The Reference

Glossary

Quick definitions for the technical terms used across this reference. Type in the search box to filter.

Akan / Asante: Akan-speaking peoples of modern Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. The Asante (south-central Ghana) formed a political confederation around 1699–1701, only sixteen years before the Whydah sank. The 79+ Akan gold ornaments recovered from the wreck (necklace beads, openwork discs, bell-shaped pendants, a cast cowrie ornament) were made by Akan goldsmiths and shipped through the Royal Africa Company's Gold Coast trade. They are the earliest reliably dated group of pre-1874 Akan gold anywhere (Ehrlich 1989). Most are clipped, folded, or hole-punched, mutilated for melting as scrap bullion at the next Atlantic port.
Articles (Ship's Articles): The written rules and shares-of-loot agreement that pirate crews signed on joining a ship. Bartholomew Roberts' 1721 Articles survive (via Johnson 1724) and are the analogue we teach. The Whydah's own Articles do not survive; trial testimony confirms the crew had them. (A wounded-heart symbol appears among crew engravings found on the wreck, but it is not evidence of a signing ritual. Teach the seals and engravings as artifacts, not proof.)
Backstaff: Sun-altitude measuring instrument invented by John Davis in 1594. The standard latitude tool of the 17th and early 18th centuries. The user faced away from the sun and read its shadow on a graduated arc, safer than looking at the sun through earlier instruments.
Bathymetry: The measurement of underwater depth and underwater terrain. Modern Google Earth shows seafloor bathymetry; you can use it to read the wreck site.
Cartography: Making and reading maps. The word comes from the Greek for "map writing." Cyprian Southack (the cartographer who marked the Whydah wreck) and Herman Moll (the most famous London mapmaker of the early 1700s) are the two who matter most for our unit.
Chokepoint: A narrow body of water through which a large fraction of global shipping must pass. Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Malacca, Panama, Gibraltar. Geographic features that give the country controlling them disproportionate leverage. Pirates concentrated near them in 1717 for the same reason modern state actors target them today.
Commission: An official government authorization. A privateer's commission (its letter of marque) made wartime raiding legal; when commissions were cancelled after the war ended in 1713–14, thousands of privateers were thrown out of work and many turned to piracy.
Compass: Magnetized needle on a pivot; gives heading relative to magnetic north. Standard navigation instrument by 1717, centuries old by then.
Conformal projection: A map that keeps shapes accurate (countries look the right shape) but distorts size (countries near the poles look way too big). Mercator is the famous example. Good for navigation; bad for comparing how big places really are.
Dead reckoning: Estimating current position from a last-known point using heading + speed + elapsed time. The only longitude method available to 1717 sailors. Error accumulated daily.
Demobilization: The discharge of military personnel after a war ends. The Royal Navy demobilization after the War of Spanish Succession (1713-14) put thousands of trained sailors out of work, concentrated in the Caribbean, the single biggest push factor into Golden Age piracy.
Driving Question (DQ): The big question you keep returning to all unit: "Why would a person choose piracy in 1717, and how would they want you to tell their story?"
Equal-area projection: A map that keeps sizes accurate (Greenland and Africa are correctly sized relative to each other) but distorts shapes (countries get squished). Mollweide, Goode, and Equal Earth are examples. Good for showing where things are spread out (people, forests, vote counts).
Equator: The great circle on Earth equidistant from the North and South Poles. Latitude zero. The reference line for all latitude measurements.
Flying Gang: The pirate community organized at Nassau by Benjamin Hornigold ~1715, after the Spanish Treasure Fleet salvage. Sam Bellamy and Edward "Blackbeard" Teach both sailed under Hornigold here.
Galley: A type of ship combining sails and oars. The Whydah Gally was a galley-class three-masted slaver, 110 ft, 300 tons.
Gibbet: An iron cage in which the body of an executed pirate was hung in public, often at a harbor entrance, as a warning to sailors. In Boston Harbor, Nix's Mate island served this purpose; the best-documented case is the pirate William Fly (1726). Distinct from the Whydah men, who were hanged at the Charlestown Ferry gallows in 1717. On Field Trip 3 (Georges Island / Boston Harbor Islands), when that trip runs, students can see Nix's Mate.
Great circle: The shortest path between two points on a globe. Modern airliners fly great-circle routes. It's why a flight from New York to Tokyo seems to curve up over Alaska. Sailors before accurate clocks couldn't follow these routes, too hard to keep adjusting heading.
Gyre: A large system of circular ocean currents. The North Atlantic Gyre, clockwise rotation between North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, physically forced the shape of the triangle trade.
Impressment: Forced naval service. The Royal Navy seized men off streets and merchant ships into compulsory military service. Deserting impressed naval service was a direct path into piracy.
Latitude: How far north or south you are from the equator. Measured in degrees: 0 at the equator, 90 at the poles. Sailors in 1717 could find this with a sextant or backstaff.
Lee shore: A coastline that is downwind of a sailing vessel: the wind is pushing the ship toward the shore. The most dangerous configuration for a ship in a storm. The Whydah was on a lee shore at Wellfleet on the night of April 26, 1717.
Letter of marque: A government license that turned a private captain into a legal privateer: permission to attack and capture enemy ships in wartime. Without one, the exact same act was piracy. The whole difference between a privateer and a pirate was this piece of paper.
Longitude: How far east or west you are from a chosen starting line (since 1884, that's a line through Greenwich, England). Measured in degrees. Sailors couldn't find it accurately at sea until John Harrison's H4 clock worked in 1761, 44 years after the Whydah wrecked.
Mercator projection: The world map you grew up looking at. Made by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. Sailors love it because any course you can draw as a straight line on it is one you can actually sail by holding a single compass heading. Its big flaw: it makes Greenland and Antarctica look gigantic. Google Maps uses a version called Web Mercator.
Middle Passage: The forced sea voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas. The Whydah carried 367 captives from West Africa; 312 survived to Jamaica.
Mutiny: Sailors collectively refusing to obey their captain. In the Royal Navy, a capital offense. On a pirate ship, the foundational moment: most pirate crews were mutineers from naval or merchant service.
Nor'easter: A large storm system in the North Atlantic that travels northeastward along the U.S. East Coast, with winds blowing from the northeast. The April 26, 1717 nor'easter wrecked the Whydah at Wellfleet.
Pink (ship type): A small, narrow-stern Dutch sailing ship used for cargo and fishing in the 17th-18th centuries. The Mary Anne, a pink of Dublin loaded with Madeira wine, was the prize Bellamy took on April 26, 1717, and lost the same night.
Primary source: A document, artifact, or testimony created at or near the time of the events being studied. Boston Vice-Admiralty Court testimony (1717), Cotton Mather's execution sermon (1717), and Cyprian Southack's 1717 chart are primary sources for the Whydah. "Captain Charles Johnson's" General History of the Pyrates (1724), now identified as the work of Nathaniel Mist (Bialuschewski 2004; Brooks 2015), is partially primary as a 1724 artifact, but unreliable for specifics; the Bellamy "Beer-speech" episode is almost certainly a Mist embellishment following a St. Augustine literary trope (Frohock 2015), and Mist altered the text substantively between his May 1724 first edition and December 1724 second edition. Frohock reads the whole GH as double satire. The "Robin Hood pirate" framing you'll meet in popular sources comes from this 1724 literary work, not from contemporary record.
Privateer: A private armed ship licensed by a government to attack enemy shipping in wartime. Legal piracy with paperwork. When the War of Spanish Succession ended in 1713-14, thousands of privateers lost their commissions. Many slid into illegal piracy.
Prize: A ship or cargo captured at sea. A privateer's prizes were judged and sold legally through a prize court; a pirate simply kept them.
Prize court: A court (often a Vice-Admiralty Court) that ruled whether a captured ship was a lawful “prize” to be sold. The paperwork that separated legal privateering from piracy. Salem's Revolutionary-era captains ran hundreds of British prizes through one at Derby Wharf.
Projection (map projection): A mathematical method for representing the curved surface of the Earth on a flat map. Every projection distorts something (shape, area, distance, or direction) because flattening a sphere is mathematically impossible without trade-offs.
Prime meridian: The line of longitude defined as zero degrees, used as the reference for all longitude measurements. Standardized at Greenwich, England in 1884.
Punonakanit Wampanoag: The Indigenous people whose territory included Wellfleet, Cape Cod, the place the Whydah wrecked. Their voice is absent from the 1717 written record. Land acknowledgment is appropriate when teaching the wreck site.
Quadrant: Heavy metal-plate sun-altitude instrument with a plumb-bob. Older than the backstaff, still in use in 1717. More awkward to use at sea but functional.
Quartermaster: On a pirate ship, an elected officer second in command, responsible for distributing loot and representing the crew's interests against the captain. Paulsgrave Williams had been Bellamy's quartermaster early in their partnership; by April 1717 he was captain of the sloop Marianne, Bellamy's consort.
Royal Africa Company (RAC): The English chartered company that held the legal monopoly on the African slave and gold trade from 1672 to 1698, kept slaving into the 1730s, and was dissolved in 1752. Operated forts along the West African coast. Cape Coast Castle in modern Ghana was its headquarters. The Whydah's gold-and-slave cargo passed through this trading network. After the company lost its monopoly in 1698, independent slave merchants (like Sir Humphrey Morice, who commissioned the Whydah) competed with the RAC on the same routes. The "RAC" appears throughout 18th-century Atlantic documents and is the institutional context for the Whydah's African material.
Rhumb line: A sailing course where you hold the same compass heading the whole way. On a Mercator map it looks like a straight line. It's not the shortest path between two points (a "great circle" is shorter). But it's the easiest to actually steer.
Sextant: Precision sun- and star-altitude instrument introduced 1759. The successor to the backstaff and quadrant. Did not exist when the Whydah sailed.
Sloop: A small single-masted sailing vessel with a fore-and-aft rig. Common in 17th-18th-century coastal trade. Bellamy's Marianne (10 guns) and the Bonetta were sloops.
Source criticism: Evaluating a historical source for who created it, when, why, and how reliable it is. The whole reason we tier our own claims (Solid, Contested, Mythologized) and explicitly flag Johnson 1724 as unreliable.
Tissot's indicatrix: A trick for showing what a map projection messes up. Place identical circles all over the globe, then flatten the globe onto each kind of map. Where the circles stretch or squish tells you what the map gets wrong, and where. See Navigation & Projections for examples.
Trade winds: Steady easterly winds south of about 30 degrees North that blow from Africa toward the Americas. Combined with the westerlies (north of 30 degrees N) that blow from America back toward Europe, they physically force the triangular shape of Atlantic trade.
Triangle trade: The 17th-18th century Atlantic trade pattern: European manufactured goods to West Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean and Americas, raw materials (sugar, molasses, rum, cotton, tobacco) from the Americas back to Europe. The Whydah was built for this trade and named after Ouidah, a major West African slave port.
Vice-Admiralty Court: British colonial maritime court that tried piracy and other sea-related offenses. The Whydah survivors were tried at the Boston Vice-Admiralty Court in October 1717, before a commission headed by Governor Samuel Shute. (Judge Samuel Sewall, the apologetic 1692 witch-trial judge, is often placed on this bench in popular accounts, but the 1718 Trials of Eight Persons record does not name him among the commissioners.)
Voyage Journal: The student running portfolio across the unit. One deliverable per session, filed in each student's folder as they went. The raw material the final project drew on.
Westerlies: Prevailing winds from the west in the mid-latitudes (roughly 30-60 degrees N and S). Carried 18th-century ships from the Americas back to Europe along the northern leg of the triangle trade.
Whydah Gally: The slave ship built in London 1715, captured by Sam Bellamy in February 1717 in the Caribbean, wrecked off Wellfleet, Cape Cod on April 26, 1717 (41.891°N, 69.957°W, off Marconi Beach, in roughly 16–30 ft of water). 110 ft, 300 tons, three-masted galley, 28+ guns when she wrecked. Discovered by Barry Clifford 1984; bell recovered 1985 confirmed identity. The cargo at her loss included Spanish silver, gold dust, and at least 79 documented Akan/Asante gold ornaments. The earliest reliably dated group of pre-1874 Akan goldwork anywhere (Ehrlich 1989).