Tudor Pickory and Plunder on the High Seas. John C. Appleby, Under the Bloody Flag: Pirates of the Tudor Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long before Blackbeard preyed on ships in the Caribbean, the waters of the British Isles were infested with pirates.Especially in times of peace, when letters of reprisal or of marque were few, the seaman took matters of employment into his own calloused hands.Even the captain on a trading voyage would not disdain a bit of pickory to sweeten things by seizing a prize or two while on the high seas.In short, it was business, and the Crown frequently turned a blind eye to enterprising mariners, especially when the prey might be a rich Spanish galleon.Sir Francis Drake was arguably the most famous pirate-or patriot-in the Tudor period, 1485-1603, but there were many others who operated first in European, then Caribbean waters and the Pacific.Despite all the famous names, the unknown infamous are also part of the story told by John Appleby in Under the Bloody Flag: Pirates of the Tudor Age.There was Henry Strangeways, who attacked French shipping in the Channel and in the Irish Sea, and Robert Hicks, who took on French, Spanish, Danish and Scottish shipping.Others first gained notoriety then plundered their way to a knighthood, such as Sir Martin Frobisher, Sir John Hawkyns, and Sir Francis Drake, honoured for their breach of the law in England, if vilified in Spain.The profligate patriot George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland, sallied forth on twelve voyages of depredation to the European coasts, to the Azores, and to the Caribbean, vainly hoping to recoup his family's squandered fortunes.Those who went off soundings went in heavily-armed vessels to the Azores, and on to the Caribbean, to the Spanish Main, to Brazil, Peru, Panamá, and Nueva España, mainly for booty.Such voyages, profitable or otherwise, challenged Spanish hegemony in the New World.Appleby, in Bloody Flag, might well argue further that the proving ground for the English victory over the Invincible Armada in the Channel in 1588 was not won in the coastal waters of Britain, but in the Azores and Caribbean.It was there that the mettle of the crews was drawn and tempered, and the metal of their cannon was thoroughly heated red hot, from Tierra del Fuego to the jungle waters off Panamá.This book spans the Tudors, 1485-1603, with more weight rightly given to the latter years.Still, it would have been finer to treat English merchant vessels sailing the Caribbean by 1520, where they were greeted as corsairs and heretics by Spanish cannon. The Northern Mariner/le marin du nord, XX No. 3, (
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".