From the Days of Fighting Sail
John Rackham – Calico Jack
Measured by his hauls and compared to many other pirates of his time, John Rackham also known as Calico Jack (his nickname was derived from the calico clothing that he wore, while Jack is a nickname for John) was not a prominent figure – rather a “small fish” with a spatially limited sphere of activity, his female companions were much better known.
Anne Bonny and Calico Jack, portrayed by Clara Paget and Toby Schmitz
Therefore, not much is known about his earlier life, except that he was probably born in England in 1682 and then moved to the Caribbean. Until the end of November 1718, he sailed as quartermaster on the brigantine of the pirate Charles Vane. When Vane refused to attack a French warship with superior armament, Rackham stood up to him and demanded that he board the enemy. Vane initially prevailed and the pirates escaped the warship, but the next day a majority of the crew declared Vane a coward, deposed him, and elected Rackham captain. Vane and his few followers were left with a small captured sloop, complete with provisions and ammunition.
John Rackham in “A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates”, published 1725
Rackham subsequently plundered a number of ships; he initially turned down the royal amnesty that Woodes Rogers had brought with him to New Providence in July 1718. In the spring of 1719, after a few more captures, he overhauled his brigantine in the Bahamas. There Rackham met a married woman named Anne Bonny, who became his mistress and was soon pregnant. Rackham is said to have bought her off her husband James Bonny for a considerable sum.
After a sloop sent out by Rogers drove him off and took two pinches back from him, Rackham settled in Cuba for a time. He lived there with “a sort of little family” until he ran out of money and food; this apparently refers to Anne Bonny and their child together. In between, he now also submitted to the royal amnesty and sailed as a privateer for Woodes Rogers. Part of this crew was Mary Read, who was later arrested with him. According to legend, Anne and Mary Read fell in love with each other after they had to show up on board disguised as men. Historian Susan Baker also suggested that there was a lesbian relationship between the two, expressed in love and concern for each other. Whether they were purely lesbian is quite speculative, but more likely they were bisexual, considering that Anne and Mary had sexual relationships with men as well. Today the term might be pirate sluts.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read in “A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates”, published 1725
Rackham and his crew quickly relapsed as pirates, however, and eventually the Bahamas dispatched a heavily armed sloop under Jonathan Barnet, a privateer, to seize them. Barnet surprised the pirates off Cape Negril in western Jamaica during a drinking bout and overpowered them with little resistance. Only the two female pirates are said to have put up a determined fight.
Proclamation from Woodes Rogers naming Jack Rackham and crew as pirates, 1720
Rackham and his men were tried in Santiago de la Vega in Jamaica on 16 November 1720, found guilty, and hanged the following day. The two women escaped the gallows by claiming to be pregnant. Read is said to have died in prison. There is only speculation about Bonny’s further fate. She is said to have been freed through the influence of her father and returned to Charles Town, where she is said to have spent the rest of her life married and with children. Others say she simply disappeared, but it is known that she was not hanged.
Bullet Points:
** What’s a measly $3 billion? I mean, it’s not like it’s “our money” we borrow it from ourselves in a paper shuffle. Pentagon Bucks often take this reprehensible practice further by putting their own spin on things and yes, it represents a shell game.
“We’ve discovered inconsistencies in how we value the equipment that we’ve given,” an unnamed senior defense official told Reuters, adding that it’s possible the $3 billion discrepancy could grow even larger as the Department of Defense continues scrutinizing its accounting error.
Many of the weapon transfers to Ukraine have come from Pentagon stockpiles rather than straight from a factory. According to two DOD officials, the Pentagon used replacement cost for these but should have used the Pentagon’s “net book value,” which is the Pentagon’s original purchase cost minus depreciation.
** If inner city democrats stopped shooting each other, gun violence would be reduced by 90%.
** They said that Noah was a crazy conspiracy theorist. Then the rain came and the fact-checkers drowned.
** A friend of mine who lives in Asia was advocating pizza with chicken feet. I didn’t believe him. They cook the chicken feet until they’re gelatinous and then put them on a pizza…he sent photos.
** Dementia (h/t Boron) I was going to write something about the study but I forgot…something.
** The Supreme Court has ruled Biden’s $430 billion student loan ‘forgiveness’ plan unconstitutional. The cases are Department of Education v. Brown, United States Supreme Court No. No. 22–535, and Biden v. Nebraska, United States Supreme Court No. 22–506.
In the first, the High Court unanimously (and, in my humble opinion, correctly) held that the plaintiffs, who were not eligible for Biden’s student loan relief, lacked standing to sue because they could not show that they had been harmed directly by it.
In the second, the vote once again was six to three, with the six Republican-appointed justices voting for the Constitution and the three Leftists voting against it.
The dissent, in effect, would remove the lawmaking power of Congress from congress and award it to the Secretary of Education, which in this case did not even abide by its own rules and procedures of public comment, and so on, before issuing an administrative fiat.
Chicken Feet/Legs-Christmas bring a dish office lunch. Interesting fare since all but two (both Gweilo-westerners) of the Singaporean staff were of Chinese and Malay ancestry. Large plate of Chicken Feet with Legs showed up. Have to be respectful but the plate was empty when I got to it…real blessing. Sea Cucumber was another delicacy I couldn’t handle.
Cletus
Watching Chinese people tear into a fish is interesting too. I’ve witnessed it a number of times, and it’s never pretty.
I’ve eaten fish since I was old enough to watch for bones (yeah we never had fillets when I was growing up), but the Chinese taught me to eat the cheeks of the fish. Very nice medallions and tasty although it’s bad form to more than one.
I was raised on the Texas Coast in Lapland (border of Texas and Louisianna) and never saw a Cajun dig the medallions out, and us Cajuns are close to Chinese in that we eat almost anything.
Cletus
I visited a forest outside of Changsha in Hunan Province once. There were no birds, no squirrels, no ants, nothing everything by way of protein had been eaten by the Chinese.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVABcl5qPA0
Chicken feet are (psychologically) revolting to me, but it’s functionally eating chicken skin, so far as I can tell. Sea cucumber is plain revolting. An animal that distracts predators by vomiting out its own digestive tract (yeah, really) should be haram. (Lizards that shed their tails are much classier.) Two sea cucumber anecdotes.
1. I knew an invertebrate biologist (studied them, he personally had a spine) who specialized in radially-symmetrical animals (as opposed to bilaterally symmetric ones). He said their professional society always served sea cucumber at the annual banquet, on account of them being radially symmetric. He was laughing, but I could see the pain in his eyes. 🤣
2. My girlfriend and I were walking through some Chinatown one day (FTR I hate Chinatowns). Sea cucumbers (bêche de mer) are often sold dried. You have to soak them to rehydrate before cooking. This one shop had about a dozen on the counter, soaking in a rectangular metal pan for the convenience of the impatient sea-cucumber eater. Girlfriend looked at them, made a face, and said, “I know they’re sea cucumbers, but it looks like a surgical tray full of amputated negro penises.” I’ve never seen such a thing, but she’s probably right. Blech.
Eating fish amongst Chinese. If served a whole fish (a big one on a platter, not a fried smelt), you eat from the top side. When that’s picked over, you sever the backbone at the neck and remove that to get at the uneaten side. You NEVER flip the fish over. Never. The reason is the the words for fish and good fortune are homonyms. So of course the Chinese have a superstition that having a fish to eat means you have good fortune (okay, this part is basically true). Turning the fish over is symbolically is equivalent to deliberately breaking your good luck (or worse, breaking your host’s good luck). This is the part that’s a goofy belief. I take no responsibility for it, but I observe the spine ritual when amongst actual Chinamen.
Ref #2: Which girlfriend, the Swedish bombshell or PKG? I simply wondered which one might have seen a dozen severed negro penises for reference.
Neither. Before their time. Although with Swedish Girl (MD, PhD) who knows what she’s seen? She was assigned to 6 months in a urology clinic during her training (for some damn reason). In the US we rotate through month-long rotations, apparently in Denmark* where SG did med school and residency, it’s less structured and you can get stuck in some weird area. Or so I was told.
*med schools in DK have a set-aside quota for Swedish applicants. Swedes who matriculate there are looked upon with some disdain and resentment as affirmative action beneficiaries.
PKG has minimal clinical experience, being a PhD. She has seen a lot of morbidly obese persons though — her dissertation was on methods for assessment of body composition and she did hands on measurements ranging from underwater weighing to MRI scanning. But to my knowledge she has not seen any negro penises, attached or detached.
There are elements to medicine that are repellant. I won’t go farther but I’m glad somebody is willing to jump in and do the work.
I have had neither chicken feet nor sea cucumber. I remember seeing some sea cucumbers in-situ 60+ years ago when we spent a couple of months living on the beach in San Diego. They do sell chicken feet at the H.E.B Grocery Stores, but I am not game to try them.
I did have an interesting culinary occurrence some 30 or so years ago. I went to lunch after church with a friend at a Southern Asian restaurant in Arlington, Texas. I wasn’t reading the labels on everything and got what looked like curried catfish fillets. They even tasted something like fish. When I went back for a second pass at the buffet, I saw that they were lambs brains. No seconds on that for me. But hey, if I was really hungry, I would eat them again, cooked.
What is the textural difference between curried catfish and lamb’s brains?
Hmm, I would think that replacement costs plus logistical cost to get the material to the destination would be a more realistic figure but then I did have to suspend common sense a couple of times during my accounting classes.
The Supreme Court these days is seemingly the only check on the tyrannical impulses of government. The other very important case was 303 Creations, which defined compelled speech to be unconstitutional. I see this as preventing some government entity from required nutty things like preferred pronouns on pain of losing your job. Some lawyer is going to make a mint off an idiot government agency controlled by their woke DIE department that tries to force stuff like this on us.
The Federal Government ignores the Supreme Court unless it wants to unleash whatever rule on a patriot.
Pizza – saw one picture of a pizza covered with round slices of bananas. Guess that’s still preferable to chicken feet.
When I lived in Kyushu, I used to visit Shakey’s Pizza in Fukuoka every Friday when it was a buffet. The general rotation for toppings was:
1- pepperoni
2- cheese
3- cuttlefish
4- tuna
And go back to #1. Cuttlefish was surprisingly ok, but tuna, not so much.
tuna pizza…no.
Tacos maybe?
Tuna tacos? I’ve wedged tuna and fixings into a pita pocket, so maybe it would work in a taco, but why would I? There is other fish that I’d rather have in a taco. BUT to be fair, I never tried Tuna.
Tucker’s not fooled by Admiral Duck, but who is, really?
It is an abomination.
It’s an in your face insult.
That is the intent.
Sometimes I think they want an insurrection.
They run up and down along the lion’s cage, hitting the bars with a stick without knowing that the gate is unlocked.
And a lot of people are waiting for: Open Season – No bag limit.
I don’t think they really want an insurrection. But they need to be hated. That validates their paranoid world view of eternal innocent victimhood. It also keeps them united, because their various internal factions can barely stand each other. If the hatred is too much psychological pressure to bear then they tell themselves “It’s because those benighted savages are JEALOUS of us.” There is never any introspection nor even much self awareness. It’s group narcissism.
Do Duck Levine, or AOC, or Patricia Cullors spend much time thinking “What might I have done to harm or offend my fellow man? If I have done wrong, how can I make amends?” I seriously doubt it.
Good point.
But if they were only pawns…
Put that link to Lara Logan’s twitter story on another site. It wasn’t long before nobody could log into it any more.
The game is afoot.
“Pirate sluts.” I’m dying laughing hear, thought I’d heard it all. Good name for a goth rock band.
Add an apostrophe (The Pirate’s Slut) and you have Amber Heard’s come back movie. Speaking of whom, is Aquaman 2 out? And how much screen time does AH have in that? The rumor is that they keep trimming her scenes.
(The next woke disaster of a superhero movie from Warner/DC: AquaMa’am 3: The Transition. Yep, you heard it here first, folks.)
I can hear the “parthenogenesis does occur in fish” talking points, already.
-Kle.
Might need to look at “Black Sails”…looks a little like Yellowstone (that I do not watch), only in the Caribbean on boats.