[QUOTE=John W. Kennedy]
[ul]
[li]If it’s well understood that pirates don’t keep their loot aboard ship, then there is no profit for other pirates in attacking them in the first place.[/li][/quote]
This doesn’t work because they have to get the loot sometime. And if they’re suspected of having just hidden the loot, then a spot of torture would be in order.
I believe that the list of pirates who made it to happy retirement is an example of selection bias. They’re the famous ones, not necessarily the average ones.
I agree with the others here who say that the norm was to split the loot in shares at the end of a voyage, not to save it for some nebulous future.
In fact, that seems to be what Stevenson turns into fiction. Flint betrays his crew to keep treasure for himself, but dies before he could dig it up. Good fiction; bad logic.
Drake was a privateer, someone officially commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to attack ships of an enemy country.
That why what ftg wrote is inaccurate. In formality, privateers are not pirates. They are more like the guys in western movies that the marshal pins a temporary deputy badge on. As long as they are sailing under a letter of marque they are as official as the English Navy would later be, though under different rules. Any plunder was to be returned to the Queen, and only what she gave back then parceled out. Keeping and hiding any of it would be treason. All countries of the time operated this way, and letters of marque are mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
The Wiki page on privateers does a good job of both explaining what a privateer officially was and the way individual circumstances allowed them to shade into what we and even they would call pirates. That doesn’t change the formal difference between them any more than the fact that posses in the Old West at certain times engaged in what amounted to legal lynchings meant that lynch mobs were legal.
Also, if the pirate ship was having seaworthiness issues they might have chosen to bury the loot rather than limp around in a vulnerable state. Or if they happened to break down near an out of the way place they could stash the treasure until the boat was repaired, maybe getting killed before they could return for it.
Surely Cecil knows that in the expression treasure trove the word trove is not a noun, but an adjective, meaning “found” in French (the French origin of the expression is the reason that the adjective comes second). Yes, some dictionaries list trove as a noun, but this usage is beneath the smartest human ever.
And I suppose you also object to calling George Washington, John Pershing, and George Patton “generals”? After all, it was originally short for capitaine général where général is a French adjective, not a noun. And those pesky astronomers should stop talking about novas too, because nova was originally an adjective in the Latin phrase stella nova. I could think of others, but I’m sure you get the point.
Trove by itself has been an English noun since at least 1888 when it was used by Rudyard Kipling. Any dictionary published in the last 50 years that doesn’t list trove as a noun isn’t much of a dictionary.
Not that I know a tremendous lot about sailing practices of the period, but I seem to recall reading someplace that navigation was a fairly specialized art and the majority of the crew wouldn’t have anything more than a very general idea of where the ship might be located at any given time. If my memory is accurate, then the captain can bop around for a while, pick a secluded beach, take the loot ashore, and sail away, completely secure in the knowledge that hardly any of the men on board would be able to find their way back.
I await correction on this point from better-informed readers.
…The coins were inside an ancient Roman wallet, with identification card intact. However, despite a nationwide search, the Roman male has not been successfully contacted…
