Real pirates don't hoard treasure

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, pirates, diving, salvage, discoveries

Prior to 2009 only one sunken pirate ship of the "Golden age of (Atlantic) Piracy" (1650-1720) had been found and positively identified, the Whydah, found in 1984 off Cape Cod. Barry Clifford and the others who found the Whydah had a map to go by, though it had been misinterpreted before his discovery. When John Chatterton and John Mattera, ably assisted by Heiko Kreschmer and Howard Ehrenberg, and partly bankrolled by Tracy Bowden, went out to find the Golden Fleece twenty years later, they didn't even have that. They had a smattering of resources including diary entries, old ships' logs, and letters between the Governors of Hispaniola and the English Crown.

They started with what they had, including a strong hunch by Bowden, based on some written speculations, that the wreck would be found near Cayo Levantado in Samana Bay on the north side of the Dominican Republic, which now occupies the eastern 2/3 of the island Hispaniola. "Levantado" means "raised up" or even "levered up", and refers to the island's suitability for careening a ship. Careening is partly beaching a ship and heeling it over so the sailors can scrape barnacles from the hull and do other maintenance a sailing ship periodically needs . Contemporary accounts of a battle between two British frigates and the pirates aboard the Golden Fleece, captained by Joseph Bannister, state that the frigates came while the ship was careened, and that she was partly re-floated but then sunk in 4 fathoms (24 feet) of water.

Chatterton and Mattera, extremely experienced divers and treasure hunters, were enticed and employed by Bowden to search for the Golden Fleece, and once it had been found, they told their story to Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers, about the salvage of a WW2 German submarine near New Jersey in 1991. His new book is Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsessions, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship.

Chatterton's and Mattera's search has as many twists and turns as the life of any pirate of the Golden Age. Their quarry was not really the ship so much as her captain, Joseph Bannister, who began as a very successful merchant captain. But one day he sailed his ship off without lading cargo and went pirate. In the two years that followed, he and his crew robbed many ships and foiled attempts to corral him again and again. But it was the battle with the two frigates that made his name. He won. It appears that, knowing he had to careen the ship to reduce drag and keep her speed up, he careened in a place that he could defend adequately. He had the ship's cannons, including it seems quite a number taken from other ships and kept in the hold, brought ashore in two batteries, where he also stationed a large number of men with muskets. They held off the British until the frigates were out of shot and powder and had to retreat.

The book tells, not just the story of the search and salvage work, but the stories of Chatterton and Mattera, of Bannister as it was gradually unearthed by Mattera's research, and of the work of the deep divers who test the limits of endurance of humans and the equipment to which they entrust their lives. It tells of the relationships, by turns collegial and fractious, among the men who reach the top of their obsessive profession.

It has been said, "An expert is someone who has gotten away with risking his life a few more times than you have." This is most true of salvage diving. The work requires an unusual combination of intelligence and perseverance and patience. Those usually don't go together, and they very seldom go together well. The divers searched every possible area around Cayo Levantado, dived every magnetometer "hit" (and this magnetometer cost the same as a Cadillac, or more), and came up dry. They found lots of "modern trash". No lost ship. Library work, and learning to think more like Bannister, led both Chatterton and Mattera to believe that the island was not well suited to planning a battle against the British navy. They became sure it must have been a different island, and found one nearby that seemed ideal. They couldn't get their backer Bowden to agree, however, and to dive the new area could be considered a kind of mutiny.

Eventually, Mattera decided to look for evidence of the battle on land, and found it. About that time, they obtained a "map" of their own, a drawing of the battle by an eyewitness in 1686, in the "Taylor manuscript", republished in 2008. The layout shown in the drawing matched the new location, and the finding of British cannonballs of the right vintage, deep in the island's soil, clinched the deal. Bowden agreed to a spell of diving and the Golden Fleece was found.

I'll leave it to you to learn the aftermath in the Epilogue. Big egos seldom get the kind of happy ending they are looking for. But we also learn fascinating tidbits about the lives of the "pirates of the Caribbean". For one thing, they were amazingly democratic in their own "government". Ship after ship had drawn up articles of their polity, in which the captain could not have the kind of absolute mastery of a vessel that was the rule in the British Navy. These men had had enough of the evils absolute power can engender! The captain's word was law only during pitched battle. Otherwise, he had one vote like all the crew. It is likely that these democratic ideals, and the chance to make a famous name, attracted Bannister more than the prospect of riches; he was well-to-do already.

Also, the notion that pirates amassed great wealth and stashed it on lonely islands all over the place is a Hollywood myth. Knowing that their life expectancy was likely a matter of months (Bannister lasted about 30 months in the pirate life until he was caught and hanged), they spent their takings, almost to the last piece-of-eight, in carousing ashore between voyages of plunder. Only a captain with considerable foresight could keep back enough plunder to buy provisions for the next voyage. Many with less foresight went into debt to provision a ship, and had to pay the debt upon return, or forfeit the ship.

They were tolerated in Port Royal, Jamaica, a center of their operations, because they at first mainly plundered the Spanish, and the British liked that. They also enriched the merchants there with their carousing. But later they became more eclectic in their takings, so when merchant trade had increased a great deal, by 1680 or so they were discouraged, then forbidden, then outlawed and hunted by the navy. By 1720 the "Golden Age" was over. And now, a golden age for salvagers may be over. Maritime countries around the world are passing laws to reclaim their "heritage" from treasure finders and salvagers, and archaeology is being favored in place of the derring-do of men like Chatterton and Mattera.

Double sunsets

kw: astronomy, exoplanets, discoveries

Well! I let this one slip by me. Almost two months ago, September 15, 2011, the Kepler Mission folks announced the discovery of a planet similar in size to Saturn, that is orbiting a double star. In this frame from the NASA animation of the system, the larger yellow star is a K-class dwarf half the size of the Sun, and the smaller orange star is an M-class dwarf. They orbit their common center of mass at a distance of 0.22 AU from one another, while the planet's orbital radius is 0.7 AU, about the distance of Venus from the Sun. If you project from the small star through the large star to the brightest dot about 4x their distance, that's the planet. Of course it is much easier to see in the video, where it is moving rapidly.

There has been much debate among scientists (and science fiction aficionados) whether stable planetary orbits around double stars are possible. This demonstrates that such cases are indeed possible. It remains to be seen whether a planet can orbit stably in a double star system when its orbital radius is similar to the distance between the stars. Speculations about looping orbits have abounded for decades.

Given that, from Earth's perspective, the stars are an eclipsing binary, and that the planet also transits both stars, the planet is treated to frequent eclipses and transits of the two stars, and double sunrises or double sunsets must be common. A dense, Saturn-size object is unlikely to have a surface from which the sky can be seen, so anyone visiting the system will have to watch the sky from the surface of a satellite. Both our Jupiter and Saturn have many satellites, so this planet will likely have several to choose from.

Another census mystery

kw: discoveries, genealogy, census records

In this post from about three years ago, I reported on an ancestor of mine who appears twice in the in the 1840 census. This composite image shows portions of two pages from the 1920 census in which my grandmother's brother and his wife were recorded twice.

In the upper section, William F. Nye and his wife were with the wife's mother Mary A. Levy in Carrollton City, MO on 13 Jan 1920 when the census taker visited. In the lower section the same couple (the wife's name is Katherine) were with William's parents, John and Cynthia Nye in Malta Bend, MO, just a week earlier. The two towns are about sixteen miles apart.

I am not sure if they lived at either address, though I think it most likely that they lived with Mrs. Levy, a widow. It may be that there is still a record somewhere of their being visited by a census taker in their own home!

Family history census mystery

kw: discoveries, genealogy, census records

The name "McKown" is one of the most frequently misspelled names in US Census history. Here we have two brothers, recorded in the 1860 census, whose surname is given as "McKowan". Not too bad, compared to McGowan, McCoun, McKeon and McCowen (see below).

The elder brother, John D McKown, is my great-great grandfather. He it is who received the old family fiddle sometime after 1840. [11/9/08: generational note, found to be inaccurate, removed]

Here we see John, aged 41, and his 27-year-old brother, living next door to one another in Marshall, MO, working as Plasterers. But my focus here is on the whereabouts of John D McKown ten years earlier. He was rather hard to find in the 1850 census. I dug, and dug, and finally found him...twice!

Here is John's family in 1850. His name is recorded as "McCowen" and no middle initial is given. His age looks like 37, but he was 31 at the time. The census taker seems to have dragged into his "1" making it look more like his usual "7". His occupation is states as Bellowsmaker. I guess that was a skill of sufficient demand to be one's main occupation. It is also a clue to the veracity of a second record.

This record is from Ward 4, St. Louis, MO, where the family lived before moving to Marshall. While the violin was obtained in St. Louis, in Marshall the daughter Margaret (spelled "Margarette" here) met J.G. Nye, my great-grandfather.

I found this record after a bit of a search. It took a lot more digging than the 1860 one, but the fact that McKown was misspelled in the 1860 record kept me looking at all the variations. A "soundex" search of an Internet index helped a lot.

A few days ago I took another look at the record I'd found for John's parents, James B and Bethia (or Bertha in some records). Here the surname is spelled McKeon. There John D was, aged 31, with his 17-year-old brother James and three other siblings. Both he and his father are listed as Bellowsmakers (that squiggle is an 1850 "ditto" mark: "Do"). This record is from Ward 3 of St. Louis.

I don't yet know the exact addresses, but I suspect the wards were not very large, and John and his father may have been in business together and lived quite nearby. The census taker happened to come by when father and son were at the father's home, so he got recorded as part of that household on Sept. 16, 1850. The record of John in his own home was made on Sept. 20.

I wonder how many people got recorded in the census? This is the only case I've heard of.