So I just got an Advanced Reader Copy of David Maraniss' upcoming book Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe.  It's scheduled to hit the bookstores on August 9th.  I've not read anything by Maraniss before, but I'm familiar with the praise for his biographies of Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi.  

Thorpe was a childhood hero of mine so I'm very much looking forward to this and I am going to slot in in to my reading right away.  

At the intersection of science and history...Pompeii victim’s genome sequenced.  Interesting article.  They attempted to sequence two victim's but the female's DNA was not sufficient to fully sequence.  

I’ve been reading articles by Dr. Rebecca Simon, an expert on piracy. She’s debunked a myth or two about piracy, and I have found it to be fascinating reading.

So, did pirates really bury their treasure? It’s a common trope in pirate fiction, most notably in Treasure Island. What is the reality, though?

Captain William Kidd (c1655-1701) was a pirate who ended up in jail. As a ploy to escape a prison sentence, he wrote to the governor of New York and Massachusetts, claiming that he had buried a cache of gold and jewels on Gardiner’s Island, off the coast of New York. Newspapers picked up on the story and it spread. Robert Louis Stevenson then wrote Treasure Island, and what was a lie became “fact” over the centuries.

Rebecca Simon wrote that pirates had no reason to bury treasure. Pirates had to repair and restock their ships, hire new crew and buy food. What use would their wealth be buried in a chest on an island, far from where it would be useful?

Still, where would the fictional fun be without buried treasure? (Simon also wrote that ‘treasure’ often meant textiles, spices, wines and spirits)

Apparently, real-life pirates did not force people to walk the plank. More often than not, they kept people below deck and subjected them to beatings and disfigurement. Marooning people was another popular form of punishment.

Regarding the skull and crossbones flag, while there is some reality to that, there were many other kinds of flags, including red flags and plain black flags; red would mean that pirates would give no mercy while black meant that pirates would.

Eyepatches have some basis in reality, but there are no reputable eyewitness accounts of pirates having ‘peg legs’. It is thought that that trope was another case of Treasure Island popularising it - and it being accepted as ‘historical fact’.

Thanks to Dr. Simon for the facts, here is her website: rebecca-simon.com

You know, I was reading some stuff about the American Civil War yesterday and it occurred to me that it's feasible that there may've been people alive at the time of the Civil War who could remember the American Revolution. I mean, obviously there wouldn't have been many, given the average life expectancy back then, but you could have had a person born in, say, 1768 who witnessed the birth of the nation as a 8-year-old and lived to see its potential demise as civil war broke out in 1861. They'd only need to be in their 90s, I guess.

This might sound obvious to some, but I dunno...that realisation kinda blew my mind.

Watching a British WWII film and it just occurred to me. Brits calling the Germans "Jerrys" as a term of derision. Jerry- doesn't sound nasty, it actual seems like a friendly name. Much nicer than the American slang of that time beng Krauts. And what about all the Brits of that time whose names were actually Gerry or Jerry. Did they start to feel like social outcasts?

Yep, check out my post above on that...it was the daughter of a Civil War vet who was collecting until 2020 (the time of her passing)!