Whydah Exhibit

The Whydah exhibit was interesting although a little thin on physical objects. The ship broke into pieces during the wreck and the most of what washed up on the beach was spirited away by scavengers. Much of the exhibit was reconstructions of the ship with mannequins.

One thing that the curator(s) did particularly well was contextualizing piracy within the Atlantic triangle, specifically the relationship between piracy and slavery in the early 18th Century. The rise in transatlantic commerce made piracy attractive due to both the temptation posed by the riches to be gained and due to the fact that sailor life aboard merchant ships was pretty hard. After the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 ended the wars with Spain and the need for privateers, many sailors were left unemployed and vulnerable to pirates Pirates impressed both black and white sailors as well as the slaves captured in their slave ships raids (this wasn't always the case. As W. Jeffery Bolster points out, pirates were just as likely to sell slaves as to free them). Blackbeard's crew may have been as much as 60% black.In fact, there is some speculation that the massive crackdown on piracy prior to 1730 was spurred by the threat piracy posed to the slave trade

One of the more gruesome and haunting displays was of the shoe, stocking, and shinbone of a boy named John King who's estimated to have been between 8 and 11 years old. King and his mother were passengers of one of the ships captured by Bellamy's crew, and King was so enamored by the pirates that he threatened to kill his mother if she tried to stop him from joining them. He died with most of the Whydah's crew.

In terms of my own work, it's hard to say precisely how much will be useful. There were 2 things that might make it into the chapter if only as footnotes.

• The alterations made to the Whydah by Bellamy's crew seem similar to descriptions of the San Dominick in Benito Cereno. The partitions were removed to reflect the egalitarian ethos embraced by pirates.
• Cotton Mather was judge presiding over six members of Bellamy's fleet. He freed one who alleged to have been impressed into service.

Revision and the Illusion of Completeness

Discussing chapter revisions is simultaneously excruciating and liberating. You are purged of delusions of completeness, disabused of any sense of your own brilliance, and finally reassured that you're "almost there." You are also, at least for a little while, free from that dark isolated cave so necessary to writing, and in talking about your work more aware of how things are coming together beyond the immediate chapter. And having done the hardest work of wrestling with concepts in the first draft, you are now allowed to pay more attention to nuance, argument, etcetera.

So instead of moving on whole-hog to pirates, I'm going to start with the revising process with small excursions into pirate territory for variety. In terms of revising, The next few weeks I'm going to concentrate on some key questions brought up at the workshop.

• Principles of Selection
• The Historical Phenomenon of the Maritime Imaginary
• The Relationship Between Insurrection And Revolution
• The resonance of Haiti and American Revolution within the Context of the 1850s

The narrative isn't as clear as it initially seemed. The progression from swamp to sea of course makes mores sense at the end of the chapter than at the beginning which, naturally, that the chapter essentially as to be rewritten backwards. Having teased out the close readings of the texts I now need to go back and do what I set out to do in the first place and make the controlling elements the progression from swamp to sea rather than letting my close readings guide the chapter. I think I'm going to spend the next couple of days concentrating on the introduction and then go back to the swamp. Sigh.

On the pirate front, this weekend I'm headed, finally, to the Field Museum of Natural History's exhibit of the Whydah.

From National Geographic:

The Whydah's story begins in London in 1715 when the hundred-foot [31-meter] three-master was launched as a slave ship under the command of Lawrence Prince. Named for the West African port of Ouidah (pronounced WIH-dah) in what is today Benin, the 300-ton [272-metric-ton] vessel was destined for the infamous "triangular trade" connecting England, Africa, and the West Indies. Carrying cloth, liquor, hand tools, and small arms from England, the Whydah's crew would buy and barter for up to 700 slaves in West Africa, then set out with them on three to four weeks of hellish transport to the Caribbean. Once there, the slaves were traded for gold, silver, sugar, indigo, and cinchona, the last being a source of quinine, all of which went back to England.

The Whydah was fast—she was capable of 13 knots—but in February of 1717, on only her second voyage, she was chased down by two pirate vessels, theSultana and Mary Anne, near the Bahamas. Led by Samuel "Black Sam"

Bellamy, a raven-haired former English sailor thought to be in his late 20s, the pirates quickly overpowered the Whydah's crew. Bellamy claimed her as his flagship, seized a dozen men from Prince, then let the vanquished captain and his remaining crew take the Sultana.

By early April the pirates were headed north along the east coast, robbing vessels as they went. Their destination was Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, butthey diverted to Cape Cod, where legend says Bellamy wanted to visit his mistress, Maria Hallett, in the town of Eastham near the cape's tip. Others blame the course change on several casks of Madeira wine seized off Nantucket. Whatever the reason, on April 26, 1717, the freebooter navy sailed square into a howling nor'easter.

According to eyewitness accounts, gusts topped 70 miles [113 kilometers] an hour and the seas rose to 30 feet [9 meters]. Bellamy signaled his fleet to deeper water, but it was too late for the treasure-laden Whydah.Trapped in the surf zone within sight of the beach, the boat slammed stern first into a sandbar and began to break apart. When a giant wave rolled her, her cannon fell from their mounts, smashing through overturned decks along with cannonballs and barrels of iron and nails. Finally, as the ship's back broke, she split into bow and stern, and her contents spilled across the ocean floor.

A slave ship turned pirate ship and wrecked off the coast of New England! Perfect!