[music playing] NARRATOR: Their
customized ships cut through the oceans like sharks. From their use of big guns, to
hand grenades, to navigation, the technology they developed to
practice their murderous trade helped revolutionize
naval warfare. Now, learn the three Rs
of Pirate Tech on "Modern Marvels." [theme music] [music playing] [explosion] [indistinct speech] NARRATOR: Resting 20 feet
beneath the surface of North Carolina's Beaufort
Inlet, researchers believe they found the remains
of the Queen Anne's Revenge. [mumbled police radio] MAN (ON RADIO): [inaudible]
from the boat to the cannon. Here. Floating cannon coming up. It gets going. NARRATOR: This legendary
vessel was once the flagship of the
notorious pirate Blackbeard. DAVID MOORE:
Blackbeard was probably one of the foremost
pirates of his era and certainly today
is an icon of piracy. I think it was a little of
everything that made Blackbeard the power that he was, operating
essentially a small flotilla of ships anywhere from
300 to 400 pirates under his command at
any one particular time. NARRATOR: No one knows for
sure how the ship sank. One theory speculates
it was not during battle but on a routine
maintenance voyage. PHIL MASTERS: He brought his
flotilla to Beaufort Inlet. He tried to get the Queen
Anne's Revenge into the unit so he could clean her bottom. But in the process of
trying to get her in, she got stuck on a sandbar,
and he had no choice-- after trying to get her
off, he had no choice but to abandon her right
where she had gotten stuck. NARRATOR: Dead
men tell no tales. And Blackbeard's been
dead for nearly 300 years. But knowledge gained
from a shipwreck like this can speak volumes
about the technology of pirates and how they went about
their buccaneering business. Each artifact from the wreck is
carefully analyzed and cleaned after being brought
to the surface. And each has a story to tell. WENDY WELSH: We have
discovered 24 cannon on site. We have recovered eight. And we do think we have
a few more areas that need to be investigated on this
site that could possibly have a cannon. This cannon is possibly loaded. That is a good possibility. Before, out of five that we
have inspected have been loaded. PROF. CHARLES EWEN: Another
aspect of these cannons that come off these shipwrecks
that give us a clue that they might be pirates is
that they're preloaded. These vessels sank with their
charges still in the guns. And most of the
time, regular vessels would not sail around with
the cannons already loaded. NARRATOR: In their
day, pirate ships were the most feared
vessels at sea. [explosions] Elusive and fast, there were the
souped up customized hot rods of the world's oceans. And like many hot rods,
they were hot in more ways than one for most
of them were stolen. When a pirate
captured a ship-- and that's how virtually all of
them acquired their ships was by capturing-- they would strip
off anything that didn't suit their purposes. If there were extra
compartments or extra cabins or extra bulkheads that
were dividing up the hold, they strip all those off. They just got in the way, and
they didn't allow them to hold as much cargo as they wanted. NARRATOR: This stripping also
served to make the vessel lean and mean. Every lost pound counted because
the lighter the ship was, the faster it would go. When possible, pirates
added extra sails. GAIL SELINGER: If it was a
one master or a two master, they would then go and add
additional yard and sail so that they would have as
much canvas as they could, so when they would catch the
wind that they could actually sail faster. NARRATOR: The most prized ships
were those with shallow drafts such as sluice and schooners. This allowed them to
go into shallow water where ships with deep draft
holes couldn't pursue them. DAVID MOORE: Pirates operated
best with smaller vessels. It's a common sense thing. Larger, more powerful,
heavily-armed naval vessels could not
follow them into those areas. And so it was a protection
factor involved with that. NARRATOR: Next, the pirates
maximized the vessels firepower. It's typically, uh,
when they took a ship, they would add more cannons. Many ships may have only
had 10 to 12 cannons. The pirates would
tend to load them up. There are some who say that
Queen Anne's Revenge had as many as 40 cannon on
board, so firepower was very important. [cannons firing] NARRATOR: Pirates have been
honing their nefarious craft for centuries. The crime of piracy goes
back before recorded history. PROF. CHARLES EWEN: You've had pirates
as long as you've had people going to sea. Piracy is, by definition,
just thievery at sea. GAIL SELINGER: The Minoans and
the Phoenicians, the Egyptians had problems. The Greeks had such a
problem with pirates that with the city-states
actually started hiring pirates to collect taxes, because
they couldn't control them and felt they could
control them that way. The Romans used the
threat of piracy to actually even help them build
their empire because they would go to cities, states,
and towns and say, we will help you rid
yourself of pirates if you went into
the Roman Empire. NARRATOR: During
the 8th century, the Vikings of Scandinavia
became the master pirates of the seas. Their main innovation
was the longship. With its shallow draft, it was
the perfect hit-and-run vessel, which is the hallmark
of any good pirate ship. Columbus's journey to
the New World in 1492 cleared the way for a
golden age of piracy. Pirates were the
ultimate opportunists. And from the 16th
century through the 18th, no waters offered
more opportunity than those of the Americans. GAIL SELINGER: The Caribbean
was the prime hotbed of pirate activity for
the simple reason that's where the Spanish found all
the gold from the natives. And they went to South
America and the Caribbean and found gold and silver
and emeralds and pearls, and they started shipping
a fleet of their galleons from South America
back to Spain. So these ships
were sitting docks loaded with all this treasure. NARRATOR: The wealth carried
by even one Spanish treasure galleon was staggering. In 1969 off the Florida
coast, undersea explorer, Mel Fisher discovered the wrecks
of two Spanish galleons that sank during a hurricane
in September 1622. The treasure they contained
has an estimated value of $200 to $400 million. A portion of it is housed
in Fisher's museum located in Key West, Florida. COREY MALCOM: The ultimate
goal of any pirate was to capture a Spanish
treasure galleon. If they did that,
they'd be set for life. They would on one of
those ships find all sorts of wonderful things
like you see here. These are objects recovered
from the Spanish galleon, "Nuestra Se ora de
Atocha" wrecked in 1622. You have silver ingots-- these came from the
mountains of the Andes, gold from South America,
elephant's tusks acquired in the
African slave trade. NARRATOR: Also included were
the legendary pieces of eight, which are Spanish silver pesos. Sometimes the treasure was
so overwhelming pirates had to rebalance their
ships in order to carry it. This stuff is heavy. [grunts] One weighs
probably 80 pounds alone. Multiply that by 1,000
times on a galleon and you can see how it was a full load. If you were to steal this from
taking on board your vessel, you'd have to take into
account that weight. And so pirates, if
they were lucky enough to find a cargo of
silver ingots or coins, they would actually have to
get rid of some of their stone baluster, even some
of their cannons then they could replace that
weight with heavy silver. NARRATOR: As thick as thieves,
the bonds form between the men in the pirate ranks
were so strong that they became a separate
society, often referring to themselves as the
Brethren of the Coast. DAVID NATEMAN: The Brethren of
the Coast referred to, uh, sort of a grouping of
pirates that found that through mutual cooperation,
they could achieve much more. Pirates had a code of conduct. Each ship had a
series of agreements the crew members
had to sign on to. A lot of these
were very basic, very common sense type rules-- no bringing women on board the
ship, no arguing aboard ship. NARRATOR: This sophistication
mixed into their form of government-- democracy. We normally don't look
at pirates in that light. But these guys would
vote essentially on anything and everything that
they were going to be doing-- ships they would attack, areas
they would go into to operate. GAIL SELINGER: The captains
of most ships were elected. The crew chose who
their captain would be. Usually, when a
ship first went out, the captain would be the
person who would start the ship voyage. However, if the crew did
not like the captain, if he was not getting them
close to any treasure or foods, they were able to, by a
majority vote, vote him out. If the man was smart,
he wouldn't object. NARRATOR: Those who did paid. [gunshot] Along to their special
code of conduct, pirates also had a symbol,
one that's still recognizable today-- the skull and crossbones. It was a potent
psychological tool. Pirates began to
integrate images that they found in graveyards,
images that would strike fear into the hearts of the
vessels they were attacking. You would see a
skull and crossbones which would symbolize death. You might see an hourglass
which symbolized, you only have a short
time before we attack. And really, the whole
purpose of the pirate flag was to strike fear into
the captain and the crew of the ship that they
were going to attack. NARRATOR: Flags on
pirate ships also served as effective instruments
of deception. One of the tactics that
the pirates used to attack another vessel was they
would have a variety of different national flags. And depending what ship
they were coming up against, they would hoist up a
flag of a friendly nation. When they got close enough, they
would normally pull that down and put up a pirate flag, hoping
that that would scare the ship and that they would not resist. NARRATOR: During
times of battle, the pirates would multi-purpose
their ship's parts and tools. There are many
items used for work and everyday use onboard
the ship that can be turned into fairly lethal weapons. One of these is
the belaying pin. Now this thing is
all over the boat. They're up and down the
rails, around the mass. They're used for
tying off lines, ropes in the normal
saline of the boat. But once you undo those lines,
pull them out of the hole, you've got a fairly vicious club
or a pretty lethal projectile if you heave it fast enough. The cargo hook, also found
all over the boat for the men to work with-- hauling cargo
in and out of the whole, clearing away wreckage
through damage rigging. Held in the proper
position, this can be turned into a
fairly lethal weapon. The boarding ax,
used for cutting away damaged lines in a storm or
some other natural occurrence. It has a long enough handle
to be wielded very lethally. The pick end, sharp ax type
end, it's a very nasty weapon. NARRATOR: Each of these
were very effective weapons. But on a pirate ship the
real intimidation factor was its firepower,
especially the big guns. [music playing] A piece of eight
was legal tender in the American colonies,
and later, the United States. Worth one dollar, it
was demonetized in 1857. ] Today, the big guns
brought up from the wreck of the ship believed to be
Blackbeard's, the Queen Anne's Revenge, are being
meticulously restored. [equipment buzzing] DIVER: OK,
[inaudible],, coming up. NARRATOR: Approximately
10% of the ship's artifacts have been recovered since
its discovery in 1996. DIVER: OK, which
way is the boat? NARRATOR: No single item has
been found to conclusively prove the ship's identity,
but accumulated information suggests that the
wreck is indeed that of Blackbeard's flagship. How could we know whether it
was the Queen Anne's Revenge or not? Well, we have some descriptions
of what the Queen Anne's Revenge was like. We know it sank in 1718. And we can look at
this wreck, it's in the right place
at the right time. We're not going to find
a barrel of peg legs or pirate hooks or parent
skeletons or anything. We're not going to find that. What we are going to find is
a ship about the right size, heavily armed, and
having artifacts that date either before or to 1718. To date, the archeology that has
been performed on the Beaufort Inlet wreck all would tend
to support the idea that this is the Queen Anne's Revenge. But we need to keep vigilant
as we test that hypothesis. NARRATOR: Researchers pay
special attention to the guns brought up from the wreck. And this would please the
pirates of all because of all the equipment aboard
a pirate ship, none were so carefully looked
after as the artillery. Pirates were firearms masters. But the way guns were
handled on a ship differed from their use on shore. Even the terminology
used for them on board a vessel was different. GAIL SELINGER: On land, a
cannon was called a "cannon." As soon as it hit the deck of
a ship, it was called a "gun." Cannonballs were on land. When it got onto a ship,
it was called "shot." NARRATOR: The ultimate
weapons in a pirate ship were the big deck guns. The more, the better. A pirate ship often
had a variety of sizes because most of the guns
were stolen from ships built in different countries by
manufacturers with varying standards. PROF. CHARLES EWEN: You might have
several different calibers. If they're capturing them,
if they're stealing them, you can't say, well,
she would be nice if we all had the same caliber
guns so that we only have that one kind of ammunition. Sometimes you just got
the cannons that you got and so you might have a
variety of ammunition. The NARRATOR: Pirates used an
ingenious variety of shot in their guns. There's a lot more you
can shoot out of cannons than just cannonballs. Everything sitting here
on the deck in front of me is intended to be
fired out of a cannon. Let's take, for
example, chain shot. It's two cannonballs connected
by a short length of chain, which when compressed
in the ball of the gun and fired due to it's irregular
flight will extend back out and go end over end in
flight tearing up anything it rips into. It will wrap itself around
spars and snap them like twigs. Very close cousin to
chain shot is bar shot. Bar shot is nothing
more than halves of the same cannonball
extended with a bar cast as one piece, loaded the
same way as chain shot, will do the same thing. NARRATOR: Ironically, even
though most pirate ships wielded great
firepower, their game was not to sink an enemy
vessel but instead to stop it by attacking its
sails and rigging. What good would it be to sink a
ship if your goal was to steal the treasure it had on board? DAVID MOORE: They were
looking to capture ships. So utilizing these smaller
anti-personnel type weapons and anti-rigging
type weapons, firing those sorts of projectiles
would have been much more conducive to capturing vessels
than the whole piercing capability of these carriage
mounted guns to sink ships, which, of course, they were
we're not trying to do. NARRATOR: There were
shots specially designed to take out almost
anything on an enemy ship. This is grapeshot. This is made for a larger gun. It's a stack of smaller
cannonballs meant to fit into a cannon, the
diameter of this piece of wood on top here. The act of firing this would
shatter the wood as these balls left the bore, tearing apart
heavier portions of the ship-- the side, the railings,
gun ports to get to the men inside the boat. A very odd-looking
and particularly nasty weapon is the langridge
or fire arrow. And those, we have a
funny dark looking thing. This is filled with a highly
combustible material-- sulfur, a little bit of
gunpowder, saltpeter, anything that'll burn for
a length of time. It has this arrow
point on the end, meant to stick in a hard solid
wood surface like a master or the side of the ship. Then you have these four chains,
these double prong hooks meant to catch in rigging or sails. So this would happen, this thing
would instantly catch a deck or rigging or sails on fire. Just a couple of these things
could almost ensure a victory. NARRATOR: Fueling all of
this artillery was gunpowder. The ship derives
its main firepower from gunpowder, invented by
the Chinese thousands of years before the Western world
ever heard about it. By the age of piracy,
this is the main implement that these sea battles
were fought with. Not much by itself like that. But I tell you what,
you take that gunpowder, you pack enough of it in
a cloth bag like this, you've got a charge
for a cannon this size. NARRATOR: Getting a
big gun ready to fire was a complicated,
time-consuming task. This is what a pirate
ship is all about. Its guns. Everything that goes on this
boat is about these guns-- the pre-positioning of the
ship, the loading, the aiming, the firing, the
maintenance of these guns. This is a three-pounder. It's out of battery,
ready to load. Let me show you how that works. Inside this pass box is the
shot and the powder charge. So powder charge is
packaged in this cotton bag. Gunner would insert
it into the muzzle. He'll then take the rammer,
which is a solid wooden end of this stick. Gently push that charge all
the way down to the breach of the gun, withdraw, reach
back into the pass box, pull out the shot or
whatever kind of ammunition they're going to
shoot, insert that. Gently seat that on top
of the powder charge. The gun would be run forward. Gun is now in battery. I have to aim it. You lift the breach
into the gun. This piece here
is called a coin. This is inserted
under the barrel. Put it at the desired
height that you want. You aim through the gun
part looking across the top of the tube about as
crude as it can be, watching the natural motion
of the boat up and down. You want to fire
on the upswing, so that if you're high
on your target, you at least go
into the rigging. If you fire on the downswing,
it will throw your shot into the water. At this point, the gunner
will take his gunners gimlet, sometimes called a prick. Insert it in the vent, which
is a small touch hole used to ignite the charge, break open
the powder bag, take his horn, prime the vents slightly to
make sure the seat is filled. Take a priming quill,
which is a form of fuse. Insert it in the
gun tube like this. Then from his assistant,
he will take the linstock, which is a slow match. Thread it onto a stick, being
careful to be outside the path of the recoil of the gun. He'll blow on the slow match
to get a nice good hot spark going. Touch it sideways to
the priming quill. NARRATOR: The big guns
were great for softening up the enemy. Just before the final
assault, the pirates would give one last volley
or broadside of their guns before boarding to get their
enemy's head down below decks so that they could more
easily take their prize. NARRATOR: But any
real fighting that was going to be done on
the other ship's deck would require cutlasses,
pistols, and muskets. A "shiver" is a wood splinter. The timbers of a ship
splintering in battle gave rise to the term,
"shiver me timbers." [music playing] The wreck site of what may
be Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, is
revealing some intriguing hand weapons. WENDY WELSH: What
you're looking at here is a grenade that could
have been used by a pirate. This is a cast iron grenade. It's hollow inside. You can see the cast lines. And this is a wood
plug right here. You can see one that
has a breakaway in here. Here you can see the
wooden plugger would extend throughout. Gunpowder would have
been put in there before this plug and a fuse
would have come out of here. NARRATOR: The fuse
would then be lit, and the grenade would be thrown
by hand or flung with a sling. Its casing would explode
into countless pieces. But pirates had more
than cast iron grenades. It's made out
of a glass bottle. You could use any
type of bottle. It has a wooden or
cork plug with a fuse to be filled with either just
straight gunpowder, if you're going to use it offensively
where you're charging and you don't want to get
hit with your own shrapnel. You would just have it as
a shockwave, a flash bang, if you will. If you wanted to do damage,
say, you're up in the tops, you're throwing things
down on the deck, you could fill it
full of pistol balls. Pour gunpowder in
around them and then put your fuse in
so it would burst, throwing the pistol
balls around a shrapnel. NARRATOR: A precursor
to the tear gas canister was the pirates' stink pot. They would fill a glass
or a ceramic container full of rotten meat,
anything that stank, and they would throw it
over to the other ship. When it exploded,
the stink would be so horrendous and foul
that men actually would jump overboard to get away from it. NARRATOR: And what would a
pirate be without his sword? In the earliest
days of piracy, those men that had
weapons prefer the rapier. This is what they used on land. This is what they were used
to-- a long, thin, finely-made, well-balanced weapon. NARRATOR: However, on the
confined deck of a ship, the rapier was
just about useless. GARY HARPER: The problem
is it's too long. You can't get around
without hitting something. Get it stuck in the
deck, it's easily broken. They needed another
weapon to replace this. The answer for that
was the cutlass-- short blade, easy to move
around on deck anywhere. They can in cross
section for strength able to hack and thrust
at the same time. The cutlass was also
good for smashing things. An interesting weapon
is the main gauche. This is a short
left-handed weapon. A guard to protect
your hand and also use offensively as well
as defensively. The main thing this allows you
to do is two-handed fighting. Put a cutlass in the
other hand, now you can whirl away on
the deck of a boat because you are
still short enough to get around in any area you
have to and be twice as lethal. NARRATOR: Any pirate
worth his bucket of blood needed a dagger as well. This is about the most common
type there was during this time period. It's called a plug bayonet. So tapered handle, it's intended
to be inserted in the barrel of a musket after it's fired. It's one and only shot
that you get with a musket to enable the weapon to still
be used as a bayonet, the pike, that sort of instrument. NARRATOR: At the
Blackbeard wreck site, researchers are finding
evidence of the pirates' use of small firearms. We found over 15,000
lead shot on site. Here are some of these smaller
inlet shot that we have found. And we also have some ledge out
of the larger in which could have been used for muskets. NARRATOR: Contrary to the
popular image of pirates is swashbuckling swordsman. They really preferred firearms. GAIL SELINGER: Most men did
not know how to use a sword. Only nobility were taught
the art of swordplay. So if you ended up with
a cutlass in your hand, you had to be taught by
somebody with experience, or you had to learn as you went. It was a slashing
and hacking weapon. And you could get very tired. And basically whoever
tired first lost. With a pistol, it was a
much more equalizing weapon. If you were at good shot,
you were much more deadly. NARRATOR: The pirates had
a wide array of firearms, each designed for
a specific job. First, as you're
near your enemy target, you might send your men
up into the tops, top of the mass with the musket. Long barrel, 75 caliber, able
to reach out 100, 150 yards. Get your best marksman to
try and pick off the officers on the opposing ship. NARRATOR: Although the weapon
and spear to be quite different and have different purposes,
they're all flintlocks and are loaded the same way. GARY HARPER: First
step you're going to do is put it on half cock. That's the first click. It's where the phrase, "don't
go off half cocked comes from. Now you take your
paper cartridge, your gunpowder wrapped
in a paper cartridge with the ball, the
caliber of the weapon at the end of the paper tube. You take the end
opposite the ball, tear it off with your teeth. Take the first
little bit of powder. You're priming the pan. Close the frizzen. When the flint hits the
frizzen and sparks setting off the powder we just put in,
that will detonate the powder. We're going to now
dump down the bore. All that's left now is
the ball on the end. Shove that down into
the bore part way. Take out your ramrod. Gently tamp that home. Push it all the way
down to the base. Withdraw the ramrod. By the way, you are expected
to do this three times a minute if you're a good marksman. Now we're ready to fire. Pull the hammer back
to the second click. The safety is off. All I have to do now
is aim and shoot. NARRATOR: A pirate preferred
his short range blunderbuss when boarding a ship. Fast to load, a
huge bore and you can't miss throw in
the shot and there. It is the equivalent
of five or six guys firing pistols at the same time. Really a devastating weapon. NARRATOR: At
extremely close range, a pirate used his pistol. He often carried more than
one of them into battle. Obviously, it takes
a little bit of time to reload a flint lock. Another way around this was to
take three of these single shot pistols, tie them around your
neck as you board that ship, trying to make the
bridgehead, if you will, for the rest of your
crew coming behind you. You've got three shots right
there that you can use to clear out a space to get your man on
board that prize that you want so much without reloading. NARRATOR: Yet all the firepower
in the world was of no use if buccaneers weren't in the
right place at the right time. Pirate with ships depended
on their navigators to strategically
position them for action. The best navigators were
literally worth their weight in gold when turning a ship
toward treasure or away from danger. Early cannon shot was made
of stone that was hand cut by skilled artisans. By the 1600s, ion
shot was mass-produced cheaper and faster, and thus
became the preferred projectile for maritime artillerists. [music playing] Finding treasure would be easy
if x always mark the spot. But in reality,
pirates used navigators to lead them to the riches. Apart from the
captain, your navigator would probably be your most
important person aboard a ship. You need to know not
only where you were going but how to get there and
what sort of obstacles would be in your way. How deep was the water? How treacherous were the shoals? Were there reefs in the area? You needed to be able to
avoid those perils or else it didn't matter whether
you caught any ships or not if you sank your own. NARRATOR: The job required
a man of many skills. He had to be literate. He needed to know mathematics. He needed to be able
to read the instrument. NARRATOR: The
navigation instruments the pirates used were
stolen from ships of different cultures. They took the best
of each of these and adapted them
for their own use. DAVID MOORE: Or the
pirates would certainly utilize whatever technology they
were able to steal or plunder. In a lot of cases, particularly
with these navigational instruments, they would
certainly utilize whatever they found to work best for them. GAIL SELINGER: One of the jobs
of the navigator, if he was very good, was knowing the
trade routes where they would be uncertain times of the
year so that he could navigate the ship very close to where
they assume the ship should be and also, to know the best
escape route from that area. NARRATOR: Many of the
pirates' navigation devices are still in use. The most important tool in
navigation aboard any ship today or in the golden age of
sail is the ship's compass. It's always located
here by the ship's helm so the helmsman knows what
direction to sail the ship. NARRATOR: At the very front of
the compass is the lubber line. It's a fixed line indicator
pointing toward the exact front of the ship and is therefore
the zero point from which relative bearings are measured. JOHN KRAUS: This is one of
the more obvious instruments or tools that the
navigator would use as a spyglass or a telescope. It's used to get a good fix
on a piece of land or a ship that the observer will
be using to navigate by. It's usually used
in the hand so it can compensate for the pitching
of the ship back and forth. But when you're at a
still point of view, you can put on a tripod so
it'll stay still and get an idea of what you're looking
at a little bit better. NARRATOR: The spyglass
was very important because much of the ceiling at
this time was by line of sight, meaning pirates would attempt
to use any islands, reefs, or other natural landmarks
to get their bearings. The spyglass gave them a
closer look at these landmarks, allowing for more
accurate navigation. Measuring the speed of the
ship gave them a clearer idea of how far they had traveled
and how much longer they would be en route. JOHN KRAUS: It's a device
known as a chip log. It's an instrument that they're
able to used to determine the ship's speed. They would toss the chip
overboard which point the line would start paying out. And one of the sailors
would have the line in his hand letting the
line run through his hands like this until the
first line or the first know would pass his
hand right here. You tell one of the
other sailors mark. He turn the sandglass
over, then he'd start to count how
many knots on the line would pass through his
hands and the amount of time for these sand glass to run out. And as soon as sandglasses
run out, he'd stop. He'd pull the line. And he count how many knots
have run through his hand. And however many knots
is run through his hand would they determine how many
nautical miles an hour the ship would be going. And that's where we
get the term, "knots." NARRATOR: Some of
their navigation tools were very simple
yet very effective. This is a fairly common
object on a lot of shipwrecks. It's called a sounding weight. It had a rope tied here
have been chunked in, hit the bottom, and gave the
mariners an idea of the depth of the water that
they were sailing in. I would make note of
these marks going through. These marks are 1,000 apart. The line went slack at the end
of three of these marks that means that I am three fathoms
or 18 feet to the bottom. I would bring it back up. And if I had sand here,
I'd know the bottom was sandy, little rocks, I'd
know the end had rocks in. And if nothing came back up,
I would know probably that it was solid rock of some type. NARRATOR: They used a quadrant
to determine latitude, which was their position north
or south of the equator. The instrument was designed to
measure angular distances using the sun as a reference point. JAMES WEHAN: The way
it works is this. The navigator would
look directly at the sun and line up this
edge with the sun. They could then have
somebody else come along and tell what mark the string
was at on the quadrant, which would give the angle. What they do is
start before no noon and they'd watch that sun go up. They'd see the angle increasing. And then after a point,
it would start decreasing. That greatest angle
was new, it was always. So they didn't need a
timepiece to determine that. And then from that angle they
would go to some books they had and determine what was the
latitude of their position. The trouble was they had to
look for long periods of time directly into the sun
which, of course, was very detrimental to their eyes. NARRATOR: Finding
latitude was important. However, pinpoint
nautical accuracy didn't come about until
instruments were devised that would also accurately
measure longitude. These weren't developed
until the late 18th century after the great age of piracy. Therefore, the most
coveted of all navigation aides available to
pirates were sea charts. JAMES WEHAN: The charts were
made by the histories that were given by other captains. And they told of things
like how deep the water was, where the reefs were, and
where the landmasses were. They had orientation
on them that you could use to find where you were
and to locate yourself on the chart relative
to the landmasses and to the reefs and
that kind of thing. NARRATOR: Accurate charts could
be more valuable than treasure. PROF. CHARLES EWEN: When you captured
a ship, part of the loot would be any sort of
navigational charts that this other
ship had on board. And oftentimes, you would
have captains throwing them overboard so that the
pirates couldn't take them. That was certainly one of the
biggest prizes to be taken. And that lets you sail around
areas that might have been more difficult otherwise. NARRATOR: A good navigator
could bring a pirate ship to a galleon packed
with treasure. But the thrill of bloody battles
left many a pirate wounded. And the medical attention
they received aboard ship could be more painful
than the wound itself. Many pirates were superstitious
and considered the compass to have magical properties. To ease their fears,
they housed the compass in a small wooden box
called the "binnacle"-- a term still in use today. [music playing] [music playing] Some of the medical equipment
found at the Queen Anne's Revenge site is
surprisingly sophisticated. DIVER: [inaudible] or I don't
want to excavate too much more with this large dredge. DAVID MOORE: This is a small
pewter urethral syringe. A little bit crushed, probably
during the wrecking event. See the tapered point up here. And would have been utilized
for treating probably venereal diseases. There was a very minute amount
of mercury on the inside which was utilized for treating
venereal diseases during this period. NARRATOR: Yet most onboard
medical care was primitive. Amputations were
especially feared. SARAH KNOTT: Laid out
here in front of me is a very rare surgical
kit used for amputations and orthopedic needs. It's dated 1750. Inside this kit here, we
have lots of different tools that are really a primitive
version of what we use today. The bow saw here would've
been used to amputate a larger limb such as a leg or an arm. And the patients may have had
to have been tied down or pinned down by other
pirates on the ship in order to fall
off the entire leg. On pirate ships, a lot of times,
the doctors and carpenters would have been the same
people or using the same tools. Therefore, if one of the
doctors wasn't around, then the carpenter may
just have to use the saw to cut off a limb. So it wasn't always an
educated doctor that would have done the surgeries. DAVID MOORE: I would imagine
any sort of amputation during this period would have
been very difficult to watch. Basically, the only anesthesia
that would have been available would have been several
shots of the hardest liquor that they had on board. This here is an
amputation knife, similar to what would have
been used with the bow saw. This would have been used
for smaller appendages such as fingers or
toes, maybe ears. But this would have been
one of the more commonly used instruments within
the surgical kit. NARRATOR: With all the
fighting pirates had to face, it wasn't uncommon to
see men without limbs. The image of a pirate with
a hook or a peg leg is not a clich or a fallacy. They were used in that
time not just by pirates but by other individuals. A hook was very expensive. It was usually made out
of a leather base attached to the arm. And a peg leg would either be
carved to fit their kneecap or higher up or they would
just take a very heavy stick and tie it with rope or leather
around stump of their leg. NARRATOR: If pirates couldn't
count on good medical care, they couldn't count on
a hearty meal either. Provision spoiled quickly. Often they turned to preserve
foods like tough salted pork. WENDY WELSH: We have recovered
a number of pewter artifacts from our shipwreck. What's particular about this
pewter plate, as you can see, the cut marks that are
on this plate, which could be an indication of how
they had to cut their meat and the salt in pork was
actually pretty tough so this could be an indication of
trying to get through that meat. NARRATOR: There's an irony in
the pirates poor food quality because the word "buccaneer"
is derived from the French word "boucan" which is a smokehouse
for preserving meat. On land, some of the
men who became pirates worked in such smoke houses. Because they reeked
of the smoke, people began calling
them "buccaneers", which later became buccaneer. Some hard luck crews were even
forced to eat the rats on board to survive. GAIL SELINGER: A lot
of times, rats ended up being the only protein that
you could find on a ship. All the food was
stored in wood barrels. And because of the salt and
the humidity and other factors, food went bad very quickly. So they would even eat the
weevils and the maggots that were in the food, whatever
they needed to do to survive. NARRATOR: And the pirates'
bottle of rum was more than a clich . It, too, was a
matter of survival. PROF. CHARLES EWEN: They
all will drink a lot. That's probably because
the water was so horrible. You put water in a
barrel and keep it on your boat for a while, it
gets slimy and hard to drink. So, of course, they're going to
drink anything else that they have on hand that keeps better. And alcohol is one of those
things that keeps pretty well. NARRATOR: They'd often
add rum to available water to make it safer. This concoction was called grog. And as for the
bodily functions-- This is called a
[inaudible] or pissoir, known in modern
times as the urinal. It's made out of lead, but
it's crushed, as you can tell. So actually what you're looking
at is Blackbeard's head. NARRATOR: And why did they put
up with all of this hardship? The money, of course
and maybe the challenge. Pirate stayed one
step ahead of the law by using any technology
that was innovative. Then they invent
different things. I think we want to think
more of them adapting different technology
to their uses. And the fact that they
captured ships from all over meant that they had a lot
of different technologies at their disposal. They might capture
a French slave ship, and so they would
have French cannon. A Spanish ship might
have other things. Ships coming back
from the Orient might have different
devices on them that they might find useful. The truly successful
pirates were the pirates that could adapt the
vessels and whatever they stole to their needs the best. NARRATOR: As the
19th century neared, the pirates' days were numbered. Merchants and regular citizens
started really pressuring their governments to do
something to stamp out pirates. And the governments then to
save their own skins and jobs, had to start seriously capturing
them and making a statement that pirates were no longer
allowed on the waters, though piracy never
completely ended. NARRATOR: For a time, their
stripped-down, customized ships ruled the seas. They were a bloody
and treacherous lot, and they did much harm. Yet by adapting their ships to
sail faster and their artillery to be more lethal, they
pushed the envelope of marine technology. [theme music]
