Sea Control - Sea Control 171 - Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay with Dr. Jamie Goodall

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Links:1. Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay2. Dr. Jamie Goodall3. The Notorious Oyster Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay4. Commodore Barney at the Bladensburg Races5. The One-Man Blockade of Great Britain - Thomas Boyle and the 'Pride of Baltimore'

Hey folks, it's Jared. Thanks for tuning in. We have an excellent episode for you today. We're talking pirates with Dr. Jamie Goddall, author of the new book, Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay. I also wanted to highlight SimSec's Project Trident. If you don't follow SimSec on Twitter, go do so now or visit the website at simsec.org. If you're interested in shaping the future of international maritime security, this is your opportunity. Our first call for essays is out. We've partnered with Marine Corps University's Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity to address strategic choke points and littorals.

More information on questions and content can be found on our website. Submissions are due by May 25th and can be emailed to content at simsec.org. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're doing a book club episode, and we'll be discussing the new book, Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay, with its author, Dr. Jamie Goodall. Jamie, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.

So before we start, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners? Sure. So I am a staff historian with the Center of Military History down in Washington, D.C. I got my Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University with specializations in early America, Atlantic world, and military histories. I also have a background in archaeology and museum studies and public history. Thank you. And we are recording this on April 1st, so I'm going to ask a couple of questions about the topic of the day of COVID-19. How are you coping with all these self-quarantine measures in place? Are you still able to work?

I am teleworking yes mostly right now I'm reading and we're constructing a timeline of the army's response to COVID-19 so I'm just that's what I'm working on right now as far as how I'm coping it's a little difficult my husband is deployed so I'm by myself fortunately I have my two dogs but I've been quarantined in my house for the last 22 days by myself so it's a little stressful Yeah, I can imagine. Is this your first experience with telework and how are you finding it? Yeah, this is my first experience with telework. I find it's quite nice because I live in Baltimore, Maryland, so my commute to work is quite long right now. So it's nice to not have that commute. It's very self-directed, which is nice. So I can sort of work at my own pace, which I really like. Any other coping mechanisms that you're using?

Right now, I am watching a Netflix original series called Terrorism Close Calls, and it's probably not the best thing to be watching right now, but it's very fascinating, and it's keeping my mind off of the virus, so I guess it's working. Yeah, I guess at least with Terrorism Close Calls, you know that it has a somewhat more happy ending, so that's a little positive. myself i have recently discovered the world of bespoke sweatpants and i may never go back to work again so this has been um it's been a period of self-discovery i have a toddler who loves to just smash through my door like she's the kool-aid man and demand hugs sometimes during conference calls which uh is interesting but it is it's telework has been by and large much nicer than I anticipated. So I think we can start going into the book then. How many times have you been asked how you got into studying pirates? I've lost count. I'm not going to ask that. At what point

in your personal research did you realize that you had enough material for a book? So for this particular project, I was asked to do this project. So it was a matter of me finding the material to do the book. And I didn't really have a lot of time to work on it. At the time that I was working on the book, I was a university professor and I had a 4-4 teaching load. So I ended up not really being able to work on the book until the summer. So I spent the better half of the summer collecting the research and the latter half of the summer actually writing the book. That is actually a really compressed timeline. Can you explain to us what you mean by a 4-4 teaching load? I'm not an academic, so I'm not positive what it means. I think some of our listeners will be confused as

well. Could you just contextualize that a bit for us? Yeah, absolutely. So basically, a 4-4 teaching load means that I taught four classes in the fall semester and four classes in the spring semester, so there's not a lot of time left over for researching and writing and that sort of thing because you can imagine trying to grade for four different classes and preparing for four different classes. It's a very intensive aspect of teaching. I was at a teaching-focused college, which was why we had the 4-4 load. Okay, that makes a lot more sense to me now. Also, I mean, I just taught professional military education and had to do a six-week seminar, and it completely occupied my time for three months. I can't imagine what teaching four courses

simultaneously would be like that's wow how did you define piracy versus privateering so for me the distinction really is a fine line and it's more semantics than anything i stuck with the fairly traditional definitions of piracy being attacks on vessels either in the water or sometimes attacking land-based operations and then privateering being the exact same thing except for the fact that you had a letter of mark or a document from a government official that gave you permission to attack vessels so really the very same thing they just there's a difference in terms of legalities and it seemed to me that the legality it didn't really matter what the perpetrator whether you're a pirate or privateer what your intent was when you started the legality

is entirely on the law enforcement side so once you're captured the legality is going to be determined by someone else not what you personally think about what you're doing would you agree with that yeah absolutely and as i read the book it seemed like a lot of pirates didn't begin their careers with the plan to become pirates where they start as privateers and just find themselves on a slippery slope or a conflict ends and now their letter of mark is no longer valid isn't that what happened with captain kid for captain kid yes he started out as a privateer and a lot of the issues that he ran into was that his crew was very unhappy with the restrictions of their letter of mark they wanted to be able to attack more than just french vessels and he really didn't

have a lot of choice when it came to appeasing his crew and that sort of happened to a lot of privateers and for a lot of people they didn't set out to become pirates they often were either on board a merchant vessel part of the merchant marines or the royal navy and got tired of their treatment or the lack of money and they would mutiny and become pirates thank you so can we discuss the space that is the Chesapeake for a minute? Because it seems like the Wild West on water. What is it about that body of water that made it such a suitable environment for piracy? I think part of it is the number of rivers and tributaries and inlets and islets that come off of the water, which enabled pirates to sort of infiltrate and escape quite easily.

I also think because the harbors of Baltimore in particular, but also some of the ports of Virginia, were very active ports. And so there was just prime pickings for pirates. You know, they had lots of vessels coming in and out of the harbor or out of the Chesapeake Bay, which just made it easy for them to pirate. So what law enforcement resources did colonial authorities have access to? Could they call on the Crown for support, or was it mostly locally deputized forces afloat that they're calling on? Yeah, they tried to call on the Crown, and depending on what was happening in terms of just geopolitical situations, sometimes the Crown was very helpful, but for the most part, they had to rely on the resources they had at hand. And that sometimes meant issuing privateering licenses to go out and hunt pirates.

And were you encountering cases of these privateers hunting the pirates and then turning around and becoming pirates themselves? I know this wasn't on the script that we discussed, but the question seems like, given that we've already talked about the slippery slope from privateering to piracy, it seems like that would have happened on more than one occasion. Yeah, I don't have any specific examples that come to mind, but I do believe that it happened more frequently than not. so we discussed this a little bit before you and i started recording about all the older language that's in use here whether it's describing ships or people's names you know we talked beforehand i think i i lost 30 30 minutes to an hour just going back and rereading the section on the guy

named marmaduke because i found his name so fascinating i kept flipping back to it and making notes and if I was like all right I already have three pages worth of questions I need to uh probably cut the marmaduke stuff but we're also talking about ship names so pinks and shallops pickaroons how much of your time as you do this research is spent figuring out what exactly people are referring to when they use some of this language where is that all covered in your doctoral studies some of it was covered in my doctoral studies but the ship names in particular it took me a lot of research to figure out just what the differences between them were and why pirates and privateers might use certain types of ships over others i know that

they tended to veer more towards the smaller vessels the ones that were more maneuverable so that's what made things things like the pink or the the shallop or even sloops much more appealing to them and then can you explain what a pickeroon is because that was another one that i had to go back and look on myself so a pickeroon was just another verbiage for pirate trying to figure out the best way to explain the pickeroon let's see it read to me like it was a loyalist privateer in the way that was used in the book but i could also be misconstruing that yeah it's difficult because the word pickeroon itself really just means a rogue

or a scoundrel and so it in terms of the usage in the Chesapeake that's what they started to refer to as pirates just because they were ordinary thieves they just

sorry my dogs are a little whiny no no I've heard him flap his ears a couple times in the background is like I just want to reach through the computer and actually he's just scratching behind the ears. Anytime I'm talking, they're like, what are you doing?

You're not paying attention to me. Yeah, so, but yeah, a pickeroon in some context could be a loyalist. It depended on who you're talking to. Sometimes pickeroons referred to slavers. So those who enslaved other peoples. It really is one of those catch-all terms. Okay.

What was Charlie Wilson's treasure, and have you ever looked for it? So Charlie Wilson's treasure is a, I guess, a mythological treasure. This guy, Charlie Wilson, supposedly buried a significant amount of loot in the Chesapeake Bay, and many people have tried to find the treasure of Charlie Wilson. Supposedly, there's a letter that he left for his brother which detailed where the treasure was buried, And people have tried to interpret that to figure out where this treasure was. I myself have not gone to look for Charlie Wilson's treasure. I tend towards the fact that I think it's more myth than reality. I realize you may not have the answer to this, but was that the actual impetus for the plot of The Goonies? You know, I don't know for sure, but I'd like to believe that it might have been.

okay act two of the book is the importance of the Chesapeake during the American Revolution why was the Chesapeake so important during the revolution I think partially its geographic location it's sort of centrally located along the eastern seaboard it made for an easy place to launch vessels from in order to attack British shipping or British vessels it also provided a a base from which to offer defensive maneuvers, and again, I think the geographic centrality of the Chesapeake Bay was really important for the American Revolution. Yeah, one of the other things that struck me as I'm doing all this reading is, okay, I'm a modern-day sailor, but I'm used to deep draft vessels, so when I look at the Chesapeake, it seems very narrow, but if you're in

these smaller vessels, there's a lot more maneuver space than I think we think of today. By the same token, I don't think we necessarily think today of the Chesapeake as a transit space, just from a logistical perspective, and how much people move goods at that point by sea versus on land. It was actually much easier to move things by sea. Was that one of the reasons for the importance of the Chesapeake, just the quantity of commerce that was passing in and out? Oh, absolutely, yes. It was much easier to ship goods from around the nation via waterway particularly if you're shipping from the southern most southern coast so say georgia area or what would become like alabama and those areas they would ship goods around florida and up the coast as opposed to trying to

ship them over land. The Chesapeake Bay was a very active shipping port, so it was very commercially heavy. Thanks. The final major act of the Revolution in the Chesapeake was the Battle of the Barges. Can you tell us what happened? Yeah, so during the American Revolution, there was the Bay Defense Act passed in Maryland, where a number of barges in particular had been commissioned to patrol the rivers, inlets, and various waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Some of these ships commissioned belonged to the Maryland Navy, but some of them were private vessels, so sort of a mixed fleet of naval and privateer vessels.

And the Battle of the Barges was the bloodiest engagement in the whole of the Chesapeake Bay and was ultimately the last naval engagement of the war. in particular they were facing loyalist privateers which was the need for the act of the protection of the bay and this tension between the loyalist pickeroons the loyalist privateers and the barges who had been commissioned by the maryland navy this led to a significant conflict the barges themselves you know they're not able to travel very quickly but they were tactically advantageous because they had shallow drafts which made it easy for them to travel into the marshy inlets

of the islands and tributaries of the bay so yeah it was just one of the bloodiest battles of the revolution and one of the last naval engagements of the revolution were the barges actually powered by wind or were these folks just rowing to move the bars around the bay Because when I think of a barge, I basically just think of a bunch of planks nailed together flat and probably like some old Disney movies with Davy Crockett on the Mississippi River. That's a good question. I'm not as familiar with the maneuverability of the barges in that sense. I would think that they tried to make use of the wind as best they could, but I don't really have an answer for that. No problem.

So now we get to the War of 1812. There's a whole section in the book on Baltimore schooners. It's kind of the bane of the British existence during the War of 1812. How is the Baltimore schooner different from other vessels? Well, so the Baltimore schooners were, you know, a typical schooner. They just so happened to be built in Baltimore. But most of the Baltimore schooners at this time had one deck and two masts, which enabled them to have speed. They also had shallow drafts, which was a critical component of their design. So they're sleek, they're fast, but they were very difficult to sail, actually. And so a Baltimore schooner required a highly competent crew. And these were really helpful for Baltimore privateers and, I guess, pirates as well, in the sense that it prevented the British from using captured Baltimore schooners. So between the American Revolution and 1797, there was over 60,000 tons of commerce that passed through Baltimore. and between 1795 and 1835 there was a total of 421 Baltimore schooners built in Fells Point so

that gives you a sense of just how important the schooners were to the Chesapeake Bay region particularly Baltimore and Fells Point yeah there's an absolutely massive number of cargo for that time as well as just the raw shipbuilding capacity I don't think we really think of it that way today because we're used to building ships out of different materials. The most fascinating character for me, and apologies again to Marmaduke Mister, that was his last name, Mister, was Thomas Boyle. So as a U.S. Navy officer, I feel like I definitely should have heard of him prior to reading your book, and I believe you said he was the most successful American privateer of the War of 1812. Can you tell us a little bit about his career?

Yeah, so Boyle was actually born in Massachusetts, but he considered Baltimore his home. He frequently challenged the British Navy directly. So he wasn't afraid of direct front on front combat. He was the captain of a privateering vessel called the Comet. And he had begun his career at the sweet, sweet, tiny age of 10. which I find very fascinating. He was only 10 years old when he began working with ships, and he was able to work his way all the way up to becoming master of his own ship by his 16th birthday. During his command as a captain of privateers, they captured between 30 and 60 ships. They managed to sail quite frequently without hindrance, and so I think just the sheer courage that he displayed is why people tended to refer to him as one of the most prolific privateers of the time period.

And Boyle's success, among others, was one of the reasons the British wound up attacking Baltimore. Is that correct? Yes. So Baltimore comes up again in the Civil War, not necessarily in your book, but it's the center of anti-authoritarian sentiment to the point where during the Civil War again, the U.S. can no longer send troop chains through. What is it about that city that made its citizens so contentious? Um, that's a good question. I think Baltimore, uh, the location of Maryland, particularly Baltimore, if you didn't know any better, you would assume it was a Southern city. And so many of the inhabitants of Maryland and particularly Baltimore felt a deep connection with the South and with the cause of their Southern brethren. And so because of that sentiment, they were sort of a thorn in the side of, of the union.

As a final anchor point, in the War of 1812, I wanted to discuss Joshua Barney last. As a former gumbo captain, he's been a hero of mine for quite a few years now, and I was really excited to see him appear here. How did he come by his commission, and then what did he do in the war? Okay, yeah. So Joshua Barney was born in Baltimore County, Maryland, which was one of the reasons that I included him, because I live in Baltimore County. He joined the Navy at the age of 13.

And he, I guess, through sheer hard work, was in command of his own ship by the time he was 16. He actually had become a merchant after the American Revolution, but felt, you know, the traditional patriotic call to serve in the summer of 1812. President Madison himself actually commissioned him as a privateer aboard the ship Rossi. and he just essentially built on his earlier naval successes frequently raiding british ships on the open ocean he one of the things that was really helpful for barney's popularity was that he received significant press attention about his raiding voyages so he was successful as a privateer but his ventures weren't necessarily profitable for him he was able to use his reputation to

his advantage though in 1813 and he requested to create a special squadron in the Chesapeake Bay a sort of small flotilla to protect the Chesapeake Bay from the British because the Chesapeake had been at the mercy of the Royal Navy who was practicing unrestricted warfare against both Maryland and Virginia and so Barney's plan sort of came at a very good time and those in charge of putting together commission the secretary of the navy william jones agreed to the creation of this chesapeake flotilla which was also known as barney's flying squadron thanks and now we're into kind of the last third of the book where we discuss a civil war and at the outbreak of hostilities in the civil war we see what i think would be referred to today as lawfare and we're

going to have a lawfare expert coming on here in a couple weeks to discuss some of this but What are the American versus Confederate approaches to Letters of Mark? The Confederate States of America were more than happy to issue Letters of Mark, particularly because, of course, they don't really have much of a Navy. They're facing the Navy of the United States. And so in order to put full-scale war into motion, they really needed the use of privateers. So Jefferson Davis put out his own call issuing an invitation for applications for Letter of Mark, and he was not disappointed because he received countless volunteers who submitted applications to the Confederate Congress. Davis particularly required each Letter of Mark, though, to be backed by a specific vessel. He wouldn't issue blank commissions.

Lincoln initially avoided the use of privateers, but once President Davis issued his call for privateers, Lincoln responded by issuing his own proclamation specifically, not so much the use of privateers, but that any persons who were captured with these Confederate state privateering commissions would be considered pirates and would be subject to the laws of the U.S. for the prevention and punishment of piracies. Lincoln really relied more heavily on the U.S. Navy, whereas the Confederate States of America relied very heavily on privateers. And I think an important consideration there, what were the penalties for piracy at that point, if the U.S. is approaching these privateers as pirates? The penalty for piracy at that time was that any Confederate privateers captured would be hanged for piracy.

That does seem like an effective deterrent. how did the two sides attempt to use the chesapeake during the civil war so the chesapeake really found itself in a difficult situation at the outset because of course responding to the situation at fort sumter virginia passed its ordinance of secession in april of 1861 but maryland remained a member of the united states so the chesapeake bay literally was a bay divided fort mchenry in baltimore received a garrison of marines from the Washington Navy Yard as the southern states began seceding. And again, Baltimore was known for its violent politics by this point. It was often frequently referred to as mob town. And those

who supported the South kept calling for Maryland's secession. So the issue for the United States was keeping Maryland on the Union side, despite the fact that, you know, this bay was both physically divided now and divided based on political ideology and the civil war saw the introduction of steam propulsion as well did that make piracy and privateering more or less accessible as a career choice i would say that it probably made things a little more difficult for pirates and the fact that they probably wouldn't have had as much access to steam power and so those who did have access to the steam power would be would be able to capture the pirates a little more easy So your final chapter was on the Oyster Wars, which shockingly, the time period here blew my mind.

That I hadn't heard of them was not a surprise to me, but the time period lasted from 1865 to 1959. What is the importance of oysters to the Chesapeake region, and how did Maryland attempt to protect that resource? So oysters were an incredibly lucrative and competitive industry. The area's waters had very few oyster predators and were free of the parasites that often cause common oyster diseases. So Maryland in particularly, but the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were ideal for growing oysters. It was just a very profitable commodity in the Chesapeake Bay region. Maryland and Virginia attempted to protect this through a series of legislative acts. laws limiting oyster harvesting to state residents only. And some say that these laws were the start

of the so-called oyster wars. I think at some point I read the Maryland Navy, or Maryland formed its own Navy to sort of police that. Maybe that was a colloquial term. Is that accurate? Yeah. What would become the Department of Natural Resources created their own Maryland Oyster Navy in order to deal with transgressors who violated the oyster laws, who had become known in the press and by the public as oyster pirates and these i mean did this become violent at any point here or is this mostly regulatory actions taking place and people are going quietly to jail afterwards for the most part it was not deadly although there were instances of extreme violence quite often between oyster pirates themselves but um probably the the deadliest action took

place in 1959 when the Maryland Oyster Navy attempted to apprehend Berkeley Muse and a couple of his friends who had gone out one night oyster pirating. And the Oyster Navy was supposed to only shoot a few warning shots, if you will, to get the men to surrender themselves. But instead of, you know, shooting a few times, they ended up hitting the vessel with a barrage of bullets. and berkeley muse was hit and died as a result as a result of this the maryland oyster navy was disbanded because it was clearly ineffectual yeah i would say so and again there's just another great name berkeley muse that derailed me as i was reading the book but did the oyster navy actually have regulatory authority it sounds like a little bit of an ad hoc organization

It had authority to apprehend oyster pirates in Maryland waters only, and it was pretty ineffective just because you also had the issue of Virginia, and they had no authority in Virginia, and their authority was pretty limited by the government and what they could do in terms of apprehending the oyster pirates. So it was sort of ad hoc in a sense. Like I said, they didn't have a lot of authority. I would imagine Virginia has most of the same concerns about preserving the resource. Was Virginia attempting to regulate this in any way as well as actually at sea regulated with forces equivalent to the Maryland Oyster Navy? Yeah, so I don't think that Virginia had its own oyster navy the way that Maryland put together, but the oyster wars actually started in Virginia, technically, when Governor Cameron decided to take matters into his own hands and put together a small flotilla of vessels who would go out and attempt to apprehend oyster pirates. And he was in charge of, he even went on the voyages with the men he was charging with capturing oyster pirates. And so Virginia is very much like Maryland, though, issuing laws in order to protect the precious resource of oysters. Thanks. I think those were all the questions I had for the book. I did have some other questions.

I know that you're aware, because I've seen on Twitter, that LEGO is releasing a new pirate set. Have you ordered that set yet? I haven't ordered it yet because I have a feeling, a sneaking suspicion that my husband might order it for me for our anniversary. So I'm going to hold off on it until after our anniversary and my birthday, just in case. Yeah, I don't know how far away those dates are. I ordered it as soon as it was available, just as a quarantine coping mechanism. I do the podcast to help cope and maintain outside contact, Legos or the other thing, which, you know, we have to wait until after toddler time to bring those out. She's not quite old enough for those yet.

But I assume also that you probably have some of the older pirate sets decorating your office, but I could be wrong on that. So my husband bought me the Ship in a Bottle Lego set. He bought me one of the Pirates of the Caribbean Lego sets. We have tons of Lego sets. We have the Millennium Falcon. We have Hogwarts, the full Hogwarts set, like the big massive one. Yeah.

So I definitely have plenty of Legos to put together, but I promised him I wouldn't put any together until he gets back. So I don't really get to use it as a quarantine coping mechanism, unfortunately. Well, the two of you can binge Lego Masters when he gets back as well. My wife and I have been watching that every week. Oh, yeah. But that is all the time we have for today. My guest is Dr. Jamie Goodall.

the book is Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay you can find it on Amazon Jamie where can we find you online and what else are you working on? So you can find me I have a website jamiegoodall.com I sometimes blog although I'm not as good as I would like to be with it

I'm also on Twitter and Instagram my handle is atlehistorian which is L underscore H I S T O R I E N N E and currently i am planning on i'm still working on revising my doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript which i hope to finish in the next couple of years but with my new job i don't know

how much time i'll have to work on it can i ask what the topic will be i focus on piracy in the atlantic world and the role that it plays in benefiting island economies something i call economies of opportunity and just how they're bringing goods and services to islands that might not have otherwise received certain types of goods just by virtue of they're stealing them when they're headed to one location and pirates are then stealing them and bringing them to a new location. Also the role of piracy and slavery. That sounds excellent and I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you again so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next week.

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