Previous posts here, here, and here have quantified it might have taken somewhere between 44 and 47 people-years to construct and outfit a medium sized Viking longship. How big a community would it take to construct a longship? So the next question that comes to my brain is how many farmsteads would have to work […]
The Maritime Museum of San Diego has a large collection of ship models. While visiting the delightful museum recently I took a number of pictures of models of sailing ships that were in operation somewhere in the vicinity of the Pirate Age. Also got a large number of shots of the life-size San Salvador and […]
Continued discussion of the value of coinage during the pirate era. Part one is here So how do we understand British pounds circa 1600? A fun website called Life in Elizabethan England, provides background on coinage. One page provides basics of Money and Coinage. Most significant piece of information is that there was no […]
The Spanish silver dollar is referred to as the first global currency. There were so many produced and they spread so far across the world that they were the common currency. Because the Spanish silver dollar was present everywhere and the valuations referred to during the pirate are in British pounds, let’s explore the value […]
In Black Flags, Blue Waters author Eric Jay Dolin says pirates would rather not engage in a fight when they captured a prize ship. The downside of a battle is the target ship might be sunk, some of the valuable cargo might be destroyed, and more significantly some of the pirates might get hurt or […]