.  Minhas traces its origins to the Blumer Brewery, founded way back in 1845 during the Midwest's lager boom, and today makes its way out of Wisconsin via Trader Joe's.  Although it is in a little town in rural cheese country, they style themselves nautical under the brand name "Boatswain."  The two beers I was given were a double IPA called Twin Screw Steamer and a strong ale called Heavy Lift Vessel.  The former was unremarkable, simply because I really could care less about IPA.  The latter, however, I would recommend as a sturdy, hearty brew, one that I would not only drink again but also could see myself trying to adapt into a homebrew recipe.  More importantly, I would like to suggest that my coworker Juanita had the right idea:  Don't waste your Christmas money buying socks or a gift card, show someone you care by giving them good ale!

4. It may be a wee bit wet and cold for sailing, but what does that matter to underwater archaeologists?  Between diverticulitis, work, and the coming of fall weather, I have not been to the Center for Wooden Boats in months, but then the CWB livery does tend to hibernate, too.  Nevertheless, the CWB's blog "Bearings" tells of restoration work, a new exhibit on boathouses and fishing resorts of Puget Sound, and the ongoing survey of shipwrecks on the bottom of Lake Union.  I have embedded a nicely made 9-minute video about the project above, and you can learn more at the Lake Union Virtual Museum.  I have written about this before.  It is not just of local interest:  It is a remarkable work of archaeology because of the extreme conditions it takes place in and the treasure trove of vessels found.

not a wash, a wish

5.  A month ago, I posted on how I was going to 'pretend' to take Mystic Seaport's summer seminar at the Munson Institute.  Well, all of the books have arrived from Amazon as well as two thick readers from Dr. Glenn Gordinier.  Dr. Gordinier told me that the seminar did not have any assignments; this was not a graduate seminar but an educators' seminar, and not only was the reading list too intense for weekly papers, but, really, teachers probably don't need the practice when they're too busy writing articles for actual publication.  So, by comparing the reading list to the draft syllabus posted online, I have created my OWN assignments.  In the upcoming weeks (or, rather, months), I will be posting here what I am already calling, perhaps presumptuously, "The Munson Papers."  Some of these will be topic only until the reading is done.  These subjects include the definition of maritime studies, the relationship between maritime labor and slavery, and the end of the age of sail.  Others, drawing partly from the actual seminar and partly from my own library and interests, already have initial titles:  "Blackbeard in Colonial Context," "Late Piracy and the Early U.S. Navy:  The Case of Charles Gibbs" (thanks again Juanita...you had no idea), and "Scholars and Scavengers:  Archaeology vs. 'Treasure Hunting'."  As you can tell, my brain is all buzzing.  The bad news is that it might be a while 'til you see a post here on the blog, as I lose myself in hundreds of pages of literature; Hell, I might even take a break from O'Brian (*gasp*)!  The good news is that there are over a dozen 'papers' you can look forward to reading...and, for me, perhaps the seeds of a new academic career.  Plus, you know, I'm a pirate, and thus likely to be distracted by something shiny that I think is worth writing about.

Stay roguish, my friends...

A few words about historical archaeology

Dr. James Deetz, Master of the Parenthetical Comment

One of the chief reasons I am here (and thus you are here) is my academic background.  Way back yonder, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, Magna Cum Laude, from the University of California, Berkeley.  I learned about the (pre-)history of California, the great era of the Maya, and even "circumpolar" peoples like the Inuit and the Sami.  But the class that set my course was James Deetz' "Introduction to Historical Archaeology."  This made sense, really, as I grew up on back roads and trails to ghost towns of the American West, from California's 49'er country to the high and lost in the Colorado Rockies.  Being in California, I could have focused on the mission chain, all of which I have visited and which I studied a little while apprenticing at what was then still called the Lowie Museum.  Instead, my major adviser was Kent Lighfoot, who was doing the archaeology of the oft-ignored Russian impact on U.S. history and digging at its southernmost reach, Fort Ross.  He, in turn, had a grad student named Aron Crowell, now director of the Arctic Studies Center's Alaska office in Anchorage (Pauline, if ye ever by some truly odd chance run into Aron, say Lou from Berkeley remembers him fondly).  And so I spent two adventurous, soggy, and life changing summers digging at Three Saints Bay, Kodiak Island, the first Russian American colony in North America.  I then wrote my Honors Thesis, "Elderberry Wine and Other Necessities," which argued, based on a combination of archaeobotanical evidence and local ethnography, that, in the absence of vodka, the Russians were distilling the local plants.  I then endured a year of grad school at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, before realizing that the discipline was veering down a road I didn't want to be on...more on this in a moment.  All of this has, in a way, circled back with my interest in maritime culture and pirates, whether it be shipwrecks or Port Royal.  So, after all that preamble/CV, I want to take a few minutes to discuss the field I love, which I may have left officially but still have dalliances with.

Fort Ross in 1828.  Outside the wall were the homes of seal hunters brought all the way from the Aleutians, and where the archaeology has been focused.

Naturally, historical archaeology is defined in contrast to prehistoric archaeology.  Unfortunately, this distinction is troublesome.  It might seem simple to say that the former implies the archaeology of historical time, while the latter is the archaeology of people and places before there was a historical record.  The problem is that "history" as it is commonly perceived prioritizes written history, but culture always has memory.  Every culture has at least oral history.  Many cultures will have some representational history--Mayan glyphs, southwestern pictograms, Plains hide paintings--yet these are not, by most classifications, within the purview of historical archaeology.  This also means that creating a numeric break from prehistory to history will vary from society to society and even from site to site.  Thus, another distinction is often made between "pre-contact" and "post-contact"--that is, before and after the coming of European colonizers; the term "Pre-Columbian," referring of course to Columbus, is often used to generalize pre-contact.  "Contact" was in most cases a huge, and often catastrophic event for indigenous cultures.  However, this distinction gives that moment premier priority, a distinction that might not be shared by that culture.  Do Arawaks consider the coming of Columbus the single most important event in their culture, the Hawaiians the arrival of Captain Cook, the Powhatans the coming of John Smith?

Logan, Pt. III: Escape to Liverpool

When we last left Logan--back with my long post over a year ago on the Jacobite Rising of 1715--the Battle of Preston had been lost, and soon thereafter the whole rebellion was crushed.  Logan would have been among nearly 1,500 prisoners of war in Preston.  It was late November.  Common soldiers like Logan were held in the town church for a whole month, cold and uncomfortable, barely existing on bread and water, unsure of what doom may await.  If he was not imprisoned or executed, he was likely to be indentured and sent to America.  By some ruse (that I have yet to invent), perhaps alone at night, Logan managed to get out of the church.  Marked as a rebel, his only option was to flee as quickly and as far as possible.  For Logan, this meant getting to sea and leaving England completely, perhaps never to return.

Warton Marsh on the Ribble Estuary, from the blog ribbletoamazon.com

The port of Liverpool was only about thirty miles away.  The most obvious route would have been directly south, but this led through Wigan and thus in the direction from which General Wills had brought his troops.  Luckily for Logan (and, for me, the writer), the geography of the area gave him a way to travel that few if any people would notice.  West of Preston, the River Ribble broadens into a massive estuary.  Even today, thanks to preservation as a National Nature Reserve, over a quarter of a million waders and waterfowl winter in the area.  The region was sparsely populated, limited to small, scattered fishing and farming villages such as Banks and Churchtown in the ancient parish of North Meols that had been settled by the Norse before the Norman conquest.  By keeping to the marshes, Logan would have been seen by no more than thousands of birds such as wigeons, geese, and plovers.  The going was slow, muddy, and treacherous.  Eventually, south of what is today the seaside resort of Southport, the wetlands would have given way to miles of beach and sand dunes.  The flat, broad West Lancashire coastal plain saw Logan all the way to the outskirts of Liverpool.

A 1917 map of the Ribble Estuary

Of Weather and Ancient Mariners: Brian Fagan's The Great Warming

How Lou met archaeology (after Jones)

Brian M. Fagan introduced a lot of people to archaeology, including myself.  The first book I remember reading on archaeology, well before getting to Berkeley, was Quest for the Past, which exposed me to some of archaeology's most famous moments, like Louis Leakey finding "The Cradle of Mankind" in Olduvai Gorge, Howard Carter getting into Tutankhamun's tomb, and, more locally, Richard Daughtery excavating the amazingly preserved, pre-contact Makah village of Ozette right here in Washington State.  Fagan's Archaeology:  A Brief Introduction, quite possibly the most widely used textbook in introductory archaeology classes, is now in its eleventh edition.  Fagan, now approaching his 76th birthday, is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is still a very prolific writer.  So when G'Ma once again had a book to pass down, I was pleased to see Fagan's name.  I hadn't read an archaeology book in a long time, and this was an old friend.

The central topic of The Great Warming:  Climate Change and the Rise an Fall of Civilizations, is the Medieval Warm Period, hereafter to be referred to as the MWP.  Proposed by the British meteorologist Hubert Lamb, the MWP was a period between roughly AD 800 and 1200 of what we would now call global warming.  The MWP was first applied to Medieval Europe, and for those cultures it was a grand time.  The general warming meant more settled weather, leading in turn to better farming, population growth, and that legendary time of kings, knights, serfs, and alewives; yes, the MWP was most definitely a factor in the history of beer.  Elsewhere, the MWP was downright malicious.  This is perhaps what drew G'Ma to this book:  It is a set of archaeological cautionary tales of how cultural strategies did and did not successfully respond to drastic climate change.  Here are a few of several striking cases, representative of Fagan's approach.

Pirates, archaeologists, and smugglers: a tale of three documentaries

Ile Sainte-Marie:  just another pirate paradise

Last week, "H2," previously known as "History International," aired three shows targeted towards the drunken pirate demographic.  The first I stumbled into (on G'Ma's TV), and when I looked on the Comcast guide and set the DVR for a full showing of that I found two more.  The first, accidental discovery was the best as an actual documentary:  Pirate Island, about investigations of Ile Sainte-Marie off northeast Madagascar.  Ile Sainte-Marie was one of the premier pirate havens of the Golden Age, because it had everything you could ask for--a location close to the rich shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean yet undisclosed to the law, a harbor to keep ships same from both storms and the Navy, and a local supply of fruit and water.  Kidd, Levasseur, Every, and other legendary pirates of the era used the island as a base at one time or another.  It was known for having vestiges of pirate days, but no professional archaeological survey had ever been done.

Bell of the Whydah

The team leader for the investigations documented in Pirate Island is a modern name well known to pirate buffs, Barry Clifford.  Clifford reached fame in 1984 with his discovery of the Whydah (pronounced WID-ah, not WIDE-ah).  The Whydah started as a trading and slave ship in 1715, but two years later it was captured in the Caribbean by the pirate "Black Sam" Bellamy.  Bellamy added cannons, made the 105-foot vessel his flagship, and preyed off the East Coast.  Unfortunately, in April, 1717, the Whydah was caught in a storm near Cape Cod.  Gale-force winds snapped the mainmast, and the ship capsized and broke apart.  Over a hundred pirate corpses washed up on the beach the next day as well as scattered goods that were quickly picked over by wreckers.  Three hundred years later, Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah.  Over 200,000 artifacts have now been recovered, ranging from buttons and buckles to grape shot and grenades...and 10,000 coins and 400 jewelry fragments.  The key find was the ship's bell, clearly inscribed with "The Whyday Gally 1716."  Clifford had found the first positively identified pirate shipwreck.

Blackbeard's anchor?!

Look at the size of that thing!

The Queen Anne's Revenge Project, which has been been doing ongoing archaeological investigations of what very well may be Blackbeard's famous ship, has just pulled up a massive anchor.  Pauline's blog informed me of the news, and the news is all over the Net.  I still had to share.  There is a nice article from the local StarNews detailing the recovery.  Like all archaeology, this identification is to a certain degree hypothetical, but, nevertheless, the evidence that this is in fact the ship of the notorious Teach is accumulating.  And, by any measure, this is one Hell of an artifact.

"Wicked Pirate City"--or, what's wrong with the National Geographic Channel

Fictionalized Cap'n Morgan and his fictionalized buccaneers

I was pretty jazzed when I found out that the National Geographic Channel had a new documentary coming on about the underwater ruins of Port Royal.  For those unfamiliar with this major piece of Caribbean and pirate history, here are the basics.  Port Royal was England's toehold in the Caribbean during the era of the "Spanish Main."  The English captured the town from the Spanish in 1655, and for the next few decades Port Royal was the center of both (illicit) English commerce and English-led buccaneering.  Legends like Henry Morgan not only sailed from Port Royal to attack Spanish ships and towns but also brought the booty back to spend on rum and women.  At its height, over 6,000 people called Port Royal "home."  The problem with pirate (or privateer?) paradise was that it was built on little more than a sand spit on the outside of Montego Bay.  In 1692, when a major earthquake struck Jamaica, the ground under Port Royal essentially liquefied, and within minutes two thirds of the town had slid into the ocean and most of the remainder was flooded by the ensuing tsunami.  Many of those that were not killed immediately were soon dead from injury or disease.  The English shifted their city to Kingston on the other side of the bay.  The buccaneer era passed as Royal support waned, and piracy shifted to the Bahamas.  The famous Cap'n Morgan had died four years before the earthquake, killed by edema, tuberculosis, and/or the rum.  His grave sank into the sea along with the town he had helped make famous.

Under Lake Union

The Center for Wooden Boats' Lake Union Archaeology Project has already gotten a decent amount of local press, starting with this Seattle Times article written by Three Sheets Northwest's Deborah Bach and followed by a shorter article in the Post-Intelligencer.  I can't help but tout this, though, because the underwater survey of wrecks and remains, overseen directly by the CWB's Dick Wagner, is just too interesting.  I have known a handful of underwater archaeologists during my old academic life, from the grad students at Cal Berkeley to the insane divers who helped us survey the cove at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island.  Fact is, the murky, 45-degree waters of Lake Union sound intense enough.  You can read all about the project at its own site (linked above), but I wanted to highlight a few wrecks and their stories.  OK, maybe this is just an excuse to write about them...