When slaves and free men were shipwrecked together
economist.com
economist.com
Here's google maps' view:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ile+Tromelin/@-15.887665,54.518924,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1s51527737!2e1!3e10!6s%2F%2Flh4.googleusercontent.com%2Fproxy%2FiMhyFUkn4LJgwo9p8DjAUZt0vlqw-WwVhSy_sTrUodfRWDx5vbsokN0DWBptPTKfGrd8C4cokaPA8UYgxRRoPlzLlFJcuQ%3Dw203-h134!7i1000!8i661!4m2!3m1!1s0x223214bebf13fbd7:0x7691448fcb61642d?hl=enA more extreme example would be oil rigs (tiny island) that are serviced more often by helicopters than boats.
What oddly? There were men on there just a year prior, in August of 1775:
> Why had only seven castaways survived, when 14 had been spotted weeks before? It seems the newly marooned sailor had tried his luck as a latter-day Castellan. With the help of the now-natives, one assumes, he had salvaged whatever could still be used from L’Utile’s wreck and built his own Providence. Sails were improvised from birds’ feathers. Unlike Castellan, the unnamed sailor had taken some of the slaves: the last three men and three women. Also unlike his predecessor, he failed to reach Madagascar.
The article even speculates that the white sailor was the father.
I'm also not sure why it says "14 spotted weeks before" - according to the article, over a year had passed since the 14 were spotted.
The boat in question was a 15 meter long oak on oak boat. It lasted 2 winters for 2 homes with a fire stove, and we didn't even burn it all.
There's an amazing amount of wood in a boat, particularly around the keel. The framing, keel and other structural elements are made of really heavy timber. On top of that good wooden boats are (were..) built of slowgrown oak that is incredibly dense. One large piece would last for 6-8 hours in my stove and give off a lot of heat.
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that a 25-30 meter boat would last for 15 years if you the goal was primarily to keep the fire going, only getting it really big/hot when needed.
Well played, sir.
Some quick Googling puts the weight of three masted schooners at 300-400 tons; a cord of firewood weighs 2 tons, so that's between 150 and 200 cords of firewood. Some of that was reused in the escape-raft and some of it was presumably unrecoverable, but if they were able to recover 25% of it, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 cords of firewood, or around 3 cords per year of the 15 years.
3 cords is a reasonable amount for a house to use for heating in a heating season in the US. That's less than a year, but you're probably burning it faster than you would if you were carefully husbanding a fire and occasionally using it for cooking or warmth or light.
So it's totally plausible (which is good, considering it happened), but the numbers are close enough that I couldn't guess whether you'd expect the average shipwreck in similar circumstances to run out of wood after ten years or have enough for a hundred, without having more information about the burn rate in this particular situation or how much wood they actually were able to recover.
Why would that improve their chances? That intuitively seems like a bad idea, but the people who know what they're doing thought otherwise.
The principle of scuttling the ship is to remove the buoyancy so that the ship settles firmly on the bottom (which is shallow because it is grounded) and does not get pounded to bits as the waves pick it up and slam it back down. This helps keep the ship intact and allows the people more time to get off.
When used as a verb, "scupper" means to destroy or thwart.
(From the document linked at the bottom of this page: http://www.histoire-genealogie.com/spip.php?article1533&lang...)
By cutting the rudder free, it would no longer be breaking the ship up, but it would leave a major hole where the rudder post came in, resulting in scuttling the ship.
The very bare minimum of basics - hardly any water, and hardly any food. But it did sustain over a dozen people for over a dozen years, with basically scraps of the ship they came in!
First of all, the "slaves" were actually kidnapped Africans. They had yet to do a day of forced labor and had not yet undergone the years of conditioning it took to turn a free man into a slave.
Second, the "free men" were actually slave traders. Yes, there was a ban on slave trading at the time, but that didn't stop them.
If you're interested in learning about what happens when kidnapped Africans and free men come into contact, study what happens when slave ships came into contact with pirate ships. As a general rule, pirate ships were egalitarian, as it helped preserve social harmony on the ship. And the composition of the crew was usually multiracial. Over 60% of Blackbeard's crew was black. Oftentimes, when the pirates took control of a slave ship, they would take the goods they wanted, free and arm the kidnapped Africans, and let the ship go on its way.
Some non-enslaved/kidnapped people of the ship may have had no knowledge of the cargo, or if they did, may not yet have had an opportunity to notify authorities at a port after learning. Calling them slave traders before they've had an opportunity to show their side one way or another is no different than calling the kidnapped people slaves before they've been actually put into slavery.
To be clear, I believe most the people on the ship probably would not raise any alarm over the situation, at least not enough to cause legal trouble, but if you are going to be pedantic about terminology in this way, it only makes sense to do the same in all cases brought forth, unless you are using terminology to manipulate the perspective (this is not an accusation).
Note: Edited slightly for clarity and typos.
I am not a lawyer but I do know that people are held responsible for the personal belongings they carry, say on a plane. I know that I cannot carry a prohibited item on a plane and claim that I didn't know how it got there. Which is probably why they make you say that your bag was not touched by any strangers before you board your flight.
The captain of a ship should be held responsible for the ship and it's cargo.
Actually there's strong legal precedent in the opposite direction. From page 14 of [0], "a defendant cannot knowingly acquire or possess that which he or she does not know exists". This sentiment is common in US law -- you can claim to not know how something got into your possession, and if that claim is reasonably credible, you'll typically be let off the hook.
[0] http://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/Decisions/2012/May12/70opn12....
I read the above line several times carefully.
Here is the meaning I made out of that sentence, one cannot claim that they knew exactly how they got a certain object and then say at a later time that they did not even know such an object exists.
This is a different scenario than accepting responsibility for your personal belongings (say while flying) and then claiming that you don't know how it got there.
In the former case there is evidence that you got that object.
To summarize, my understanding of in flight carry on rules are you are aware of the things you are carrying and would be held responsible if you are later caught with a prohibited item.
But it can happen in the opposite order. I recall at least one professional athlete [0] getting caught with drugs in his bag at the airport, and having the charges dismissed because (supposedly) his friend had used his bag and left the drugs in it, without his knowledge. The claim "I didn't know that existed" (ie, drugs in the bag -- knowing drugs exist in general is not the same as knowing drugs exist within your bag) is compatible with the later claim "given that it does exist, I'm certain as to where it came from" (knowing someone else had used that bag during the prior week).
In the context of this thread, it's quite possible for (some of) the crew of a ship to be in the dark as to what cargo might be onboard, and therefore to not knowingly possess contraband or be involved in slave trading. "Ignorance of the law is no defense; ignorance of crime is one." [1] As kbenson rightly pointed out, it's not "aiding and abetting" if you don't know crime is happening; it's only "aiding and abetting" if you're trying to help someone commit a crime. As the link you yourself posted says, "It is necessary to show that the defendant has wilfully associated himself with the crime being committed" -- not merely that he helped someone who happened to have committed a crime, but that he intentionally, knowingly, chose to participate in crime.
[0] http://espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=1906525
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40709114/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/i...
So my statement that passengers are held responsible for thier possessions in their carry on still holds.
Type "Carmelo Anthony drug charges dropped" into google [0].
Your statement is mostly correct, but the ways in which it's wrong are significant and relevant for this thread. As kbenson and I have both pointed out, ignorance is a valid defense in US law, and was a valid defense in many legal traditions of the past. You may have heard the phrase "harboring a known fugitive" -- someone who provides shelter to someone they know is running from the law can be held culpable for aiding and abetting, while someone who provides shelter to somebody who happens to be running from the law (unknown to them) is treated as a victim. The generalization holds -- a person who knowingly helps someone pull off a crime is culpable, while a person who happens to help someone but didn't know they were helping a criminal is innocent.
Without more detail, we don't know how much of the crew of the ship in question might fall into either category.
[0] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/basketball/nba/nuggets...
Commemorating the end of WW2, German president Joachim Gauck said, "On May 8, 1945, we were liberated — by the people of the Soviet Union." The crew on the slave ship were not "free men," even if they were well-meaning.
The tales of piracy aside, In 1761 the kidnapped Africans would be universally regarded as slaves, and the sailors manning the vessel as free men.
Nevertheless, it is our duty to correct the terms they used to better reflect the reality. And this is common practice. If it weren't, Socrates would be remembered as a corrupter of the youth and Galileo as a heretic.
Why do you suppose the Africans would see it differently? They were in fact confined to belowdecks in anticipation of being sold into slavery by white men. Do you think they weren't cognizant of this? Do you think they would have rejected the institution of slavery on the basis that they were getting the short end of the stick? Slavery exists to this day and is generally recognized where it is seen. Attitudes towards it vary, but it's not a matter of belief or conjecture.
> Nevertheless, it is our duty to correct the terms they used to better reflect the reality. And this is common practice. If it weren't, Socrates would be remembered as a corrupter of the youth and Galileo as a heretic.
Socrates is remembered as an instigator of rebellion, and Galileo as a heretic in the eyes of the church. As it so happens, predominant Western culture cares much more about Socrates' other contributions to culture than his relationship with Athenian politics, and regards heresy as something of an unreasonable charge.
I really fail to see what the big deal is. Certainly attitudes towards slavery have changed dramatically over the years. Much as attitudes towards many historical facts of life have changed. That doesn't make them cease to be facts. Are you objecting to the article's use of "free men" and "slaves" as primary identifiers? The point of the article appears to be primarily about race and the institution of slavery, when in isolation shipwrecked on an island. The labels are not false, neither are they inappropriate in a historical context.
And the newfound freedom of pirates was a direct threat to the state. It's no wonder that in a span of 50 years, as mercantilism developed, pirates went from being knighted (Francis Drake), to being the worst kind of criminals (Blackbeard).