I don’t know about lethality but I can imagine being under the deck with cannonballs hitting left and right and making showers of splinters (with assorted debris included) and it being absolute chaos. Enough to prevent the crew from doing anything if not outright pushing them into serious blunders. I think quantity matters in this case.
What was funny to me is that I could tell that my recent pirate obsession had gone too far when Mythbusters was like “Did pirates use rum to get out blood stains???” and I shouted at the television “No, they used urine!”
And sure enough…
Anyway, I agree with everyone else that, while the eyepatch thing was very interesting, somehow I’m more inclined to believe that pirates wore eyepatches after having their eyes gouged out somehow.
I could possibly believe the eyepatch thing in the reverse of the way they did it on the show. They had Adam and Jamie standing out in the bright sun and then going into a dark room. I don’t think that would be the biggest concern on a pirate ship. In fact, I’ve seen old ships that had prisms built into the deck to act as skylights for the cabins below.
I think the reverse is plausible. I can imagine a sailor at night using a lantern while reading a chart or eating, and wanting to be able to see well when he got back on deck. On my ship, we kept the lights out on deck to preserve our vision during night watches.
We had some rum on board, but not for washing clothes. I heard some stories about Jack Iron rum, but I think that would just disolve anything it touched.
Yes?
It was actually the first Mythbusters show I watched, and … I was a wee bit disapointed. A lot of the stuff seemed… Cobbled together to get a ‘well, we’re close enough!’ effect, which, really, doesn’t prove much.
And don’t get me started on the ‘the cannon ball could kill four men! All they’d have to do is be lined up directly in front of the shot, side-to-side!’
What is this from? I must know!
Tori is a regular at midnight sun in the castro.
Oh he dances like the best of them, and he also said that they’ll be revisiting the sail experiment. Also Keri is married 
He also said that a sex myths episode is coming
Here’s what I heard:
Not all pirates wore eyepatches. Like all mariners of the time, the navigators used a sextant. In order to use a sextant you need to stare into the sun at regular intervals while lining up the doohickey with the horizon. After years of staring at the sun, you’d lose sight in that eye. It would look nasty, hence, the patch.
I’ll do some research, it sounds sort of true-ish.
Thank you! I was reading the thread going, “But it was the sextants! Everyone knows that, right?” Glad I’m not the only one who’s heard that (at a museum in Nag’s Head, no less.)
It may not be right, but did they at least bring it up as a possibility? I didn’t see the show.
Huh. Good to know. I’ve heard that the Latin American Club is popular with the cast, as well.
Cite (from memory): Dava Sobel’s Longitude says that true sextants (invented about 1730) were actually better than their predecessors (such as the astrolabe and backstaff), and includes a quote from a contemporary about how many captains were blind in one eye because of using the backstaff.
This would only apply to captains and other navigator-types, but certainly accounts for some of the eye-patches worn.
And, I wonder if ‘splinters’ causing wounds referred to in period accounts would include not only 2-inch fragments of wood from a small hole the hull, but also big chunks of masts/booms/whatever that were knocked loose and not only flying around from the force of the cannonball, but also just falling from up above due to gravity. I’d hate to have the outer 4 feet of a major boom fall on my head…
There are lots of freak things that can be done once in real life and never repeated.
Take the guy in Minneapolis yesterday who fell 17 floors and survived (he landed on a glass roof far below and broke his leg).
Could a stunt man do that? No way, but it happened in real life.
Well, I’ll bet if we threw a couple of hundred stuntmen off the same roof, one at a time of course, odds are, one of them will be bound to survive. Assuming the glass gets replaced after each drop and the stuntmen are of average weight.
Another thing about the cannonball.
When they used the air cannon it was going at (what did they say) half speed. The figured since it was only going half speed the shards weren’t going fast enough to cause any real damage. Then they got a real cannon which they said was going something like 9 times (correct me if I’m wrong on that) the speed of a period cannon. Is it possible that the since the cannon ball was going so fast it made a cleaner cut through the wood and therefore less/smaller splinters? AND how close where they firing the real cannon from. Wouldn’t a cannon on a pirate ship be quite far away (from the other ship) and lose quite a bit of energy on the way, seems like they should have taken that into consideration?
I was mainly perplexed by the fact that they used foam instead of a ballistics gel mold in the initial air cannon small scale tests. Granted, a lack of splinter penetration wouldn’t have told us much since the air cannon projectile was traveling at a much lower speed, but it would have been VERY interesting if there had been penetration. As it was, all we knew from the initial tests is that splintering actually occurs, which probably wasn’t a surprise to anyone. (Oh, and which wood splinters best, of course.)
My biggest problems with the cannonball test were, first, that the section of ship built in no way represented the mass of a warship of the time, and second, that the mythbusters were purposely aiming between the frames and not at them.
A well built man-of-war might have 18 to 24 inches of timber to shoot through rather than the paltry maximum of 9 inches of Adam’s section (and between the frames there was no more than five inches). That’s why warships used 18-, 24- and 48-pounders. Six-pounders were considered relatively minor weapons. I don’t exactly remember the ballistic mathematics, but I seem to remember that when the mass of the shot is doubled, the force is squared for the same relative speed of the projectile. Therefore, 24- or 48-pounders would deliver tens or hundreds of thousands times more energy than a 6-pounder. Under such circumstances, I can imagine splinters would be more deadly.
It would be virtually impossible during battle not to hit the ships framing. Carved knees and beams would throw off heavier, larger and more deadly splinters, not to mention the hundreds and thousands of metal fasteners – nails, spikes, bolts and such – used to hold parts together. Sailors of yore may have referred to a 2-foot-long hunk of wood with a 9-inch spike sticking out that killed a compainion something different, but I suspect the common term was “splinter”.
Certainly this makes it a difficult myth to prove, and in my mind it really has little to do with pirates since they tended to want to avoid battle, but the work put in by the mythbusters seems lacking to me.
As an aside, it was common to use pine or some other cheaper wood for cieling (interior planking) as it was more economical and flaws in the wood would not affect the integrity of the hull to the same degree.
I believe they said that the air cannon wasn’t as fast as a real period cannon, so they got something closer to period, maybe a little faster but not huge amounts.
But they were firing at point-blank, which would make the impact at higher speed than a shot from medium range.
And it’s certainly plausible that a slower projectile would cause more splintering, while a higher speed shot just punches a neat hole right through the wood.
Also, after minor research, it turns out the backstaff was actually a big improvement on the forestaff, which required basically staring directly into the sun. A decent sextant should have smoked glass for you to see the sun through, so not quite an express ticket to eye-patchville, though there’s probably enough accidental exposure not through the glass to make a sextant at least slightly risky, from a vision point of view. And again, there is a period quote about captains being blind in one eye from using the forestaff.