THE SEA ROVER’S PRACTICE

The Sea Rover’s Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730   —-   by Benerson Little

The Sea Rover’s Practice isn’t really about Barbary corsairs, but it does deal with the corsair age, and, more importantly, it focuses on the basic constellation of skill sets that all Barbary corsairs absolutely had to have in order to prosper: seamanship.

The book casts a wide net—Chapter Two, for instance, deals with “freebooters, cruisers, corsairs, buccaneers, privateers, and pirates”—and deals with the practice of piracy in general. But it’s not a book about generalities. Rather, it’s really a sort of detailed “how to” book for pirates. A quick glance at the chapter heading gives you a good idea of what a pirate—or any stripe—needed to deal with:

• Baptisms, Pissdales, and Dog Watches: The Routine at Sea
• Piraguas, Sloops, and Ships: Tools of the Trade, Part I
• Of Small Arms and Fireworks: Tools of the Trade, Part II
• Hailing and Showing Teeth: The Prey in Range
• Plucking a Crow: Small arms and Great Guns
• Volleys, Grenades, and Cutlasses: Laying her aboard under Fire
• Houses, Towns, and Cities Sacked: The Sea Rover as a Soldier
• Rum, Women, Dice, Turtle, and Honor: The Routine Ashore

All this is presented in considerable detail, and as far as I can tell, the detail is all firmly grounded in solid research. Benerson Little knows his stuff.

Simply knowing your stuff doesn’t necessarily make you a good writer, though. Lots of academics know their stuff, but the books they write — even the ones on topics as potentially arresting as Barbary corsairs, pirates, slavery, and the centuries-long conflict between the Christian and the Muslim sides of the Mediterranean — are often not particularly engrossing reads.

Little doesn’t have this problem. Reading The Sea Rover’s Practice, I got the feeling that he personally finds the stuff he writes about to be genuinely fascinating. That fascination is infectious. This is a detailed, technical book, in that it deals with the technical skills required by pirates, but it’s not a dry book at all. Rather, it’s an absorbing insider’s look at what it was like to be a pirate.

Look at the following, for example, from Chapter 2 (Piraguas, Sloops, and Ships: Tools of the Trade, Part I) on the problems that cannons could cause on smaller ships (pirates generally used smaller ships):

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In heavy seas the great guns, their muzzles lashed to eyebolts in the hull, placed great strain on a light ship, weakening timbers and working caulking loose, and night eventually turn a ship, particularly an old one, into a sieve. Guns could be lashed parallel to or sideways to the hull, but in this position they took far too long to put into action. Carrying guns run out with the carriages pressed against the sills of the ports also decreased the strain. However, this manner required the nuisance of ‘half ports’ that fit around the barrels to close the ports to the sea, and the gun port lids themselves were kept open. Guns carried run out, their ports up, would catch or ‘hold wind’ to windward, creating drag, and in a running sea they would dip and drag in the water to leeward, slowing the ship and often wetting the powder within the gun barrels.

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This kind of practicality isn’t what most people think of when they imagine a pirate’s life. But being a successful pirate was like being a successful anything (astronaut, surf boarder, physician, oil painter, green grocer, soccer player, poet): the devil, as the old saying goes, is in the details.

Benerson Little provides those details.

Like this description of how to prepare a cannon for firing:

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To fire a great gun, the crew cast off the tackles and removed the tompion (stopper) that sealed the muzzle from the sea. They removed the lead apron that covered the vent, or touch hole, and removed the tallowed oakum that sealed the vent. Assuming the gun was already loaded, the gun captain pricked the cartridge with his priming wire, filled the vent with powder, pouring some behind the vent as well. He ‘bruised’ or crushed this powder with his horn so it would take fire more easily, then hung his horn out of the way of the flash of the priming when he fired the gun. At this point, depending on how long it would be until the gun was fired, he might cover the vent with the apron. Now the gun crew opened the port (if necessary) and ran out the gun.

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And just in case detailed descriptions like this prove to be a bit hard to follow, he includes useful illustrations. Like this one that shows the various accoutrements required to prepare and fire a “carriage gun” (i.e, a cannon):

As the book progresses, Little deals with all the various skillsets required for a pirate vessel to find a prey ship, chase it down, engage it with cannon fire, and, eventually board it:

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Good seamanship and a steady hand were required for effective boarding, for if her crew were alert and her vessel sailed well and answered the helm quickly, the prey night foil the attempt to board. Otherwise, if the rover sailed better he would sooner or later be aboard with his prey. In general, the prey was advised to try to force the attacker to board at the least convenient place; if the rover tried to board bow to bow and stern to stern, or amidships, the chase was advised to bear up and try to put the attacker to stern. With the wind abeam, and the attacker trying to board alongside, the chase might suddenly bear up into the wind, hoping to finds herself athwart the attacker’s hawse with the attacker’s bowsprit tangled in the main shrouds, but this was difficult to do from the lee gauge.

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Once again, in case the detailed description might prove to be a bit hard to follow, Little includes an illustration, this one showing the different boarding positions:

 

To enjoy The Sea Rover’s Practice, you have to be interested in the subject matter initially, but if you are (as I am), the details Little presents are genuinely engrossing. You can read the book from cover to cover or just dip randomly into the various chapters — there’s always some bit of interesting detail to discover.

For me, the experience was entirely satisfactory.

If you’re at all interested in seventeenth century pirates—of any sort, for the details Little presents apply to them all—then this is a book you’ll find not only informative but also quite fun.