Let’s talk buccaneers for a paragraph or few and then settle into a mighty pragmatic lesson that these spoilers of the seas took for granted and that many of we, the 21 st Century coddled crew, a bit less so. Hand-to-hand fights were quite common in the days of sailing piracy, in fact we get our phrase “hand-to-hand combat” from this very fact. A crewman on a sailing vessel was and is a “Hand” and thusly hand-to-hand combat in piratical parlance is just that, a one-on-one affair between marauder and mauradee. Contrary to cinematic depictions of rival ships holing one another willy-nilly with cannon shot, the preferred tactic was to fire upon masts and other standing rigging and leaving as much of the ship intact as possible. Afterall, a sunk ship cannot be looted, a sunk ship cannot be taken over as additional transportation booty. No, the crux, more often than not, was to use sailing prowess and well-placed shot to make boarding feasible. With boarding an ulti...
Examining & Resurrecting Indigenous Skills and Frontier Rough & Tumble Combat