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Record W4406824268 · doi:10.25071/2561-5467.1273

Rebecca Simon, The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship

2025· article· en· W4406824268 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Jim Gallen

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicMaritime Security and History
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLawCode (set theory)AeronauticsPolitical scienceEngineeringHistoryComputer scienceProgramming language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Pirates hold their place in the sagas of the sea.The Pirates' Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship sweeps away the fog of legend to uncover the life and structure of pirates' existence.The Golden Age of Piracy is defined as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is a largely West Indian phenomenon, although it extended throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond.Just as it is said there is honor even among thieves, so pirates had codes by which they lived.Cognizant of the maxim, "If you will steal for me, you will steal from me," Northern Mariner readers might be inclined to think piracy was an undisciplined industry and wonder why anyone would undertake it.Author Rebecca Simon devotes an introduction, eight chapters and a conclusion to refuting such presumptions.Operations of pirate ships frequently were governed by "Articles" which were similar to a modern partnership agreement.The Articles of Captain Edward Low and his Company are offered as an example.The Articles set the distribution of loot: "The Captain shall have Two full Shares, the Master a Share and a half, the Doctor, Mate, Gunner, Carpenter and Boatswain a Share and a quarter."Presumably other crew members received one share.Infractions included "striking or taking up any unlawful Weapon"; "Cowardice in the Time of Engagement"; failure to deliver "any Jewels, Gold or Silver ... found on board a Prize to the Value of a Piece of Eight ... to the Quarter-Master in Twenty-four Hours Time"; "Gaming, or playing at Cards, or Defrauding or Cheating one another to the Value of a Royal of Plate"; "Drunkenness in the Time of an Engagement."Those found guilty were made to "suffer what Punishment the Captain and majority of the Company shall think fit."Provision was also made for compensation to pirates suffering serious injury while "working."Why would anyone enlist in a pirate enterprise?Chapters are devoted to food and drink, safety, weapons and battle tactics, and entertainment and culture.Pirates were better paid, better fed, were healthier, received better medical treatment, and were offered more economic advancement than other available careers, including naval or commercial maritime ones.Captives were sometimes lured by promises of mercy and shares of the loot.Yes, it was a dangerous occupation and pirates were often hanged, but various

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.248
Threshold uncertainty score0.493

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0100.006
Scholarly communication0.0060.007
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0070.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.005

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.235 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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