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Pieces of Eight!

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Literary History, Maps, Villains

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Blackbeard, Captain George North, Captain Kidd, coins, Doubloon, Edward Teach, Elizabeth I, Hernan Cortez, Inca, Long John Silver, Mexico, Muppet Treasure Island, N.C. Wyeth, Parrot, Pieces of Eight, Pirates, Privateer, reales, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Newton, San Luis Potosi, Sir Francis Drake, South America, Spain, Treasure Island, Young Folks

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In 1881-1882, a new serial appeared in the British children’s newspaper, Young Folks.  Its author was Captain George North and the story was entitled, “Treasure Island or, the Mutiny of the Hispaniola”.  In 1883, Cassell and Company published this in book form

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as Treasure Island, and its author’s name was right below the title:  Robert Louis Stevenson.

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The story had come about because Stevenson had seen his stepson, Lloyd, drawing a map.  Stevenson joined him and that map became the map.

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The book became a number of movies over the years, including one by the Muppets (1996),

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but our favorite is that made by the Disney studio in 1950.

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This version has Robert Newton as Long John Silver, the man whose twitches and vocal mannerisms have been passed down now as “the way pirates talk” (including—and especially on—“International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, September 19).

MBDTRIS EC018

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You’ll notice that parrot (as far as we know, there’s no “International Talk Like a Parrot Day”, unfortunately) on his shoulder.  We can trace this back to the original novel and identify him as “Captain Flint”, Silver’s pet.  Here he is in a picture from our favorite illustrated version, that of NC Wyeth, from 1911.

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(If you’d like your own early edition, with Wyeth’s illustrations—not his only pirate pictures, by the way—here’s a LINK to the 1913 printing.)

Among other parrotings, Captain Flint is given to calling “pieces of eight!” and, when we were little, we wondered “pieces of eight what?” and perhaps you did, too.  The story begins much earlier than the novel—about 1500.  It starts with this early Spanish silver coin called a “real” (14th century).

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About 1500, a new coin appeared, worth 8 reales,

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and this is a “piece of eight”.

It shouldn’t be confused with another coin Captain Flint might have exclaimed over, the doubloon.

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The doubloon (from Spanish  “doblon”—“double”) was gold, rather than silver, and was probably called “double” because it was worth two of the coins below, an escudo.

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Spanish silver supplies mushroomed after 1519, when a small expedition, led by Hernan Cortez (1485-1547)

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landed on the coast of Mexico.  The expedition was armed with European weapons and armor of the period.

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As they marched inland, they found an empire, with a capital set in the middle of a lake, with public buildings made of stone blocks.

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They also found that the local warriors were still living in the Neolithic Era and, though they were fierce, were no match for modern (early 16th-century) weapons.

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Farther south, other Spanish invaders found the same thing along the west coast of South America,

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and soon, they had enslaved the local populations and turned them to work in the silver mines, like that at San Luis Potosi, in Mexico.

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Their labor then produced vast quantities of precious metal, which was left in bars, or turned into coins—pieces of eight and others.  This was loaded on ships and sent back to Spain.

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Such riches didn’t escape the attention of Spain’s enemies, however, and soon such ships had to travel in convoys, with merchant ships being shepherded by warships.

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This didn’t prevent attacks completely, a famous leader of those attacks being Sir Francis Drake, from the days of Elizabeth I.

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Although the Spanish referred to Drake as a “pirate”, while England was at war with Spain (as it was for much of Drake’s later lifetime), to the English he was a “privateer”—a private naval commander holding a kind of license from Elizabeth I, which permitted him to attack enemy shipping at will (and to share the profits with the Queen’s government).  Because he wasn’t one of the government’s official officers, this created a kind of grey area, one which many sailors from western nations, as late as the Napoleonic wars, would take advantage of, slipping between government service and something which, even with that license, could look like piracy.  Such men included the notorious, like Captain Kidd

image21kidd

(of whom there is no portrait—we inserted this just for fun)

and Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”.

image22blackbeard

(His beard isn’t really on fire, by the way.  He wove bits of matchcord—used to fire ships’ guns and touch off handgrenades—into it to give himself a fiendish aspect.)

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image24grenado

Rather than sharing it with governments, both men were said to have taken much of their loot ashore and buried it in now-lost locations—

image25treasure

which brings us back to the map and Captain Flint squawking, “Pieces of eight!”

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D31MWE Long John Silver. Image shot 1954. Exact date unknown.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and definitely

MTCIDC (matey!)

CD

ps

The most famous of Blackbeard’s ships, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has been located off the coast of North Carolina, here in the US.  Here’s a LINK to the site which talks all about the discovery and the ongoing archaeology.

A Pirate’s Life…

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Tags

Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Algiers, Anduin, Barbary Coast, buccaneer, corsair barbary, Corsairs, draught, dromon, dromunds, galley, Harad, Haradrim, Harlond, Helm's Deep, Legatus Regis Barbariae, Pelennor, Pirates, Ramas Echor, Southrons, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Turkish galley, Umbar, US Navy WW2 fighter

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In a previous posting, we mentioned the Corsairs of Umbar.

If you google “corsair” in images, the first thing which appears is this:

image1corsair.jpg

It’s a US Navy WW2 fighter—but hardly what was sweeping to attack the south coast of Gondor in Sauron’s massive campaign.

Change that to “corsair pirate” and you see things like

image2piratecostume

which is definitely a bit better, but he looks so 18th-century.  As we have discussed in many of our postings, Middle-earth is Middle Ages (more or less), even if it mixes High Medieval (things like the plate armor of the Prince of Dol Amroth) with Anglo-Saxon (the Rohirrim).  So “corsair pirate” is too late in time.  Another word (with a much-discussed origin) for “pirate” is “buccaneer”, so, how about “corsair buccaneer”?

image3trailer

Ooops!  Okay—clearly that doesn’t work!

So what will—and what are we really looking for?  Well, what do these corsairs look like according to JRRT?

They have black sails:

For Anduin, from the bend at the Harlond, so flowed that[,]from the City[,] men could look down it lengthwise for some leagues, and the far-sighted could see any ships that approached.  And looking thither they cried in dismay; for black against the glittering stream they beheld a fleet borne up on the wind:  dromunds, and ships of great draught with many oars, and with black sails bellying in the breeze.

‘The Corsairs of Umbar!’ men shouted.  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

Anything more?

In The Lord of the Rings, unfortunately not.

Umbar is in Harad,

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however, and there is a little about the Haradrim.  Our first view of them is Sam’s:

Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them.  He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar.  His scarlet robes were tattered, his corselet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood.  His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword. (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Other details?

Just before Sam speaks, Gollum has reported seeing:

‘Dark faces.  We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not.  They are fierce.  They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold.  And some have red paint on their cheeks, and red cloaks; and their flags are red, and the tips of their spears; and they have found shields, yellow and black with big spikes.  Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look.  Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger.’ (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed.”)

“cruel and tall” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

They have cavalry and they are armed with scimitars. (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

These would seem to be people from Near Harad (that is, near to Gondor).  The men to the south of them differ:

“…Southrons [men from Near Harad] in scarlet and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

But all of this to us suggested a model from our own world (as always):  the Barbary Pirates.  So how about the search terms “corsair barbary”?

image4barbarycorsair.jpg

Ah.  That’s a bit more like it, we think.  He has to lose his gunpowder weapons, though—the only gunpowder in Middle-earth appears to be something in the hands of Saruman and Sauron’s orcs, as we see at Helm’s Deep

image6ahelmsdeep.jpg

and the wall of the Pelennor, the Ramas Echor.

We would imagine those corsairs, then, as looking like the infamous “Barbary Pirates”.

They certainly fill the bill geographically—they’re southern (at least in relation to JRRT’s England)–their hangouts being on the coast of North Africa

image6barbarycoast.jpg

and, if you wanted a big port city, as Umbar was supposed to be, here’s Algiers.

image7algiers.png

What about ships—that is, “dromunds and ships of great draught with many oars”?

“Dromund” is a medieval form of the Byzantine Greek dromon, literally a “runner”—a word you’d recognize from the English word “hippodrome”—the “place where horses run”.  This was the common larger Byzantine warship.

image8dromon.jpg

Here’s a Renaissance-era engraving of a Turkish galley.

image9barbarygalley.jpeg

There’s a difficulty with “ships of great draft with many oars”, however.  Draught (also spelled “draft”) is the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the keel, as in this diagram.

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Ships with many oars are, commonly, galleys,

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and galleys commonly have a shallow draft—both to allow for maneuver in shallow waters and to allow for the oars to do their job most efficiently.  So, we presume that all of the Corsairs’ vessels were actually galleys of various sizes.

image12galleys.jpg

Jackson’s Corsair ships have something of the look of JRRT’s description, but his

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depiction of the Corsairs, unlike that of Rohan and the Rohirrim, is not even close to the little we have learned so far from the text.

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The Barbary Pirates, to us, not only match point of origin and vessels, but are much more exotic and colorful, whereas those in the film look to us more like dingy Vikings.

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And here’s a portrait

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of the Moroccan ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I (notice that, in the caption he’s called Legatus Regis Barbariae, “deputy of the King of Barbary”—a splendid figure with a splendid name:  Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun—imagine him facing Aragorn from the deck of a galley—we think that the Oath-breakers would have had little fear for him, even as they overwhelmed him and his crew.

image17corsairs.jpg

So, as always, we ask you, readers, what do you think?

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

Just a thought, but, if Sauron, as one of the Maiar, was virtually immortal and had the kind of power which is displayed in the forging of the Ring, why did he need vast fortresses and armies and fleets?  Something to think about in a future posting!

Accuracy? Well, Yes, But…

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

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American Civil War, American Revolution, Concord, Don Troiani, Germantown, grenadiers, H. Charles McBarron, Harper's Monthly, Howard Pyle, Illustration, John Trumbull, Joseph Warren, King Arthur, Lexington, Pirates, Richard Simkin, The Battle of Bunker Hill, The Battle of Nashville, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Salem Wolf, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Today’s post takes us to the question of what we like and why and how such likes may push us—who, we realize, are a little stiff on the subject of accuracy—to accept things which, if our feelings weren’t engaged, we would briskly reject.

We begin by looking at a painting by one of our favorite late Victorian/Edwardian illustrators, Howard Pyle (1853-1911).

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If you’re a regular reader (and we hope you are—or will be!), you’ll have seen his work on our pages any number of times, from his King Arthur illustrations (and here’s a LINK to a free 1922 reprint at the Internet Archive)

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to his pirates (and here’s a LINK to a later—c.1921—collection of Pyle’s pictures and writings on pirates at Internet Archive).

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Pyle also wrote and illustrated original fiction—just look at this haunting picture from a short story, “The Salem Wolf”, which was published in the December, 1909, issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine.

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(And here’s a LINK to the story at Internet Archive)

Pyle also painted stand-alone historical pictures, such as this of “The Battle of Nashville” (1907).

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And we’re lucky to have a photograph of the artist at work on this very picture.

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Besides American Civil War pictures, Pyle painted several based upon incidents of the American Revolution, such as this, of the assault on the Chew House, at the Battle of Germantown (4 October, 1777).

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Another of his pictures of the Revolution is the subject of this post, “The Battle of Bunker Hill” (1897).

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We’re not sure when one of us first saw this picture—childhood, we’d guess—but we were immediately bowled over by it. It’s the adventure of it: those long ranks of redcoats stoically marching up the hill, drums beating behind. It’s not a sanitized picture—just look up the hill and all around you can see the wreck of the earlier British attacks—but its emphasis is upon the courage it must take to do what those soldiers did.

This was, in fact, the third battle of the American Revolution. The war had begun in mid-April, 1775, when a raiding party of British troops, ordered to disrupt local preparations for defense, fought two skirmishes with local militia, at Lexington

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and Concord,

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two rural settlements some twenty miles or so west of Boston.

When the British withdrew into Boston itself, those locals, who had grown in numbers to about 15,000, drawn from all over New England, blockaded the town and there was a period of stalemate, while both sides were reinforced. When it was clear that the locals had seized a nearby hill and were planning to plant artillery there which would then be capable of bombarding Boston, the British were forced to move. Their choice was to attack that hill, which was named “Breed’s Hill” but, through an historical mix-up, the battle was named for the hill to its rear, “Bunker Hill”.

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Initially, the British plan was to have part of its force make a feint—a fake attack—against the main part of the hill, where the locals had built an open-backed fortification, called a redoubt, while the real attack was to push through the weaker local left and curve around to hit the locals from the rear.

By underestimating the defense, the British soon suffered over a thousand casualties to the local 450. As the assaults were driven back, the British plan changed and the main attack was to be uphill, straight at the redoubt and this is what is depicted in Pyle’s painting, specifically the advance of the 52nd Foot (“Foot” is 18th-century shorthand for “regiment of infantry”).

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This is not the first well-known painting of the battle, however. In the first third of the 19th century, John Trumbull (1756-1843), a prominent American artist, painted several versions of a work entitled, “The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775”.

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This picture belongs to what we might call both the “heroic school” and the “portrait school”, the former because of a certain flashy quality (look at the way the wind seems to be whipping everything—and where are those flames on the right coming from?), the latter because, not only is the local officer, Joseph Warren depicted, but so are a number of other figures—two of the British generals, two British majors, and a number of more minor participants.

Bunker Hill remained—and remains—a popular subject for historical painters, most of them depicting events from the local side. Here is one version, by the distinguished 20th-century American military artist, H. Charles McBarron (1902-1992).

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And here are two by one of our favorite contemporary American Civil War artists, Don Troiani (1949-).

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All pictures are not from the viewpoint of the colonists, however. The late-Victorian/Edwardian British military artist, Richard Simkin (1850-1926), gave us this view.

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Of all of these images, the Trumbull has drawn upon his memory and upon his sketchbooks, too, we bet, to give a general impression of the look of the soldiers, but, although he was part of the colonial force besieging Boston, he only saw the battle through a telescope. McBarron was a collector of uniforms and equipment, as is Troiani, and their works are painstakingly accurate. Simkin, although he, too, was a collector, came from an earlier time, just at the beginning of serious research on weapons and uniforms of the past, and, therefore, certain elements in his picture—the plumes and cords on his men’s bearskins and those packs (left behind in Boston, in reality), for instance—are not correct. Even so, his picture is far more accurate than Pyle’s, which is full of mistakes, in everything from the uniforms and equipment to those grenadiers (those guys in the fuzzy hats in the center), who shouldn’t be there at all, having been detached to form part of the right wing assault force.

And yet the Pyle is still our favorite depiction of the battle. Why? Because it feels right: it’s a 19th-century image of courage and discipline, and appeals to our romantic souls, even though there are casualties strewn about, which, to us, only serves to emphasize the bravery and stick-to-it-iveness of those solid infantry.

And this is where JRRT comes in. We’ve said before: our favorite part of P. Jackson’s films is anything to do with the Rohirrim.

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The fact that, in the books, they live in wide, grassy plains (unavailable in New Zealand) and that their capital, Edoras, does not have “a dike and mighty wall and thorny fence” in the films, along with any other details it would be easy to extract from The Lord of the Rings, doesn’t matter to us in the least. The depiction in the films feels right and we’re content with that, even when there are other parts of the films where we have other reactions. Simple (and perhaps surprising to us) as that.

So, dear readers, do you have similar reactions? And to what? We’d love to hear!

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

A Pirate’s Life

24 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Villains

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Barbary Coast, Captain Blood, Captain Hook, Corsairs, Errol Flynn, Gilbert and Sullivan, Howard Pyle, Jack Sparrow, Jolly Roger, mariners, Napoleonic Wars, Narnia, Peter Jackson, Pirates, Scharb, shipbuilding, Tamora Pierce, The Black Pearl, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tortall, Treasure Island, Umbar, USS Philadelphia, xebec

“Oh, a pirate’s life is a wonderful life,

A-rovin’ over the sea,

Give me a career as a buccaneer

It’s the life of a pirate for me…”

Wallace/Penner, Peter Pan (1953)

 

Dear readers, welcome, as ever.

Being clever, you can tell immediately where this posting is going to go. Yep, the corsairs of Umbar.

A corsair is another word for pirate. And, when we think “pirate”, first there’s the late-19th-early-20th-century work of Howard Pyle.

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And the silly pirates from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.

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And Long John Silver, from Treasure Island.

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And then there is Captain Hook and the Jolly Roger.

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And Errol Flynn in the 1935 movie, Captain Blood.

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And who could forget Jack Sparrow and The Black Pearl?

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We think that Tolkien has something rather different in mind, however. Let’s start with a little history.

Umbar’s past in relation to Gondor is summed up by Damrod in “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”:

“ ‘Aye, curse the Southrons!’ said Damrod. ‘Tis said that there were dealing of old between Gondor and the kingdoms of the Harad to the Far South; though there was never friendship. In those days our bounds were away south beyond the mouths of Anduin, and Umbar, the nearest of their realms, acknowledged our sway. But that is long since. ‘Tis many lives of Men since any passed to and fro . Now of late we have learned that the Enemy has been among them, and they are gone over to Him, or back to Him—they were ever ready to his Will—“ (The Two Towers, Book 4, Chapter 4,“Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Damrod’s mistrust is confirmed by what Beregond says to Pippin in “Minas Tirith”:

“…There is a great fleet drawing near to the mouths of Anduin, manned by the corsairs of Umbar in the South. They have long ceased to fear the might of Gondor, and they have allied them with the Enemy, and now make a heavy stroke in his cause. For this attack will draw off much of the help that we looked to have from Lebennin and Belfalas, where folk are hardy and numerous.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

As Damrod has said, Umbar is to the far south.

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Here is a view of it as imagined by the Czech artist, Scharb.

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To us, this resembles cities along the southern Mediterranean coast, especially as seen in old engravings of the Barbary Coast.

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Take, for example, this copperplate of Tunis, from 1778.

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There are all kinds of ships depicted here, from three-masters to a galley, in the center, to a small xebec, to the far right.

The galley seemed once to be the characteristic ship of the pirates of the Barbary Coast, coming from earlier Turkish galleys.

Galley1500ca.jpg

 

What the Czech artist appears to have picked up upon, however, is something from P. Jackson’s third The Lord of the Rings film, in which the xebec

Xebec L80 - 01.jpg_0_1024x769.jpg

 

is the model for the corsairs’ vessels.

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Jackson’s corsairs look like this (including Jackson himself, mugging to the left).

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The crews of actual Barbary ships probably looked more like this:

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This makes perfect sense, as these are North Africans, and very tough people, as European mariners came to know. Their swift, daring ships attacked any vessel which might bring them profit.

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The young United States first paid them tribute to keep them away from US ships.

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But, as the government somewhere found the money, it began a shipbuilding program to provide the country with its first national navy.

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This particular ship was the ill-fated USS Philadelphia, which ran aground and was captured by the pirates.

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It was destroyed, however,

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in a daring raid by Stephen Decatur, seen in this miniature.

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The United States fought two wars against the Barbary pirates, 1801-5 and 1815, doing a great deal of damage to the pirates.

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Ultimately, however, it was a combination of governments and navies, including the US, the British, and the Dutch, which put a stop to piracy in the southern Mediterranean after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

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So, like Scharb, we took the idea from JRRT that Umbar was in the far south and, influenced by our experience, not only of the Barbary pirates, but of Narnia and the country called Calormen

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and of Tamora Pierce’s “Tortall” with its Carthaki southland,

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we imagined the corsairs to look like this.

barbarypirates.jpg

So, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

A (Self)-portrait of the Artist?

03 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators

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Tags

Adventure, Doubloon, Howard Pyle, Illustration, N.C. Wyeth, Pirates, Self-portrait, Spanish Galleon

Dear Readers, 

We intend to continue our discussion of narrative in Tolkien in our next, but heavy with the baskets of jelly beans and peeps we’ve consumed pre-Easter, we thought we’d daydream with you a little this week. Our focus in this blog is a picture we have displayed once before. It is by N.C. Wyeth and was the cover of the March 1922 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. 

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Remembering all of N.C. Wyeth’s pictures of pirates, like this one:

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we could certainly see this as one of that thematic family– a Spanish galleon being attacked by tiny pirate longboats.

hIDxztR

Here’s a cutaway of one such galleon by the wonderfully talented Stephen Biesty. And here is what they are attacking the ship for (and who wouldn’t?):

DOUBLOONS

It’s clearly a very powerful image: the boy daydreaming of adventure on the high seas. What interests us, however, beyond the evocative nature of the image, is to take a closer look at what the boy has in front of him, and to realize that the book is opened not to a picture, but to print. Thus, what so stirs the boy’s imagination is not a an illustration by, say, Wyeth’s teacher, Howard Pyle,

Unknown-1 

but the written text which such a picture would have accompanied during that golden era of book illustration, just at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries. And something else strikes us: is this a self-portrait of Wyeth himself as a boy, stirred, as we know he was, by stories of adventure? Compare these two pictures (the one on the right is the earliest picture we could find of Wyeth– dated 1903, so he’s about 21). 

3923894215_20aa1d139f_o NC_Wyeth_ca1903-1904

If it really is a retro self-portrait, then we have an extra level of narrative:

1. a boy, lost in the written word of an adventure story, day-dreaming of pirates

2. not just any boy, but Wyeth the painter–could we be looking at Wyeth depicting that moment when he decided that he would like to illustrate such stories himself?

What do you think, dear readers?  The only thing we could wish was that there was a companion picture, in which a girl of 1922 was reading the same book and having the same daydream!

Happy Easter!

MTCIDC

And thanks, as always, for reading,

CD

Pyle of Pirates

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Military History, Research, Writing as Collaborators

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Tags

Bunker Hill, Howard Pyle, Illustrating History, Jack Sparrow, Pirates

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the wonderful Russian fairy/folktale illustrators of the late 19th, early 20th centuries.  We thought it might be fun, as we work on the sequel to Across the Doubtful Sea (Empire of the Isles) while editing The Good King’s Daughter for our second series, to continue the conversation by looking at other illustrators, beginning with two Americans, teacher and pupil Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

We begin, however, with a familiar contemporary image:

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We think it goes without saying who this is, don’t you?  He’s a wonderful actor, but, for someone who’s supposed to be dressed as a mid-18th-century sailor, he owes more to Howard Pyle, who, as has been pointed out more than once before, has exerted a strong influence upon Hollywood’s view of such people, than to actual 18th-century sailor’s dress.

Pirates were, in fact, sailors with, shall we say, non-mercantile goals.  They were workmen and wore very practical workmen’s clothes, like those in the following 18th-century illustrations.

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(This is, in fact, a contemporary illustration of the casting adrift of the notorious Captain Bligh, a British naval officer, although you see him only in his shirtsleeves here, rather than in his blue officer’s coat. His men, however, did not wear uniforms at this period, and, as you can see, would have looked like any other sailor.)

Okay, it might be argued, he’s “Captain” Jack Sparrow–what about officers?  Here’s a Hogarth painting of a more-or-less mid-century civilian captain.

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As the illustration shows, he simply wears ordinary clothing– no uniform.

Now, here are a few Pyle pictures.

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Pyle_pirates_treasfight

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Typical Pyle touches: the bandanas and the huge sashes, not to be seen in period illustrations.

One might argue that Pyle lacked readily-available visual sources:  someone in the 1890s certainly didn’t have Google Images. It has been said, that, like Detaille in France, Pyle collected period uniforms, etc., and sometimes dressed up students in them,  but, one has only to look at his illustration of Bunker Hill, to make you wonder what he actually collected.

pyle-bunker-hill

There are numerous errors here, from the cut of the coats, to the lace on the breast, to the packs and that’s only the beginning.  The study of the history of uniforms was, of course, only in its infancy in this period and even serious military artists, like H.A. Ogden, could go very wrong.

And yet, there are also Pyle illustrations like these, in which he seems to have gotten things– at least, non-piratical things–right.

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In these, you see a depiction of 18th century sailors which looks much more like those in actual period illustrations.

So what was Pyle up to? Let’s look at a much more modern depiction of Bunker Hill, by the American military artist, H. Charles McBarron.

bunker hill

McBarron was a member of the Company of Military Historians and Collectors. He was well-known not only as a skilled artist, but as a thorough researcher, and the owner of an extensive collection of militaria of the past. What you see in this picture (minus the graphic depiction of violence) would have been as accurate a depiction of the event as anyone might imagine.

Suppose, however, you were attempting to picture this event in dramatic terms from the British side. You would want long lines of red-coated, determined men, marching steadily uphill through their own casualties, as in Pyle’s illustration.

pyle-bunker-hill

Imagine, then, that even if you had much more visual information about pirates than Pyle may have had, but you wanted people to see pirates painted broadly and dramatically, what better than flowing headscarves, and big, blood-red sashes?

And this is why people in the past–and we in the present– love Pyle. Strict accuracy certainly has its place, but we’re perfectly willing to let it walk the plank in favor of romantic strokes and bold depictions.

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And, as always, we ask you readers, what do you think?

Next, Pyle’s pupil, N.C. Wyeth.

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

CD

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