Free Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty Page B

“chasers,” cannon that could be fired on anyone trying to pursue or escape them. Aboveboard, the forecastle and any superstructure behind (in seaman’s terms, “abaft”) the mainsail was removed, as were the cabins (“roundhouses”) in the stern, creating a clear deck ideal for boarding vessels or stashing excess numbers of privateers, captives, or booty. Finally, the rig of the converted vessel could be altered by stepping the mainmast aft, for increased power in the wind. Pirates adored speed; an extra knot could mean the difference between riches and hanging. Like grease monkeys cackling as they dropped a supercharged V-12 into their father’s vintage Olds, Roderick and the other Brethren took a stock mercantile vessel and made it into a thing built to fly.
    Onto their customized ships, the privateers loaded
boucan,
water, hard tack, and their most valuable possessions, prized above women and even Spanish gold: their muskets. The long, broad-butted muskets and the pirates’ skill with them were so essential to their success that one must pause to linger over these unique seventeenth-century creations. Like Lewis and Clark heading into the vasts of the western territories, the privateers depended on their firearms for their very lives; Lewis and Clark needed them for killing buffalo, the privateers for killing men. They bought them from French and Dutch traders who plied the waters of the New World, and getting a good musket and a pair of working pistols would have been one of the first priorities for a buccaneer. They paid small fortunes to obtain them, using any seed money they’d brought with them from the Old World, from their wages as indentured servants, or from selling
boucan
or animal skins; there were a dozen ways to get the necessary cash. They cleaned the guns obsessively and would slit the throat of anyone who dared touch them.
    The pirate musket was an objet d’art, often originating in the shops (one might almost say studios) of the great French gunsmiths: Brachere of Dieppe and Galin of Nientes. Mass production of firearms would not be perfected until the middle of the eighteenth century, when interchangeable parts were produced and assembled into a piece. So the privateers and pirates carried one-of-a-kind matchlocks (in which a burning taper was placed into a pan of gunpowder) and the later wheelocks (in which a metal wheel spins against a flint, causing sparks to fly and touching off the powder, a technique supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci). The finest of these heavy iron guns were considered near counterparts to Renaissance paintings and sculpture. On a typical French musket, you might find the hammer shaped into the form of a leaping dolphin, while on the blued barrel would be etched intricately worked portraits of gods such as Jupiter and Mars throwing thunderbolts or reclining on billowy clouds. Producing these firearms was a complex process involving a designer, a stockmaker, a barrelsmith, a metal carver, an inlayer, and an engraver. To achieve the scenes that made the French guns distinctive, the craftsman would work much as a sculptor like Leonardo would, his chisel and chasing tools guided by his free hand as he pounded shapes into the cold metal. The craftsman was a metallurgist who had to know how to forge metal, reduce it, soften it to a working consistency, harden it, then “clean it white,” shining it until it gleamed like porcelain. Gunsmiths also strove for lightness; due to their innovative design, the French-produced wheelocks were lighter than their competitors on the Continent, a wonderful attribute when you’re carrying a weapon on twenty-mile marches through Central American jungles. Ironically, the buccaneers, whom many regarded as civilization killers, carried into battle an instrument that was at the forefront of Renaissance artistry. A Spanish soldier sometimes had to face off against the privateers with an outdated arquebus, which was less accurate than