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51:55 They had just been betrayed by an irishman. The eleven articles listed are only a summary and an incomplete one. The original was thrown overboard to prevent its capture, and thus there is a great deal of room to suspect. The remainder contained something too horrid to be disclosed to any except such as were willing to be sharers in the iniquity of them. What survives of the articles mentions marooning as a punishment in two instances. First, that any pirate among them who stole something of value from the crew as a whole was to be marooned. But if it were merely theft of another pirate's personal property, the crew would settle for a lesser punishment. The thief would be mutilated and then put off the ship in some inhabited place where he was sure to encounter hardships. Second, any pirate who attempted to desert the ship or who deserted his post during battle might be either executed or marooned. The articles of Captain John Phillips and the crew of the revenge are more interesting. Theyre shorter, containing only nine articles, but they were supposedly recorded verbatim. They specify marooning as a punishment for three deserting the company, keeping secrets from the company, and stealing from the company, although in the case of theft, the offender might simply be shot instead, as in Zanskar, the articles provide that the maroon was to be given certain provisions, in this case, a bottle of water, a firearm, and the gunpowder and shot necessary to use it. Both sets of articles specify immediate execution as the punishment for other, more serious crimes. Now, the most famous maroon of all. And here I was gonna do a little bit where I asked nina, like, what is the most famous maroon that comes to mind? And I was hoping she would say Robinson Crusoe, so that I could then be like, wrong. He wasn't a maroon. He was a castaway. But we talked about it in advance, and she was like, why would I say that he wasnt a maroon?
46:44 Thank you. A lot of reports about marooning, therefore, take the form of it's said that when pirates maroon someone, they or normal ships maroon a sailor this way, but pirate ships maroon a sailor that way. If the standard practice was to leave the maroon stranded on an inhabitable but uninhabited island, then pirates would maroon you on a sandbar that was covered by water at high tides. So you would get nibbled by crabs and then chomped by sharks. But even if we go back centuries, the popular understanding of pirate life has basically always been based on fiction, thanks to books like treasure island or on historical documents of somewhat dubious authorship. I'm referring here to the seminal text, a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pirates from their first rise and settlement in the islands of Providence to the present time. This book, published in London in 1724, right at the end of the Golden Age of piracy, is lurid, graphic, and sensational. It directly inspired Treasure island and Peter Pan, and its probably the single biggest influence on the public perception of piracy then and now. But we dont know who wrote it or how he knew all the things he claimed to know about the secret lives of pirates. The name on the COVID Captain Charles Johnson, is almost certainly a pseudonym. The true identity of the author behind the captain has been hotly debated and well, probably never know for sure. Its clear enough that marooning was common practice with plenty of specific, identifiable instances in the histories. But whether it was an inevitable execution, a torture worse than death, or the buccaneering equivalent of a time out for bad behavior depended a great deal on the circumstances attending the stranding. A ship that had left sailors behind might think better of it after a few days and go back to retrieve them. Or if the marooning had been ordered by an unpopular captain, he might be deposed and the maroons rescued by the new leadership. A maroon on a habitable island near a busy sea lane could expect fairly prompt rescue. I can think of one example in which the person was rescued within eight days. Intrepid maroons, especially those deposited on shore in groups, sometimes managed to construct rudimentary boats and sail back to civilization. In one case, a whole ships worth of pirates was marooned together when they stopped on a small island to repair the hull of their ship, only to be surprised by navy patrol. To avoid capture and certain execution, the pirates burned their ship and fled into the interior of the island. Its not entirely clear to me why they burned the ship, but they did have friends nearby in a second vessel, and perhaps they were hoping that the navy patrol would move on after seeing the burned out ship, giving the other pirate vessel a chance to put into harbor and pick up the maroons. Unfortunately for them, the surviving pirate ship decided to just run for it. Instead. They got away. But shortly thereafter, a gang of mutineers who were determined to give up the pirating lifestyle shot the captain, a certain Thomas anstice, while he was sleeping, and imprisoned the other officers. They delivered them to the authorities at a nearby dutch colony, and for this service, the mutineers were acquitted of piracy. The captured officers were hanged, but the Maroons did all right for themselves. They survived on the island until another ship came into the harbor to take on supplies. They seized it, resolved to give up piracy, and sailed home to England, where, if Captain Charles Johnson can be trusted, they lived out the rest of their lives in peaceful obscurity. The more you read of actual examples of marooning, the more dubious those accounts that portray it as a fate worse than death begin to seem. In 1629, for instance, after the gruesome events of the Batavia mutiny, an 18 year old cabin boy turned mutineer was tried and sentenced, but spared from execution on account of his youth and his minor role in the mutiny. Instead, he was marooned. Like Sanskar, some pirates enshrined the marooning. In their version of law, a general history of the pirates recounts several examples of what the author claims are piratical articles or pirate codes, the self made laws governing each company of corsairs. The articles of the crews of Captains Bartholomew Roberts, George Lowther and John Phillips are recounted, and marooning appears prominently in the articles about the Roberts and Phillips crews. Roberts had gotten his start in piracy in the usual way. He had been second made on a merchant vessel until his ship was taken by pirates. I suppose it was a bit like working at a company that got bought out in a hostile takeover. The work is mostly the same. You just really hope you won't be deemed redundant. When the pirate captain who had captured Roberts, a certain Howell Davis, was shot to death five weeks later on principe, in the midst of a failed scheme to kidnap the island's governor, the surviving pirates elected Roberts as their new leader, despite his relative inexperience. Regarding the articles of Captain Roberts. The history says now projecting new adventures with his small company, but finding hitherto they had been but as a rope of sand, they formed a set of articles to be signed and sworn to for the better conservation of their society and doing justice to one another. Excluding all irishmen from the benefit of it.