
Paper Scraps Recovered from Blackbeard's Cannon - curtis
https://gizmodo.com/paper-scraps-recovered-from-blackbeards-cannon-reveal-w-1821821451
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Theodores
Here is a better article that gives away how the clues were matched to the
book, the book being the same one that inspired Robinson Crusoe:

[https://www.livescience.com/61351-blackbeard-pirate-book-
fra...](https://www.livescience.com/61351-blackbeard-pirate-book-
fragments.html)

We are somewhat naive about how people understood the world in former times.
People have been trading goods across continents for thousands of years. Much
like how we have no idea where are stuff from China comes from in any detail,
so it was in former times when buying spices from Africa or India. You might
buy pepper corns and have no idea they came from Africa.

Much of what we call piracy was the unofficial British Royal Navy, trading
stuff all around the world. Britain was highly invested in everything maritime
and sailors were the astronauts of the day. They did difficult navigational
things with sextants, compass things and much more, all requiring manuals and
therefore requiring literacy. Plus reading was fun in an era before TV. So why
do we portray pirates from times gone by as speaking funny with parrots on
their shoulders and a peg-leg?

~~~
sitharus
We picture pirates as speaking with an English West Country accent for a
couple of reasons. Edward Teach, who became famous as Blackbeard, was from
somewhere in the Bristol region so would presumably have spoken with this
accent. Also the 1952 film "Blackbeard the Pirate" cast a Dorset-born actor in
the lead role, who also spoke with a West Country accent, cementing the accent
in popular culture.

The peg-leg is a old popular image of experienced sailors. Sailing has always
been a highly risky occupation and it's easy to lose a leg to due gangrene
from splinters, scurvy, cannonball impact or getting it caught in the rigging.

I can't explain the parrot though.

~~~
zaroth
But if you accept the parrot, it explains the eyepatch! The eyepatch being a
direct result of the parrot.

~~~
codingdave
I thought the eyepatch was already well explained as a tool to keep one eye
used to the dark, in order to make it easier to switch between being on the
deck and in the hold.

~~~
Theodores
That is my new fact for the day!

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JoeAltmaier
tl;dr: pretty interesting reading material found crammed into cannon recovered
from Blackbeard's ship. Conclusion: pirates were sophisticated readers.

Probably used wadding for the cannon? So no, not what they were reading; what
they had pirated from other ships and their passengers, and had torn up and
stuffed into cannon to hold the powder and ball in place while they aimed. In
other words, what they regarded so little as to use as filler/trash.

~~~
benbreen
I think that it would be jumping to conclusions to say that, simply because
the book was repurposed, it wasn't first read by the crew. Early modern books
often passed from owner to owner and became extremely worn down. It's easy to
imagine a pirate reading the book (likely aloud to a group due to low literacy
rates) and then after it had become too waterlogged to want to hang on to,
finding a new use for it. That scenario doesn't imply that they thought of it
as trash.

~~~
kurthr
I would be intrigued to know the percentage of pirate gunners of 1800 that
could read at all. Best guess is less than 30% and most of those, barely
literate. England was, however, one of the best educated countries of the day.

[https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/](https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/)

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lerie82
Yea,it's pretty odd that it would be in a cannon if they were reading it lol.
If they were reading it, wouldn't they have found bindings?

