frandroid | Entries tagged with pirates

It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.

What have you finished reading: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling. Well, I've finished the novella, I still have to finish reading to post interview. But anyway. It did not get any better. So much potential, such wooden writing.

When I was in secondaire 1 (grade 7), we had a French creative writing assignment that was fairly open, so I decided to write a sort of American detective short story, like some sort of Noir thing even though I didn't know this genre name at the time. I made such a pastiche of it that my teacher accused me of plagiarism, and gave me a D instead of a better grade. I was too flummoxed and timid to challenge her so I got stuck with the grade. That year in general was pretty bad in French for me because it turns out that my elementary school had decided that some parts of the French curriculum were optional, and my peers from that feeder school had to play catch up in secondaire. ("Mais ou et car ni or"? What's that? Conjonctions de coordination? I'm still not sure.)

Anyway, I feel like Sterling wrote that novel in the same type of pastiche I did back then. It's so wooden. The only good thing about it is that when I saw a reference to Fiume in Pirate Utopias, I knew what that was and I still plan to hunt that French book down.

Actually the public library has a number of books about Gabriele d'Annunzio...

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/search.jsp?N=&No=10&Ntk=Subject_Search_Interface&Ntt=D%27Annunzio%2C+Gabriele%2C+1863-1938.

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM3957715&R=3957715

"...what is worth a mention ashore is surely worth a word afloat."

So I've resumed reading Wilson's Pirate Utopias, where I learned that the events in the book Pirate Utopia published by Bruce Sterling were based on a REAL "pirate" republic!!

The Republic of Bou Regreg was not a pure pirate utopia, but it was a state founded on piratical principles; in fact, it was the only state ever founded on these principles.*
...
*: Unless it be Gabriele d'Annunzio's infamous Republic of Fiume (1919), which financed its brief experience by piracy, and had a constitution based on the idea of music as the only force of social organization. See Philippe Julien, trans. D'Annunzio

Not that that makes that novella that much better, but anyway! All an exciting prospect, and another book (Julien's) to look forward to reading. Hopefully I can find the original French edition.

Here's a money quote from the penultimate chapter of Utopias: « Islam, to a certain extent, was the Internationale of the seventeenth century——and Salé perhaps its only true "Soviet" » 🙃 (The first half of this idea is pursued in Robert Kaplan's book about the Indian Ocean——yes, the neo-con author)

One thing I find frustrating with this book is that it feels like a work that was stopped short. The subtitle is "Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes"—the people found in the pirate republic of Salé, one of the three pirate-controlled towns at the mouth of the Bou Regreg river at Rabat in present-day Morocco. They are treated as a whole so in fact, Wilson only looks at a single pirate utopia. In the last two chapters, he compares this one to Fiume, to Nassau, to the sunken Port Royal, and to the various places in Madagascar that emerged, including the fabled Libertalia, which gets a longer look/rebunking (!). But it feels tacked on. It feels like the subject was supposed to be wider, but after finishing the research on Salé, Wilson decided he was done and wrapped up the book.

Nonetheless, it's a very interesting look at Mediterranean piracy which often gets overlooked for the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean.

Two things mar the book/the utopia. The first one is Wilson brief but obviously shocking defense of pedophilia as practiced in Salé, as a form of criticism in contemporary "conservative" sexual standards. A known item from Wilson, but remains disgusting.

The other one is about slavery. Caribbean pirates were not above keeping pirates enslaved; what to do with captured slaves depended on the crew, the captain and circumstances. Slaving was not the main target though. But in the Mediterranean, pirates were capturing a LOT of people for ransom and slavery. That was a common tactic between Europe and the Ottomans, and pirates were only too happy to do the same. Wilson describes a raid that a Salé fleet conducted in Reykjavik (!!) and finding that there were not that much valuable goods save some salted fish, they kidnapped people instead and brought them back home to be sold.

Now it's not like I thought pirates were angels—they are killers. But in general they tried to use overwhelming force, guile and intimidation to get the other party to surrender. That other party could also choose financial loss over murder and capitalism.

Save for some known psychopaths (Charles Vane, Blackbeard, maybe Ed Low?) pirates were often not going out of their way to kill people. But enslaving people was a choice, and that's one that the Sally Rovers often made.

Eventually I will read Gabriel Kahn's Life Under the Jolly Roger to further disabuse myself of life under piracy =) but more books about Kurds await me in the meantime.

One of the features I love the most about Twitter is that you can RT, and QT any bit of conversation. One of the most frustrating things I find about Mastodon is the intentional lack of a QT feature. One of the uses of QTs on Twitter is to recruit* people to come and harass the person making the original tweet. That really fucking sucks, but instead of making QTs opt-in or figuring out ways to moderate this type of behaviour better, Mastodon decided that it was too difficult to deal with and decided to not implement it.

Anyway, this is a side-rant to say that I LOL'd at this reply from

conuly in one of their threads here on DW:

Never misplace your wallet around an economist. :)

*: I was trying to find the term that's used for such recruitment. Is it brigading? I think that's it. My first guess was "embrigadeer", which I go from French, where "embrigader" is the term for "press-ganged"

The CBC and the LA Times have teamed up to publish this short-run podcast titled The Outlaw Ocean, looking into what happens at sea when you're outside legal oversight. In Episode 2: The Dark Fleet, host Ian Urbina starts following the Dark Fleet, fishing boats that turn off their transponders and go on overfishing in international and sometimes national waters of other nations. He does so aboard the Bob Barker, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's flagship. The crew of the Barker have decided to target The Thunder, the world's most nefarious illegal fishing ship. (It's on an Interpol list.) When they first meet and it's clear that there's going to be an encounter, the ship ditches its nets and decided to run for it. When a secondary Shepherd crew tries to pull the net out of the water (to keep it for evidence), it takes hours and hours to pull everything in because it's so long. So begins this long pursuit...

You can read the transcript here. But reading "intense music" doesn't live up to hearing the great sound production in this series. :)

Anyway, I'm at episode 4 now and it's a pretty intense podcast... There's been murders and slavery so far, so listener beware.

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A Conversation with Retired Forest Ranger Peter Romkey.

Shared Ground is a podcast I've started listening to recently, looking at the relationship between humans and the environment in Mikmaq'i, i.e. Nova Scotia. I find the podcast generally a little light, but this interview with a retired forester was really fascinating, in particular the importance of decomposing boles (trunks) in a healthy forest, and impacts of clear cutting and other forms of "enlightened" forestry. That sounds a bit nerdy but I thought it was pretty fascinating.

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I really need to write down my impressions right after listening to an episode... I have a backlog of 15+ episodes but I don't recall enough about them to write them up. Sigh.

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy.

The first five people to request it in the comments will receive 5 questions from me. (These questions came via

ioklopon)

1. Who is your favorite pirate (real or fictional) of all time?

I think Blackbeard's depiction in Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides is my favourite.

2. What's your favorite recipe to make?

Ohh, interesting question. There's a vegan belgian carbonnade that I make which is quite tasty, made with seitan and brown belgian beer. It's a bit of work so I don't make it too often. A more regular occurrence is this dish, Aloo Tama Bodi, which we discovered at a Nepalese restaurant ages ago. It's a creamy curry with potatoes, bamboo shoots and black eyed peas. Also recently I've started making my own seitan/okara sausages, and I'm trying different flavourings every time. It's a fun recipe to work on.

3. If you could have one dish ready-made that you could eat whenever you want with zero effort and zero expense, what would it be?

There used to be this falafel place in Vancouver named Desert Falafel. I think it was run by Israelis. Anyway, white people and definitely not Arabs, which is rare. This is where I had my first falafel and it remained the best falafel I ever had for years. At some point they moved to Commercial drive and became Oasis Falafel. They also made a latke pita, and if you wanted to be extra special, you could get the falatke pita, which had 2 falafel balls and half a latke patty. It was amazing. I miss it. The best falafel I've had in recent years is from Falafel Yoni in Montréal, also run by Israelis. But really, I'm a sucker for falafel (with a side of crispy fries and a can of cola) and could eat it very often. I actually did eat it all the time when I first moved to Toronto, as I was living close to Sara's Falafel on Bloor, and there a dirt cheap place that made a lemony falafel close to work, and there was Akram's (Syrian) with his tiny and uniquely flavoured falafels in Kensington Market. I ate so much falafel that year that I had to take a months-long falafel break at some point, because I was getting sick of it.

There are at least 5 falafel shops within walking distance of my place but none are top notch, so I don't indulge too much. Maybe I will next summer. I'm realizing that I should be having way more falafel than I'm currently having. Falafel shops that don't sell French fries are stupid, even if they sell awesome garlic potatoes.

4. If you had a 10-minute segment on national TV to cover any topic you wanted, what would it be?

It would be on the Kurdish liberation struggle. I find that most mainstream reporting on the issue is superficial. I know 10 minutes isn't that long to get into it, but that would be my thing. Or I would get into it with radical lefties who oppose arming Ukraine...

5. What's your favorite hockey moment?

It's funny because my parents weren't into hockey at all, but in 1984, 1985 or 1986 they put me in front of the TV at the start of the playoffs and I was hooked. There was this intense Nordiques/Habs rivalry and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. Back then we had divisional playoffs and both the Habs and the Nordiques were in the Adams division, as well as the perpetually bad Hartford Whalers, the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres. I think that first year the Nordiques beat the Whalers, and again a year later, but they didn't go further. But I recall watching these series intently. Then I recall watching the Stanley Cup finals in 1986, Habs versus Calgary Flames, and even though I "hated" the Habs I could only admire this team that included many French Canadians, including le casseau.

After that follow a long drought at the bottom of the standings for the Nordiques, resulting in first picks Joe Sakic, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin and Eric Lindros, so I had to fall back on watching Mario Lemieux carry the Penguins on his shoulders and win two cups in 1991 and 1992.

Then in 1993, with their young star players (though maybe Sundin had been traded to Toronto for Wendel Clark already at that point? I don't think so but can't be bothered to check) and the returns from the blockbuster deal that sent Eric Lindros to Philly, the Nordiques were competitive again, and qualified for the playoffs. Their first round opponent was the Habs.

The first two games were won by the Nordiques, good victories, so everything seemed to go well. Then the third game came, started, and the Nordiques were on fire, completely obliterating the Habs. They were everywhere on the ice. Then at some point Owen Nolan fired one of his famous slapshots but missed the net, and his shot smashed the glass pane behind the net, and everything fell apart. It took something like 10 minutes for the ice to be cleared of broken glass and a new pane to be installed. That break took all the wind out of the wings of the Nordiques. When play resumed, the Habs finally got their act together and eventually swept the rest of the series, 4 wins in a row. They then got a lucky break when Mario Lemieux's hand was broken by a Rangers player, so the Rangers could beat the Penguins. Then the Islanders beat the Rangers, but the Islanders were also the only team that hadn't won its regular season series against the Habs that year, and they once again couldn't beat them in the playoffs, so the Habs ended up playing Wayne Gretzky and his LA Kings in the final. They won the cup by playing the trap, ensuring that hockey would be boring for the next 15 years to come.

Two years later, the Nordiques were sold to Colorado and then promptly won the cup (after acquiring Patrick Roy from the Habs, something that would have been amazing had that happened in Québec City, since Roy was from there), making me boycott hockey for the next 15 years.

Chris Kreider broke Carey Price's wrist in the 2014 playoffs and I'm getting somewhat sick of Rangers players winning series that way...

Bonus questions, also from

ioklopon, from an earlier post!

6. Quel est ton livre préféré (qui est écrit en français)?

Oh wow. Way to call me out, I don't think I have anything good to report. :P J'ai pas mal arrêté de lire en français à l'âge adulte parce que les livres sur l'anarchisme que j'étais capable de trouver étaient en anglais, en ensuite j'ai déménagé à Vancouver et ça a continué comme ça. Quand j'étais adolescent j'ai lu Ça de Stephen King en français, d'une traite, je pense que ça m'a pris 22 heures, et c'était une drôle d'expérience de lecture, être complètement immergé dans l'histoire comme ça. Comme la fois à l'automne 2000 où j'ai lu l’hexalogie de Dune d'un coup. Mais ça c'était en anglais. Mais les deux fois, j'avais l'impression d'être gelé (high) tellement j'étais dans l'histoire. Un peu plus jeune, j'aimais la série Les Inactifs de Denis Côté, de la science fiction dystopique pour adolescents avec un personnage principal qui était pas mal un calque de Mario Lemieux. :) Mon auteur Québécois favori est Mordechai Richler mais il écrivait évidemment en anglais. (Les souverainistes haïraient cette idée que cet anglo pourrait être l'auteur Québécois favori d'un francophone.... :P )

7. What is one thing I should do the next time I'm in Quebec?

If you mean the province, I would say attend the yearly Montréal Anarchist Bookfair, it's an amazing event, the booksellers are awesome, many of the visitors are hot as hell in a punk way, and it's queer/trans as fuck. There are also awesome workshops on various topics relating to anarchism, and a dance party of some sort. It's usually held in May but was held in August this year, probably due to the pandemic. I'm going to bet that it'll come back to its May slot. Don't wait 10 years to visit--the original organizers have moved on and the new crew has less energy than before, though they're still putting on an amazing fair. Cindy Milstein helps organize from all the way over in SF, which gives you an idea of the change. (She's an amazing person to be getting help from though.)

If you mean Québec City, obviously visiting the old town is a must. You visit the old town, check out the shops, and then when you've had enough, you walk down l'escalier casse-cou to la rue Champlain and the Old Port. There you can visit the Musée de la Civilization (!!!), a decent popular museum. Some of their exhibits are great, some are shit, but it's a cool building. They have one or two good permanent exhibits about Québec culture. Otherwise you can visit the antiques shops or visit the maritime museum; I haven't been to the latter in 25 years but I recall it was nice. Then when the sun comes down, you get on the ferry to Lévis just so you can catch views of the old city from the St-Lawrence. You don't get off at Lévis; you just get back on the same ticket you boarded on. Another thing you can do from the old port is walk along the linear park along the St-Charles river, which used to be a concrete canal that has been renaturalized. It's impressive.

Then you go back uptown to rue Saint-Jean or rue Saint-Louis, inside or outside the old city, to one of the amazing bars like Le Drague or Le Temps Partiel. I can't recall if you're veg or not but it has a great meat-oriented restaurant scene and it really sucks for vegans, though it's getting a bit better on that side.

On the other side of Old Québec, uptown, at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, one can see Jean-Paul Riopelle's L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. It's a 40-foot long spray-painted, goose-stenciled triptych. I'm biased because he's my favourite painter, but it's awesome. (Apparently there's construction on a new Riopelle pavilion so I'd check availability first before attempting to visit.)

8. How did you get into zines?

I think I had heard of and maybe even seen a couple zines before, but when I moved to Vancouver in late 1998, one of my favourite haunts was the Spartacus Bookstore, a volunteer-run anarchist bookstore. They had a small zine section, of which I bought a few. Above that was the magazine section, which was sporting the final issue of Factsheet 5, the zine-reviewing bible of the 1990s golden age of zine publishing. They were getting so many zines to review that they limited themselves to only review great zines since they could spare neither ink nor paper for the bad ones. So in this issue there was probably a few hundred glowing zine reviews from around the world (though mostly the U.S.). I ordered a bunch of zines and I was like "wow, this is so awesome". I had been part of electronic/online underground scenes since the early 1990s, was a subscriber to the first ISP in Québec City within its first few months of operations, was part of the very first wave of people getting on the web, had moved to Vancouver due to my contact with some of these scenes, but this paper-based scene was still extremely attractive to me. I wanted everyone to read the zines I was getting but I obviously couldn't just buy tons of zines and just give them away willy-nilly. Then I discovered that people were running zine distros, i.e. sold zines at fairs and sometimes had online zine stores, so I decided I would do that, and the rest is history.

9. What your favorite thing thing you made/did with code/computer skills?

Back in the early 1990s I ran two BBSes, one after the other. I really enjoyed that time. There was very little coding involved but a fair bit of modding, which would be the textmode equivalent of web design/systems administration today. I was an ANSI artist so that was kind of my thing. More recently I just thoroughly enjoyed working for thestar.com because it's the biggest paper in the country and among its largest liberal/progressive media organizations, but I don't have particularly salient accomplishments there.

One of my early low-skill programming projects was Stationary Groove... An acquaintance had manually surveyed passengers at every subway station in the city to see what music they were playing, and wanted to produce an interactive map showing that. I ripped off the transit company's own code from its site, and also built a barebones Rails app to handle all of the song tracking to put them in a DB, and then used all of this to generate this map. There was very little skill involved but my acquaintance was a good PR person, and got a front-page story on the Star (before I worked there) out of it.

I also used to hand code all of my HTML (and there was no CSS back then). My two biggest publications were Operation Rescue, an ANSI art reviewing site that published reviews of monthly art packs for a number of years (I took the name from the Bad Religion song of the same name, not knowing it was the name of a pro-life group they were critiquing!!), and later on I also hand-coded my zine distro's site. If I had properly learned backend programming back then I would probably be somewhat wealthy now, it was a great time to get into that stuff.

So huh, that's a lot of me here!

What are you currently reading:

Pirate Utopias by Peter Lamborn Wilson.

I looked at the introduction again and it turns out that PLW is a trust fund dude. Hah.

Anyway, I've made some headway. He's giving a general background of piracy in north Africa, first in Algiers, and now focusing more on Salé, his principal focus. I've been listening to the Pirate History Podcast for the last year or so, and I've just finished his Mediterranean piracy arch (up to episode 100 or so), so it's nice to pick up this book now because it covers similar ground, though Matt Albers barely talks about "Salee" (he's really awful at pronouncing any non-English names). While Wilson's book is not particularly well annotated, he does refer to Marcus Rediker and Christopher Hill amongst other historians, so you know he's read the basic lit here. I noticed that the book was from 1995 – somehow I thought it was from much earlier. The old school type and engravings can give that impression. They make the book rather beautiful. Someone could make a deluxe edition of this book and it would sell like hotcakes. Anyway. More on this later on.

Please note the creation of a pirate book club tag.

Episode 4!! Okay this is picking up!!! WTF what is this bromance!! :)

Asides on the cast:
As soon as I saw Con O'Neill I was like "Where the fuck do I know this guy from???" and I couldn't place him, so I had to look him up. Turns out he was one of the managers of Chernobyl in the series of the same name. The one who looked Italian and felt totally out of place in the series. (Like, really bad casting!!)

The actress who plays Jim reminds me of

hexe which is really amusing when you look at Jim as basically the mirror image of Hexe, even getting discriminated against trying to get hired on a pirate crew.

☠️ ☠️ ☠️

Also for those of you mateys who don't keep up with vintage video game pirate news, there's a new Monkey Island game by RON FUCKING GILBERT coming out this year. This is the best video game news in 25 years, I'd say.

Watch on YouTube

What are you currently reading: A Michael Crichton novel, Pirate Latitudes. I know, I know. The recommendation came through a commenter on the Straight Black Sails group, too, which should have been warning enough. It contains many of the bad sexist/racist tropes you expect from pirate novels, though not many references to slavery or black people in general, I think? One character has a name, but keeps being referred to as "The Jew". This was published in 2010, not 1974... Also, the novel is realist for about 2/3rds of the way, but because Crichton got even lazier in his writing, at that point a pentagram is drawn to calm down a hurricane, and then afterwards our pirate crew meets a kraken. It would have been basic writing to link the two events (i.e. invoke the devil, face a creature from beneath) but that connection isn't even made. Also, most of the killing happens not in valiant sword combat, but when people are drunken/ly asleep, because our pirates are always attacking places with much larger crews/garrisons than pirates on hand. So crafty! The one good thing I got out of this book is an explanation of what breeching a cannon entails. There's a bit of decent naval combat writing but in the end everything is mostly about our good Captain and his smart associates thinking of engineering solutions from a century ahead to resolve their present-day problems.

Speaking of Black Sails, I'm now at Season 4 of my re-watch, along with the Fathoms Deep podcast, and it's A Lot of Podcast. The podcast started after S3 was out, so the main host had watched the show a million times and was able to provide lots of guidance on details and make lots of in-depth connections as they were going through the episodes from S1 thru S3. For S4, they put out the podcast as the episodes were coming out, so there's less in-depth analysis, and more first impressions. One part I'm enjoying is listening to their speculation on what's going to happen in future episodes. One other thing that's interesting is that the podcast got more popular and at that point they were able to get some cast (including Toby Schmitz,

sabotabby !), writers and directors on the show. (They're seriously fangirling over the actors, which is a bit annoying as a listener...) They even got one of the showrunners to come in for an interview. Looking forward to more interviews once they've finished the series so they can comment on everything without spoiling the future.

*** ETA: It turns out that this novel was found in Crichton's papers after his death. So even he had recognized that it wasn't that good, but obviously his estate only saw dollar signs. :P

Taika Waititi To Star In HBO Max Period Comedy Series ‘Our Flag Means Death’

As well as serving as director and executive producer, Oscar winner Taika Waititi will also star opposite Rhys Darby on screen in the new HBO series. From writer David Jenkins, Garrett Basch and Dan Halsted, "Our Flag Means Death" is loosely based on the true adventures of Stede Bonnet (Darby), a pampered aristocrat who abandoned his life of privilege to become a pirate. Waititi will play Blackbeard, history’s most feared andr evered pirate.

OMG this just sounds too good.

Black Sails is SO GOOD!! Just finished Season 3... Love the philosophizing between Silver and Flint so much. :)

I was perusing Wikipedia on Charles Vane, Woodes Rogers, Edward Teach, etc. today... So much of the actual or supposed history woven into the writing of the series, it's fun. (I must say I did not picture a bewigged Charles Vane though!! Zach McGowan has convinced me to grow my hair longer. Since I have a long beard, I'll have to decide whether I go Teach or Vane in the end... Maybe if I can make some slow-burning fuses??)

Now the only thing I'm asking is for in Season 4 is for Flint to get a little more gay, is that possible? Because Toby Stephens with that shaved head... UNF.

Current Mood: mischievious
Current Location: The undergound rivers of Monkey Island
Current Music: Blackbird Raum - Adder

So upon

sabotabby's repeated references, I started watching Black Sails, and it's the absolute bomb. I mean I can't really hide my weakness for pirates. (See my collection of political theory books about piracy, and my obsession with the Monkey Island games...)

So I kept thinking I had seen Toby Stephens before; he reminds me a fair bit of Hugh Grant, but I knew it wasn't simply that. Then this morning as I was ruminating over that in the bathroom, it came back; he was starring as Danton in the play Danton's Death, which F and I had seen at the National Theatre in London. Other than being a handsome fella (the real Danton was ugly as fuck), he delivered a pretty awesome performance. We were sitting high up in the rafters but his performance still reached us.

Max's character is awesome but I find Jessica Parker Kennedy's French accent to be such a porny stereotype as to be distracting.

Zach McGowan's face (Captain Vane) reminders me of a former boss I've had, who was entertaining but rather creepy towards women... and minus the abtastic body of course.

Yet another series to kill my sleep... Damn you!

Eric Margolis assesses the growing risk of war with Iran. Margolis is a right-winger but not a wingnut either. It's good food for thought anyway.

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Pirates hijack UN food aid ship

So much for glorifying pirates. I also like the userpic I've seen around that has Jack Sparrow saying something along the lines of "What? The rum was made with slave labour?"