#charles johnson

THE GRASSES OF GREAT BRITAIN by Charles Johnson (London: Harwicke, c.1861). Illustrated by John E. Sowerby. Art binding by Hannah Brown (2021)

Bound in pale yellow bull skin with inlays in a variety of colors across the entire cover. Hand embroidered with 29 species of British grasses. The endpapers and doublures have numerous hand-colored grass seeds on them. The box is made from poplar.

William Closson (whose name was spelled with the 'long s' in the muster books like this: Cloſson) is a 25 year old from Erebus.

This is John Hartnell (I posted him before as he's one of the men buried on Beachy Island) - he was on Erebus and was 25 years old.

John Morfin, was 25 and on Erebus (the real man was 25, anyway, though I'm not sure the character of Morfin in the show is intended to be 25 - his actor was born in 1974!).

Henry Lloyd, from Erebus, was 26 years old, and the only crewmember on Erebus known not to be born in the UK - he was born in Norway. Lots of crewmembers didn't have their birthplaces listed, though, so it's not clear if there were others, and of course, details about James Fitzjames's identity weren't known yet.

This one's George Thompson, who was a 27 year old crewmember on Erebus.

This one's Charles Coombs, who was 28 years old and on Erebus.

Here's Thomas Tadman, another 28 year old Erebite. He's brown in homage to poor Tad the confused reindeer from Parry's arctic expedition.

Here's John Handford, a 28 year old AB on Terror.

Charles Johnson, a 28 year old from Terror who was the only known expedition member born in what would come to be called Canada - in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

So, sticking with the pirate thing, Today You Learned about Captain Charles Johnson.

Charles Johnson is the author of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, a book from 1724 that is one of our basic sources on the Golden Age of Piracy. A lot of what we know (and question!) about the period is form his book. People question his reliability, especially because it's unlikely he was there for most of the events he described, but a lot of historical fiction you see that's set in this period? It's based off of his work.

Which makes it weird that we don't really know who he was.

See, we have no English naval records of a "Captain Charles Johnson". It's likely it's a pen name, which is a thing people still do today, and it's possible he picked it after a playwright from English history. Or maybe his name was Charles Johnson, and he strapped 'Captain' onto his name to make it sound more reliable.

For the longest time, it was assumed that it was actually a pen name for English author Daniel Defoe, the guy you probably know as the author of Robinson Crusoe, but that raises all kinds of questions. I think nowadays, most people agree that it wasn't Defoe, but it's still out there as a plausible theory.

Wikipedia suggests publisher Nathaniel Mist as a candidate, too, as he was a journalist who sailed in the West Indies, so he could have interviewed people who knew the accounts he records, but that's far from proven, too.

So! Our most cited source for the history of pirates like Blackbeard and Anne Bonny is an author... who we don't actually know the real name of.

Individualists get a bad rap in politics these days. That should come as no surprise; politics these days is dominated by electoral politics, and electoral politics is an essentially anti-individualistic enterprise. With free markets and other forms of voluntary association, people who can’t agree on what’s worthwhile can go their own ways. But the point of government elections is to give people in the political majority a means for forcing through their favorite laws, projects, and rulers over the objections of people in the political minority, and making everybody obey those laws, fund or participate in those projects, and acknowledge those rulers.

Still, even if it is unrealistic to expect individualism to get much respect from people who are deeply invested in electoral politics, it’s not too much to ask them not to try to score political points by totally distorting our position. In any case, if they do, it’s worth taking the time to set things straight.