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Message Boards > Topics > Immigration and Emigration > Death at Sea
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http://boards.rootsweb.com/topics.immigration.seadeath/80.2.1.1/mb.ashx
Subject: Re: Death at Sea
Author: halpark
Date: Friday, February 06, 2015
Classification: Query
Surnames:
Pirate ships, as all ships, need/needed fuel, food and water - i.e.they needed a base so where was a pirate who was attacking a ship between Germany and North America based? No secret islands in the middle of the Atlantic to my knowledge. Liverpool, Queenstown (Cobh), Baltimore, New York? In addition pirates attacked ships for some sort of profit - what profit would they have gained from killing all the men and sending the women on their way. As a general rule pirates sank ships when they had got what they wanted - just to make sure there was no evidence left behind. By the 1880s most of the European powers had powerful navies which would soon have searched them out.
Men were no more chivalrous at that time than they have ever been. Titanic - do read up the facts. Whether you were saved or not depended far more on which class you were than sex or age - and as for chivalry - well if it really had been "women and children first" Bruce Ismay would never have needed to kill himself because of the opprobrium poured on him after he had made sure he was safe regardless of the hundreds still on board and Duff Gordon who was saved in a lifeboat carrying only 12 people when it had room for 40 would not have had to bribe the coxswain (he always denied this - but he would, wouldn't he?) to row away instead of picking up those in the water because he thought they might upset or swamp the boat. A total of 1517 people perished - 61% of 1st class passengers survived while only 24% of 3rd class passengers made it.
For anyone who knows anything about the sea the story is simply not credible.