Cotton Mather called drunkenness, cursing, gambling, and whoremongering the “special vices of the sea.”
1. The Pirate History Podcast episode “The Special Vices of the Sea” centers on Cotton Mather, privateering, and the Charles crew’s return to Massachusetts.
2. The episode names Cotton Mather, William Phipps, and John Quelch as part of the story because Mather preached to sailors and Quelch’s men became the case study.
3. The core question is whether sermons about morality, wages, and legal violence could reduce piracy without making privateers richer than pirates.
4. The narration connects Mather’s earlier support for “100% legal privateering” in the Nine Years’ War to attacks on French shipping.
5. It also notes that Mather supplied resources for English mariners who might minister to Spanish and Portuguese sailors, while insisting that was not a call to raid Iberian shipping.
6. The episode argues that the War of the Spanish Succession made the legal target list unstable in 1701 because Spain, France, and Portugal kept changing sides.
7. It describes Spain as a personal union of crowns, with Aragon, Castile, Naples, and overseas possessions in the Americas and Asia.
8. It introduces José Sacramento as the New Spain viceroy who supported the Habsburgs, and Francisco Fernández, 10th Duke of Albuquerque, as the replacement who supported the Bourbons.
9. It says the Methuen Treaty linked low tariffs on English wool and Portuguese wine to a military alliance that moved Portugal into the Grand Alliance.
10. The episode then explains that the Brigantine Charles left Boston before those diplomatic changes could realistically reach the crew.
11. The narration details Captain Daniel Plowman’s letters from Marblehead, including his warning that it would be “madness to sail with these privateers.”
12. It also notes that John Quelch’s men later attacked Portuguese shipping off Brazil, which made the cargo legally and politically explosive in Massachusetts.
13. The quoted indictment lists a Portuguese ship near the River Plate with hides, tallow, guns, powder, sails, a negro boy, and about two hundred pieces of eight.
14. The episode adds that the Charles crew took fish and salt, sugar, molasses, rice, farine, rum, linen, silk, gold dust, and Spanish coins across several dates in late 1703 and early 1704.
15. It calculates the haul at 7,553 pounds sterling, about 1.064 million modern British pounds or 1.42 million American dollars.
16. It also states that dividing the voyage among 45 men would produce about 23,644 pounds in modern British terms over 10 months, which the narration compares to Red Sea pirate fortunes.
17. The tone is conversational and argumentative, with the host pausing repeatedly to weigh legal definitions, incentives, and likely motives.
18. The format uses historical explanation, quoted primary-source language, and dry asides about places like Albuquerque and Boston.
19. Listeners interested in colonial Massachusetts, privateering law, and piracy economics will get the most from this episode.
20. Listeners wanting a short, purely nautical action story may not find enough shipboard detail here.
