Klaus Störtebeker...

so far we havent had a thread about a famous pirate yet... so its about time we start one... this man lived during the times of the Hanse, when hamburg, lubeck and other cities on the northern coast of germany grew exceedingly rich through trade, using potbellied slow ships that could hold enormous amounts of cargo... the "hansekogge" (english: cog) looked already similar to some of the ships used later by the first navigators during the age of discoveries (15th-18th century)...but was probably a good bit slower...

 here you can read up on the Hanse, if you have forgotten evrything you went through in school, with history teacher Niccolo Nincompoop, and his consort, Miss Margret Manners...

 Klaus Stortebeker also has an annual festival hel for him in Hamburg each year, complete with fireworks, horseback riding knights who fight it out amongst each other, famous artists performing shanties & reciting poems... look above, thats what artists believe the famous Pirate Klaus stortebeker looked like.. the man who taught the entire armada of Hanse-traders to fear the waters of the english channel.. for they never knew when suddenly his jolly roger flag would appear...

 but would those "fish-heads" lawyers, traders and entrepreneurs who inhabit hamburg today, admit or mention with a single word, that "their" famous pirate was in fact not german at all ? if you´d conduct an interview in any city today along the northern coast, from rotterdam, hamburg, bremen all the way to Stettin you´d probably have everybody agree that stortebeker (plattdeutsch for "stürz-den-becher", meaning "pour down the pint"... never could have been a brit... but if you read a bit about the english king that was born aroudn the same time, and also was said to be a real roughneck, a new picture begins to take shape... richard II of england (1367-1400) was said to be a reckless character, an autocrat that always did one thing: what he wanted ! the lower house tries to override your decree and gives you a veto ? no problem, you´ll have your will anyway... you want to marry a girl that hasnt even reached adolescence, and all the bishops scream hell & fury ? nevermind, just let them complain, go get that kid ready for me.. you see this man was a true pirate king,  no matter if he attended mass in york, sat on his royal throne, or terrorized the Hanse ships running along the english channel... even tho he looks neat and clean on the official picture, his weird handwriting gives him away... it looks as if written after a long night at sea, after countless mugs of hot grog had been running down his royal throat, hoarse from singing and screaming with his roughneck crew...

 some time later, shakespeare also wrote a stageplay about him...that is also a popular classic...

and here again the website of the official "stortebeker plays" that occurr each summer in hamburg...

now since we´ve touched the subject of ships and pirates, and i havent uploaded my finds so far from the age of conquistadores... lets take a brief look at the history of ships...

 here we have 3 modern ships, 20th and 21st century... a really fast modern yacht with a weird name (from a james bond movie)...below a battleship from WW2 built in japan.. then a cruiser from the 1930s.. and very bottom a chinese boat (you can tell by the typical sails) from early 15th century...

 but aluminum and steel bellies have only been possible for about 150 years... apart from that, it was always wood, and wooden hulls need a lot of care, and be tarred and fixed up on a regular basis... wood and saltwater dont like each other.... thats why the portuguese caravelle with its 2 easy latin sails, and small enough to be docked pretty much evrywhere, rolled to the side and re-furbished, was a real hit during the conquistadores age... it could sail evrywhere around the world....

 these lateen sails had been used for thousands of years by arab traders, but the occident mostly square rigged evrything, which needs a much bigger crew, and only brings little or no gain in speed... with sailboats, when we talk monohulls (and for thousands of years the west used monohulls exclusively)... theres a strict formula that a ships speed cant exceed a certain ratio, depending of its length... since bigger wooden ships were increasingly hard to build, most of these ships probly never went much faster than 10 or 15 knots, even in favourable conditions...

 but probably that wasnt their purpose anyway, seeing many of these ships are named after hermetic characters, like "golden hind", or "santa maria" or stuff like that...so their whole use had more of a representative function.... they were the figureheads of european colonization & exploration...

 this was the "golden hin" that shakespeare aka sir francis drake (his pirate alter) used to sail around the world...

 this is a later ship, used in the battle of trafalgar by admiral nelson, a ship-of-the-line with over 100 guns, leading an entire fleet of smaller vessels... imagine all these ships cold only be built with special wood... for the bottom sceleton eg. you need a tree thats split in half... ship-building is an ancient artform, the romans once de-forested almost their entire country for the sake of building a silly large fleet... only to wage war against the surrounding powers, who did the same with their own forests...

 until the onset of the steam engine, and first poop-wheel steamers, and later sidewheel, oceangoing ships were ran on sail exclusively...

 until later the huge oceanliners like RMS olympic, titanic, or todays cruiseships like RMS queen mary saw the light of day... all these famous wharfs that build these ships, along with evrything else (airplane factories, car companies like porsche daimler, benz, audi) were all started and are run today by the same families that run evrything else... under diffrent names... and so it was throughout all time and history..

 lets look at some older ships as well... i havent found the ship that st. paul shipwrecked with in malta, around 40 AD, but something else...

 the phoenicians were the best seafarers in the entire mediterranean scenario for a long time, thats how one of their biremes looked like.. two rows of oars, occupied by slaves of war or labourers, gave even increased speed... we all know these ships from the famous "asterix" comics, where the roman galeere looked really similar... (you know, the comic where the pirate ship always sinks when they cross the ship of asterix and obelix..)

 thats another 2 phoenician ships, the first one from aroud 1500 BC, a slower trader holding more cargo... the second one a bit fancier with a little cabin in the back for the captain to relax, and the drummer to have some shade while he beats the drum for the rythm..

 these canoes go back really really far... probably as far as history goes, they´ve been built by the simpler animistic tribes and cultures.. and still are today.. just look at lake malawi, where the locals still go fishing cichlids on these boats..

that was a typical crusader vessel, you see already the similarity to the hanse-cog and also the "golden hind" of drake....potbellied ships with a low point of gravity were save to travel in, even in rough seas, for like a nutshell or a cat falling from a tree, they always stabilized themselves in heavy conditions... but probably you got seasick very fast... with all that tossing and turning..