Growing up, we lived all over the country. If we’d been in one place for two or three years, you just knew any day now Dad would be home with the “Honey, we’re moving” speech. We had the good fortune, though, to usually live by a large body of water: the Pacific Ocean, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico. So I remember watching the sky for clues to the weather because Dad drilled the old rhyme into us kids: “Red sky at night, sailor delight; red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.” My friends were always surprised that I knew ahead of time when we weren’t going to have to dress out for gym.
But red is not the only color with which the sky prognosticates the weather. For centuries, sailors have looked up and judged – often correctly – what was coming by the hints in the sky. Here is a list, by no means complete, of some of the possibilities from the great age of sail:
Bright yellow sky at sunset: wind
Dark, gloomy blue sky: high winds
Dark gray, oily looking clouds: wind
Dark red clouds: rain
Delicate, cotton candy clouds: good weather with light to moderate breezes
Gray sky in the morning: excellent sailing weather
Lavender-gray clouds: snow
Light, bright blue sky: fine weather
Orange or copper sky at sunset: storms with rain
Pale yellow sky at sunset: wet and humid
Red sky in the morning: bad weather
Rosy sky at sunset: good weather
Sickly green: wind, rain, possible hurricane or typhoon
Tawny or coppery clouds: wind
The softer the appearance of the clouds: chance of being becalmed
The harder the appearance of the clouds: stiff winds and fine sailing
Check the sky where you are today, mates. Let me know how the old seafaring wisdom stacked up in your area.Header: Good weather with light to moderate breezes in Isle de la Tortue
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleepI heard the wave of the rising tideRush onward with uninterrupted sweep,A voice out of the silence of the deep,A sound mysteriously multipliedAs of a cataract from the mountain's side,Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.So comes to us at times, from the unknownAnd inaccessible solitudes of beingThe rushing of the sea tides of the soul;And inspirations that we deem our own,Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeingOf things beyond our reason or control~ Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHeader: Tall Ship by Patricia Gilmore (buy it here)
"We shall beat to quarters!” was a not unfamiliar call aboard any man-of-war in the great age of sail. A man was expected to head to his station at that point. In some ships, this meant readying for battle. In others, the term for that kind of muster was “beat to arms”. Much like any modern emergency drill, these calls could mean battle was imminent or they could mean every hand was expected to act like it was. Each man to his station and ready the guns. Anyone found lacking would be dealt a start by the bosun’s rope or cane.
Beat was also frequently used at sea to indicate what the ship was doing, usually in relationship to the wind. A ship could be beaten back, in which case she was forced to return to port due to foul weather. A beating wind was one that came headlong into the ship, forcing her to tack larboard to starboard in order to make headway. These types of winds were sometimes called battling or contrary as well.
Along those lines the act of tacking back and forth in an effort to go forward against the wind was called beating, or sometimes turning to windward. The ship would basically move slowing in a zig-zag pattern in order to take advantage of what wind it could. The more wind a ship could catch – the more weatherly she was – the wider the zig-zag and therefore the faster she could go in a contrary wind. This was the reason sloops and brigs were so favored by freebooters. They frequently shipped fore and aft sails on at least one mast which could take full advantage of a breeze and allow them to outpace square rigged frigates consistently.
In the Royal Navy, a man was said to be “beating the booby” when he clapped his hands together or against his arms or body to stay warm in cold weather. Not a very flattering turn of phrase but certainly very British. One can easily imagine Jack Aubrey speaking of “beating the booby” with Stephen Maturin throwing in some sarcastic double entendre. I’m pretty sure that happened somewhere in O’Brian’s novels.
Finally it is from the language of the sea that we get one of our most common usages of the word beat: the verb meaning to surpass, overcome or exceed in endeavor. “The Saints beat the Colts in Super Bowl 44”. True dat.
Header: A sailing ship at sunset (I honestly forgot from whence I retrieved this image so, if it is yours, please leave me a comment so that I might credit you here or take it down at your request)
Unbelievable as it may seem, it is the first Friday of December. And I think we all know what that means. With the Winter Holidays looming large, I’d like to, just as last year, take the next few Fridays to make some gift recommendations for the seafarers in your life; or maybe a little something for yourself since you are working so dang hard. Today, books full of beautiful pictures and paintings of, from and about the sea.
For the photography buff, you cannot beat The Sea Day By Day by Philip Plisson. Plisson has been around the world and photographed the sea and the ships upon it – from simple boats to modern warships to tall ships in full sail – in all their permutations. The book is large so the pictures get plenty of room to show off. Given its size and number of thick, glossy pages (well over 400), the book is a bargain right now at under $30 in bookstores and at Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. As the back flap of the book notes, Plisson is a member of “… the exclusive and historic group Peintres de la Marine (Official Painters of the French Navy)” and his work very much reflects his painterly way of looking at the world’s water.
My next offering is not only for connoisseurs of great seafaring art, but for those who – like your humble hostess – adore the Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian. The Marine Art of Geoff Hunt is a gorgeous, oversized volume that is most unfortunately out of print. Hunt, who is a gifted draftsman and painter, has numerous paintings and drawings featured in the book, not just those from the covers of the O’Brian books. There are modern cruise ships, yachts and battleships as well. Hunt’s finest, to my mind, are his paintings of tall ships which are stunningly reproduced here. Though the online prices are ludicrous ($90 and up), I saw this book recently at my local used bookstore, Title Wave, so keep your eyes peeled. This is a gem and well worth looking for.
Enjoy your Friday, Brethren. I hope its warm and sunny where you are and I also hope I’ll see ye one and all tomorrow for Sailor Mouth Saturday.
Header: HMS Artemis by Geoff Hunt; this picture comes from The Pixelated Palette where you can find posters of Mr. Hunt’s seafaring art.
The perils of the sea are easily spoken of in terms of the men and women who faced them. High seas, storms, enemy fire and the taking of prizes, disease, want and just plane hard work are discussed over and over until they’ve been so minutely picked at that a new way of approaching them has to be found. Hopefully, that’s what I’m doing here at Triple P. All that being said, there is one form of abstinence, want and heartache that is too often overlooked in writings about the sea: the misery of those left behind.
There may be a number of reasons for the fact that the people left by land don’t show up frequently in historical tomes. The first and foremost may be that they were not thought much of in their own time when almost everyone had it hard and the absence of a relative or other loved one was a virtual daily occurrence. Only extreme cases of neglect or poverty would come to light in such societies. Either that or easily embraced stories of those who sacrificed their own comfort for a people’s hero. Then there is the fact that we know very little about how common people got on in history, much less about what they thought or felt. It is only relatively recently that reading and writing have become available to practically everyone, so most of our world’s life stories went to the grave with the individual, or at best their children’s children. Finally, and perhaps most unfortunately, the glaring reality is that those who waited for men to return from the sea were women. Though the field of women’s history has expanded incredibly just in my lifetime, it surely has not caught up with what has been missed.
Of course men went down to the sea in ships from the time they could build boats. The Ancient Sea Peoples, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all travelled and battled on the seas and oceans but in all fairness it was not until the Viking culture burgeoned in the early current era that Indo-Europeans ventured far afield. A Viking woman might watch her husband head out on a raid with trepidation but, as with so many cultures that followed, the voyages of exploration must have caused the most fear. The intent to settle new lands was always there but the man generally went ahead and then either returned or sent someone back for their families. The woman, whether she was the wife of a chief or a sailor, would simply have to wait. Though many cultures never resolved the problem of just how long it was reasonable to wait for a man to return from the sea, the Vikings handled this in their usual straight forward way. Unless otherwise stipulated by the couple prior to parting, a year and a day was the extent of the woman’s (or man’s) obligation. It is tempting to imagine that some people simply did not return and found greener pastures elsewhere, but that is probably putting a far too modern spin on the agreement.
Eastern cultures also put out to sea, but the kind of voyages made by Zheng He of China, which took his large flotillas all the way to Africa, were unusual. The Polynesian culture thrived on exploration, however, and women frequently accompanied their men on these voyages. This must have alleviated a lot of stress for everyone, at least to some degree. And the success of this policy shows in the numerous areas of the world that can now rightly be proud of their Polynesian ancestry.
By the great age of sail the pattern we generally espouse today was established: the sailor husband went off to sea and the dutiful wife stayed at home to tend hearth and children. The myriad complications with the system are too numerous to discuss here, but it is worth noting that most systems of pay were incredibly flawed, particularly in the great navies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Pay for any sailor was not in hand until the ship ended her commission which might be anywhere from six months to a number of years. In the U.S. Navy after the War of 1812, as an example, a foremast jack made approximately one modern dollar every month. This was a good, living wage by land but certainly impossible for a woman left in Baltimore with a small home to keep up and three children to feed. Though some men received an advance when they signed on, this was usual only during war time and would amount to no more than three months pay.
Women in such situations did what needed doing. Sailor’s women were frequently laundresses and/or seamstresses, at least before the factory systems took their ability to do these jobs at home. Those who did not have the care of children or, in more cases than is generally written about, the care of an elderly parent or in-law, might go into domestic service. Many wives took in boarders and the running of taverns in any port town on either side of the Atlantic was almost exclusively the business of women attached to sailors. Prostitution was an option that either appealed to or was the only out for many. In the 1821 census of the city of Portsmouth in England over 4,000 women residents were counted to a surprisingly low 2,879 men. There was no pretext about the fact that a large number of the women calling themselves single were also widows, probably of seaman, and that many of them had turned to prostitution for a living.
Men on the other side of the law, freebooters, pirates and privateers, also made attachments and married. Pirates’ women frequently joined in when a ship returned to port, helping to sell the goods plundered. The famous Pirate’s Alley in New Orleans, which is not far from Jackson Square, is so named because it was reputedly the sight of a Sunday market where women up from Laffite’s Barataria hawked wares of questionable origin while their men sat in coffee houses planning their next voyage.
The faith of a woman, or a man, could be tempted after a long time away. The historical records show that more than one seaman returned home to find a child that could not mathematically be his own. David Porter, the first Commodore of the New Orleans Station, hero of the War of 1812 and successful pirate hunter, grumbled later in life that his wife, Evalina, had not been faithful. He swore that some of their eight children were not his, but he would not reveal which ones. Evalina denied the accusation stringently and struck back, accusing him of insanity. Conversely, the second wife of Renato Beluche, then living in Porto Cabello Venezuela and having waited two years for her husband’s return, appears to have given up. She put an add in a local paper that she was selling off all of her furniture with the intent of taking her three children back to New Orleans. Commodore Beluche returned before Mizelle had a chance to carry out her plan. One wonders if he mentioned the twenty-something girl he spent months with in Panama, leaving her pregnant when he sailed back to his wife.
Death, more often from disease or the whim of the ocean than in battle, dogged the sailor and his woman. Men came home to find wife or child or both buried in the local churchyard. Countless wives probably never knew what happened to their men but simply went on, year after year, finally remarrying if possible. At home they were a great asset to their local economies in many aspects. Whether their men fished, whaled, freebooted or explored, the ladies ashore did the tasks that rarely come up in scholarly histories: goods were sold, livestock tended, butchered, cooked and eaten, gardens tended, cloth woven and made into clothes and sails, fishing nets mended, roofs patched, homes kept clean, children raised, the list goes on and on. All this with the nagging anxiety of when would the husbands return.
Some moments and emotions are too great for words and I feel justified in falling back on a picture to explain. The painting above, “A Hopeless Dawn”, was done by Frank Bramley during the 1880s when he was living in a fisherman’s a village in Cornwall. Bramley experienced the despair of women whose men would not come home from the sea and he translated it brilliantly to canvas through paint. The emotions shared between wife and mother (or mother-in-law), both of whom knew what it was to love a sailor, are clear to anyone who can see. After that, there is nothing left to say.
Just north and east of the island of Madagascar is a small group of islets that are perfectly situated. Perfectly, that is, for a pirate looking to score some of the fattest prices in the 18th century world. The islets sit on the edge of the Indian Ocean and just south of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Persia. Using any of them as a port, a clever pirate could take a fat East Indiaman returning to England or Holland one evening and then cruise north the following day to snatch the treasure galley of some Ottoman pasha. All this and home in time for supper. Or so the rumors that circulated in places like the West Indies and the Guinea coast said.
Ile Sainte-Marie is the largest islet of the group in question. As piracy became a target of aggressive persecution by the various European powers in the early 18th century, the men who plied the sweet trade turned their eyes to the wealth of the East and set sail for Africa. They found Sainte-Mary quite to their liking. Not only was it abundant in fruits and game, its native people were friendly – particularly when they found that most of the pirates had not come to enslave them – and the island was surrounded by shallow cays and inlets. These were perfect for hiding from aggressors, evaluating a prize or simply pulling a ship up on her keel and giving her a good careening. It seems, at least on the face of it, a veritable pirate paradise.
This idea caught the imagination of European writers and one in particular, the man who fancied himself Captain Charles Johnson, devoted a good deal of paper to writings on the piratical community he call Libertalia. Johnson, the author of A General History of Pyrates, has come down to us as either an eye witness authority on piracy or a complete crank. It just depends on who is commenting on his work. The idea of Libertalia, which is often reputed to have been based on Ile Sainte-Marie, has caught the imagination of many moderns because of its very modern take on community. Whether or not it actually existed is the point that must be questioned.
Libertalia according to Johnson’s book was the brainchild of a merchant seaman turned pirate named James Misson. In his vision, which was spurred on by his association with a “lewd Priest” from Rome named Giacomo Caraccioli, the Frenchman saw all men as brothers, no organized religion as valid, and slavery as the cruelest of human ills. His pirate utopia was established under a white flag and Libertalia’s motto was “For God and Liberty”. The pirates cruising out of Ile Saint-Marie called themselves Liberi and shared all goods and prizes in common. They routinely set any slaves they came upon free and so their numbers were increased rapidly by the grateful Africans joining up right away. According to Johnson’s description, Libertalia lasted 25 years and welcomed such famous and infamous captains as Thomas Tew, Christopher Condent, Henry Avery and William Kidd. The end of Libertalia is as egalitarian as its founding was revolutionary. Eventually the pirates grew weary of their lives at sea and settled down with the local girls to farm land where “… no hedge bounded any particular man’s property…” and the fruits of their labors were “… carried into the Common Treasury”.
No one would deny that the idea of Libertalia is delightful. Of course, we would all like to imagine the lion lying down with the lamb and beating swords into plowshares. The reality, however, is that Johnson chose unwisely in his fantasy populace. Pirates, though in many ways more democratic than the societies they preyed upon, were also ruthless brigands who were far from altruistic. Slaves were more often than not prizes to be sold, other pirate crews could be a threat to the amount of loot each individual might get, and the last thing these sailors were cut out for was farming. In many cases, getting away from the drudgery of agriculture was why they went to sea in the first place. Then, too, there’s the harsh fact that to take a prize or prizes, some killing will probably have to be done and that seems a poor way to treat a brother.
Ile Sainte-Marie was certainly a pirate base during the heyday of the “pirate round” from approximately 1690 to 1725. There can be no doubt that men like Tew, Edward England, Avery and Kidd at least touched at the island and several shipwrecks dating from the era have been found in the waters around Sainte-Marie. One in particular, sunk in Baie des Forbans not far from the island’s capital, is thought by the explorer Barry Clifford (of Whydah fame) to be Christopher Condent’s Flying Dragon. There is also the old cemetery that overlooks the bay (pictured above) known as le Cimitere des Pirates where modern residents continue to leave offerings for their freebooting ancestors. That seems to me a far more factual legacy than any pirate utopia could ever be.
In the French port city of Bordeaux on the Bay of Biscay the Governor, Louis Urbain Aubert, Marquis de Tourny, was full of big ideas. The Marquis, who was of royal blood even if it was only a drop or two, wanted his city to rival Paris in her grandeur. The way he financed his ambition was by backing and increasing the fleet of privateers that sailed from the port against that perpetual rival of France, Britain. The Marquis handed out commissions and encouraged ship building beginning immediately after he took office in 1743.
In 1744 one of the first new ships to slide out of dry dock into the Bay was a 460 ton, three-masted brig armed with 24 guns and a crew of approximately 150 men. She was christened that spring in honor of Louis’ wife, Jeanne Claude Cherouvrier des Grassieres and the lady’s full name was molded onto the shiny brass of the ship’s bell. La Marquise de Tourny set sail in search of British merchants, navy ships and privateers.
Fast forward to 2008 when a sizeable wreck, previously undocumented, was discovered in the English Channel by the famous exploration group Odyssey Marine. The ship lay on the bottom of the Channel approximately 60 miles off the coast of Devon and she was unfortunately disturbed by previous trawling. The Odyssey team at first thought they may have found a British merchant from the Napoleonic era, but closer inspection revealed a different story. The wreck carried mounted guns numbering 25 and no reasonable cargo could be located although heavy ballast was everywhere. Odyssey began regular dives in preparation to pull up the artifacts related to the ship and found the answer to the mystery. There among the blue glass bottles of French origin and the ten foot long cannons, was a brass bell now verdigris green. On the bell was the name of Madame la Marquise and from there the identity of the ship was only a few hours of research away.
La Marquise de Tourny had been a privateer masquerading as merchant. She may very well have been carrying “organic” cargo such as coffee, indigo and/or sugar which would, of course, no longer be detectable. Her voyages would have taken her from the Bay of Biscay through the English Channel into the French ports of Saint-Malo, Calais and Dunkirk. On her way she would have passed two of the outposts of British privateering, the islands of Guernsey and Jersey. There is documentation that she took at least one prize in the area in 1749 during the War of Austrian succession.
But did the French privateer succumb in battle? Did she go down fighting, so to say? The evidence says no. Odyssey co-founder Greg Stemm and his team think the sea and the weather were the end of their find. La Marquise de Tourny was probably playing merchant on her last voyage when she foundered in a storm. The sinking is currently dated to some time between 1749 and 1755. Regardless, the find is remarkable. As Stemm points out in this article from BBC.co.uk, she is “… one of our most important discoveries in the English Channel.”
As a superstitious sailor myself, I feel compelled to note an interesting dénouement to this story. After taking part in the christening of the ship that sailed with her name, Madame la Marquise went back to the business of being a gentlewoman. Almost exactly two years after her namesake sailed, on March 17, 1746, Jeanne Claude died suddenly at the age of 50. Was it an ill omen for La Marquise de Tourny? One way or another, you would have to think so.
Header: La Marquise de Tourny in situ
Growing up, we lived all over the country. If we’d been in one place for two or three years, you just knew any day now Dad would be home with the “Honey, we’re moving” speech. We had the good fortune, though, to usually live by a large body of water: the Pacific Ocean, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico. So I remember watching the sky for clues to the weather because Dad drilled the old rhyme into us kids: “Red sky at night, sailor delight; red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.” My friends were always surprised that I knew ahead of time when we weren’t going to have to dress out for gym.
