Pieces Of Eight

Afterword

This is near to my heart. My hobby is black-powder shooting and I own an American long rifle, which — in the hands of a skilled man — would do everything I have described in this book, including shooting a lead ball at supersonic speed.

I have, however, simplified the loading drill. Yes, you load with powder, and a patch and a ball, but if you use the ramrod, the ball won't go down, and you'll break the ramrod trying. I know — I did it, and with people looking on! Oh dear. What you need is a starter: a short stick with a fat end. You put the stick on the ball and smack the fat end with your hand. The stick drives the ball the first few inches down the bore… and then you use the ramrod to shove it all the way down.

That's what your dad would have told you in days gone by. I learned by trial and error, and I offer it to you young shooters with apologies for not putting it in the book, because nobody wants a lecture on shooting in the middle of a story.

Final thoughts on the long rifle, alias the Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle: some modern scholarship indicates that it may have been developed for — and originally used by — Native

American hunters, so there really may have been someone like Laoslahta the Dreamer, who told the Pennsylvania German gunsmiths how to improve their European rifles. But I hesitate to enter so controversial a field, and one so close to the American heart.

Think Iroquois… then forget it, because it's a mistaken naming of the Haudenosaunee: the confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscurora nations — believed to have been founded in about 1500, though possibly much earlier — and which was extinguished by 1800 as the dominant civilisation of northeast America.

Now think of the familiar Plains Indians (as in Cowboys and Indians), who were hunter-gatherers, with horses and ever-moving camps… then forget them, too, because the Haudenosaunee were entirely different. They were settled, agricultural people who lived in forest clearings, in fortified villages defended by heavy palisades of timber, which the early white settlers termed "castles", such was their strength. Their society was complex and formal, with decisions made by prolonged discussion, and women holding considerable status as matriarchal family heads.

They lived in long houses of very great size: perhaps a hundred yards long by twenty wide, with many families sharing one house. Fearless warriors, they were prized as allies by the English, Dutch and French. They took scalps, being encouraged to do so by white men who saw this as a way to kill enemies without personal risk, offering bounties of £100 per scalp — a tasty sum by eighteenth-century standards (equivalent to £100,000 in modern money). And tax-free at that.

They were indeed hopelessly affected by alcohol, but considering the numbers of people in our own society who make idiots of themselves with booze and drugs, we have no cause to feel superior.

There was no Patanq nation. They are pure invention, but the descendants of the real Haudenosaunee still live in North America and cherish their ancient traditions.

The story of the Left-Hand Twin and the Right-Hand Twin, born of Sky Woman's daughter, is a genuine part of Haudenosaunee mythology. Likewise, the Left-Hand Twin, responsible for all that is crooked and nasty, has many names, of which, one really is… Flint — which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck when first I read it.

Dreamer was a great man: a Haudenosaunee Winston Churchill. He suffered severe migraine attacks throughout life, and I've described his symptoms from personal experience, because it afflicts me too, though far less, and I don't foretell the future afterwards.

Some migraine sufferers — including me — see a pattern of lights, called aura, or fortifications for the odd reason that, to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people, they looked just like the zig-zag lines of earthworks displayed in plans of contemporary forts. These appear as a blob in the middle of the visual field, then grow and spread out to the edge of vision. They shimmer and twinkle and are coloured black, yellow and violet. These days, having grown out of the worst of migraine, I see only the lights and nothing follows, but for others the lights precede nausea and vomiting, and then a vicious headache.

So that's the zig-zag pattern Dr Cowdray recognised on Dreamer's wampum belt.

I have shamelessly stolen the marital history of Edward Teach — the legendary Blackbeard — and devolved it upon Captain Danny Bentham, whose taste for repeated marriage is described in Chapter 2. Blackbeard (c.1680–1718), probably the most famous pirate who ever lived, would get drunk ashore and marry… any trollop that takes his fancy, and whom he might have had for sixpence…

He took something in the region of fourteen "wives". The only difference from Danny Bentham is that Blackbeard presumably consummated his unions in conventional style.

In Chapter 4, Flint devises the cruel torture of walking the plank: that spectacular, piratical, and constantly depicted means of dealing with prisoners deemed surplus to requirements. When I started writing Pieces of Eight, it was my belief that walking the plank was a piece of fiction, but further research indicates that it really happened, with the earliest reported incident occurring in 1769. I therefore presented it as a novelty aboard Walrus in October 1752, when Flint surprised his men with this special entertainment.

Also in Chapter 4, Cornelius Van Oosterhout gets himself off the plank by promising to show Flint how to find longitude at sea, which he duly does — and it is impossible to overemphasise how important that was by eighteenth-century seafaring standards. It must be remembered that, in those days, most sea-borne navigators knew only very roughly where they were. Thus in Chapter 30, Captain York confesses that he worked by "lead, log and latitude" — educated guesswork, in other words. As a result, it was common for ships to be wrecked and lost simply by running on to hazards that were supposed to have been elsewhere.

The classic example occurred on the night of 23rd October 1707, when the navigating officers of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell's fleet, returning to England from Gibraltar in foul weather, thought themselves to be in open sea off Ushant. In fact, they were a hundred and twenty miles to the northwest, bearing down under full sail on the rocks of the Scilly Isles. Four ships were lost and two thousand men drowned in the disaster — the worst British shipwreck of all time.

Such dreadful mistakes were made because seamen could easily find latitude by measuring the angle over the horizon of the sun at noon. But longitude, the other half of the equation, and the key to precise navigation, could not be determined at sea by most mariners until almost the end of the eighteenth century. See Dava Sobel's superb book Longitude for the full and fascinating details, but, briefly, the solution involved either a chronometer (a highly accurate clock) and relatively simple calculations, or lunar observations and hideously complex calculations.

The lunar method came first, developed by Tobias Meyer, among others, and was tried at sea from 1757. It involved neither conceptual leaps nor special equipment, springing directly from routine astronomical theory. But it demanded books of special tables, plus formidable mathematical skill, and in practice was too complex for mariners to handle.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that a mathematician like Van Oosterhout, backed by Utrecht University, might have anticipated Tobias Meyer by a few years… In any event, it makes a damn good story.

Van Oosterhout wasn't just a mathematician. He knew how to poke a man in the eye and kick him where it hurts. And he knew how to trip, duck, strike and chop. He was proficient in silat, a martial art practised for centuries in Indonesia — or Batavia, as it was known in his time, when it was a Dutch colony.

There's nothing special or unusual in Indonesia having its own brand of martial art, since it's hard to find any civilised Asian country that hasn't got one: jiu jitsu in Japan, taek-wondo in Korea, kung fu in China, and so on.

What all these arts have in common is that — unlike a loaded pistol, for example — they cannot instantly be picked up and used. Proficiency is bought at the high price of years of practice and muscular development… We must presume, therefore, that Cornelius Van Oosterhout put in the hours and kept himself fit.

Smallpox is horrible. The World Health Organisation estimates that the disease killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century alone. In Europe, where the disease was endemic, it killed up to 30 per cent of affected adults and 80 per cent of children, and those it didn't kill it mutilated. Among the native populations of the Americas — lacking genetically acquired resistance — it was far worse.

In 1798, Edward Jenner demonstrated that vaccination — exposure to cow-pox virus — gave immunity to smallpox. But inoculation — exposure to weakened smallpox virus — was much older. The practice was established in Africa and Turkey from ancient times. In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montague described the Turkish technique — the very same that was applied to the young Joe Flint — but her efforts to popularise it in England were thwarted by strong medical opposition. During smallpox epidemics in eighteenth-century Boston, Benjamin Franklin noted that some slaves were immune to the disease, having been inoculated in their native lands; again the technique was ridiculed by the medical profession.¹

Eventually the doctors learned, and smallpox vaccine was mass-produced and deployed worldwide. So all those who believe that Nature is good and Science is bad should contemplate the eradication of this vile disease: a triumph that stands beside Beethoven's symphonies, Gothic cathedrals and the US Constitution as a great and noble work of mankind.

In Chapter 13, Ben Gunn opens a fifty-year-old grave, releasing smallpox which infects the island's monkeys, who pass the disease to Silver's men. This story is based upon half-truth. It is fact that a thirty-year-old grave, accidentally opened in Somerset in 1759, released a foul stench, and many onlookers later contracted smallpox, though it was a weak form of the disease and all survived. But the idea of monkeys harbouring smallpox and then transmitting it to humans is entirely my invention.

On the other hand… transmission of diseases from animals to humans was once common. Such infections are termed zoonotic diseases. Tuberculosis, for instance, can pass from cows to humans, while other diseases originating in animals include plague and rabies. Finally, much debate has been generated within the scientific community over the possibility that the AIDS pandemic arose from a pre-existing illness in monkeys, and it is known that simian retroviruses can pass from monkeys to humans.

The smallpox virus is different, but it is a virus and my fiction is at least reasonable fiction.

So mind how you go when you meet a monkey.