INCLUDES
Pendant and snake chain necklace in a USA-made jewelry gift box.
You can also purchase just the pendant alone to use on your own cord or chain.
MEASUREMENTS
- The pendant measures approximately 22mm x 18.5mm x 1.2mm (about .87" tall x .709" across x .047" thick).
- The 1.5mm Snake Chain is offered in your choice of length from 16" to 50".
These are just standard lengths offered - I can easily make any custom size in shorter or longer lengths of the chain for you by request.
I can also swap out this chain style with any other type or style of chain that I have in my shop, at your request!
MATERIALS
- The pendant is an antique silver zinc alloy casting. Black Patina is added after polishing to highlight the design. This creates dark shadows in the grooves, which resembles aged sterling. Zinc is long lasting and slow to tarnish, hypo-allergenic and beautiful.
- The chain and all its components are made of pure 304 Stainless steel. Stainless steel is non-tarnishing, hypo-allergenic, shiny, strong and durable. You can sleep, swim or shower in it!
ABOUT
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIRACY is a common designation for the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Indian Ocean states, North America, and West Africa.
Histories of piracy often subdivide the Golden Age of Piracy into three periods:
The buccaneering period (approximately 1650 to 1680), characterized by Anglo-French seamen based on Jamaica and Tortuga attacking Spanish colonies, and shipping in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific
The Pirate Round (1690s), associated with long-distance voyages from the Americas to rob Muslim and East India Company targets in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea
The post-Spanish Succession period (1716 to 1726), when Anglo-American sailors and privateers left unemployed by the end of the War of the Spanish Succession turned en masse to piracy in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the North American eastern seaboard, and the West African coast.
Narrower definitions of the Golden Age sometimes exclude the first or second periods, but most include at least some portion of the third. The modern conception of pirates as depicted in popular culture is derived largely, although not always accurately, from the Golden Age of Piracy.
Factors contributing to piracy during the Golden Age included the rise in quantities of valuable cargoes being shipped to Europe over vast ocean areas, reduced European navies in certain regions, the training and experience that many sailors had gained in European navies (particularly the Royal Navy), and ineffective government in European overseas colonies. The colonial powers at the time constantly fought with pirates and engaged in several notable battles and other related events.
The oldest known literary mention of a "Golden Age" of piracy is from 1894, when the English journalist George Powell wrote about "what appears to have been the golden age of piracy up to the last decade of the 17th century." Powell uses the phrase while reviewing Charles Leslie's A New and Exact History of Jamaica, then over 150 years old, and refers mostly to such 1660s events as Henry Morgan's attacks on Maracaibo and Portobelo and Bartolomeu Português's famous escape. Powell uses the phrase only once.
In 1897, a more systematic use of the phrase "Golden Age of Piracy" was introduced by historian John Fiske, who wrote: "At no other time in the world's history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. Its golden age may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720." Fiske included the activities of the Barbary corsairs and East Asian pirates in this "Golden Age," noting that "as these Mussulman pirates and those of Eastern Asia were as busily at work in the seventeenth century as at any other time, their case does not impair my statement that the age of the buccaneers was the Golden Age of piracy."
Pirate historians of the first half of the 20th century occasionally adopted Fiske's term "Golden Age," without necessarily following his beginning and ending dates for it. The most expansive definition of an age of piracy was that of Patrick Pringle, who wrote in 1951 that "the most flourishing era in the history of piracy ... began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ended in the second decade of the eighteenth century." This idea starkly contradicted Fiske, who had hotly denied that such Elizabethan figures as Drake were pirates.
INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon, U.S., who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate. An observer of this holiday would greet friends not with "Hello, everyone!" but with "Ahoy, maties!" or "Ahoy, me hearties!" The holiday, and its observance, springs from a romanticized view of the Golden Age of Piracy.
According to Summers, the day is the only known holiday to come into being as a result of a sports injury. During a racquetball game between Summers and Baur, one of them reacted to the pain with an outburst of "Aaarrr!", and the idea was born. That game took place on June 6, 1995, but out of respect for the observance of the Normandy landings, they chose Summers' ex-wife's birthday, as it would be easy for him to remember.
At first an inside joke between two friends, the holiday gained exposure when Baur and Summers sent a letter about their invented holiday to the American syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Barry liked the idea and promoted the day, and later appeared in a cameo in their "Drunken Sailor" Sing Along A-Go-Go video. Growing media coverage of the holiday after Barry's column has ensured that this event is now celebrated internationally, and Baur and Summers now sell books and T-shirts related to the theme on their website. Part of the success for the international spread of the holiday has been attributed to non-restriction of the idea or non-trademarking, in effect opening the holiday to creativity and "viral" growth.
The association of pirates with peglegs, parrots, and treasure maps, popularized in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1883), has had a significant influence on parody pirate culture. Talk Like a Pirate Day is celebrated with hidden easter egg features in many games and websites, with Facebook introducing a pirate-translated version of its website on Talk Like a Pirate Day 2008 and publisher O'Reilly discounting books on the R programming language to celebrate. In September 2014, Reddit added a pirate theme to their website.
English actor Robert Newton is the "patron saint" of Talk Like a Pirate Day. He portrayed pirates in several films, most notably Long John Silver in both the 1950 Disney film Treasure Island and the 1954 Australian film Long John Silver, and the title character in the 1952 film Blackbeard the Pirate. Newton was born in Dorset and educated in Cornwall, and it was his native West Country dialect, which he used in his portrayal of Long John Silver and Blackbeard, that some contend is the origin of the standard "pirate accent". This was parodied in the 1950s and 1960s by British comedian Tony Hancock.
The archetypal pirate word "Arrr!" (alternatively "Rrrr!" or "Yarrr!"), which in West Country parlance means "yes", first appeared in fiction as early as 1934 in the film Treasure Island starring Lionel Barrymore, and was used by a character in the 1940 novel Adam Penfeather, Buccaneer by Jeffery Farnol. However, it was Robert Newton's use of it in the classic 1950 Disney film Treasure Island that popularized the interjection and made it widely remembered. It has been speculated that the rolling "rrr", a distinctive element of the speech of the West Country of England, has been associated with pirates because of the West Country's strong maritime heritage, where for many centuries fishing was the main industry (and smuggling a major unofficial one), and where there were several major ports. As a result, West Country speech in general, and Cornish speech in particular, may have been a major influence on a generalized British nautical speech.