I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days, a presidential son and in his mid-50s and his name is bigger direct that big boy jr. the highest ranking american who stormed the beaches of normandy. he led the first wave assault on utah beach and he was harvard educated and very wealthy from his world war i service and died about a month later of a heart attack. he was awarded the medal of honor. that is the son of a president. that is an american. ian: one thing i want to add, he said i will not parted, but we didn t think he would commute his sentence, he could get convicted and leave the conviction in place. kayleigh: there is some nuance there. as we speak, naomi biden is testifying, hunter biden s old and my oldest daughter. as we get the details off that
Employees loyal to their employer and they try to stand up and keep their place of business safe but those are the people like the two women who were working at lululemon, and they chased those shoplifters out of the store but they were fired and shamed. i way that these body cameras are also being used to internally prosecute the employees, and keep them in line. as much as they are documenting what is going on. because videotaping people only works if they have shame. people who commit this type of theft, they have no shame. i mean look at the screen, surveillance video, and they are still doing this. ian: in a competent world, this would be enough. but they know, even if i get caught, i am on a body camera, they turn over to alvin bragg, and he does nothing with it. who cares? that s the problem. we do not live in a sane world or a saint community.
Backyard because of the border crisis or their affordability crisis in america right now. there s so much to be scared of such as russia or china. but this is pretty rich as far as james. they were able to book dracula. they went out to say he is not scared of retribution because he has resources. ian: i wish that he could get up in front of america and say all the things that hillary did but we are not going to prosecute. we drew that conclusion before they even interviewed her. kayleigh: new outreach, and a small town, this democrat led council refuse to honor this fall at officer by flying the thin blue line flank
Machine. or sympathetic. again to that point. , the fact of this case are strong, they go on to say that they are a w a to i compare this o the new york times, only quoted, and no state prosecutor in new york or wyoming or everywhere has ever charged federal election laws against anyone for anything not ever until trump. if, for some reason, hunter biden is acquitted, people are going to make the comparison ahead of trump sentencing where he could start off with jail time. ian: they should make that comparison, looking at this prosecution and the story, it is about addiction. someone who has let up depraved life. we have not seen this from the presidential side ever. i am sure in the 1800s before
right now and the federal gun trial for hunter biden, the prosecution has rested their case, not now hunter s attorney has called one of the employees from the store that sold hunter biden that gun, they are also expected to call the owner of that store along with that daughter naomi, and the brother of james. hello, everyone this is outnumbered i and kayleigh mceany. joining me today, sandra smith, fox business anchor, dagen mcdowell. most of the kennedy save the world podcast, kennedy. and ian prior. yesterday, we heard salacious testimony from harry biden. the widow of the late brother, who began a romantic
They may have worked in the obama administration and other places. people are really trying to assess what is left going to be life if trump wins a second term. on a very personal level, you deserve torturous discussions with their family members about whether or not they have to leave the country. so they may avoid being unconstitutionally or illegally detained. donald trump wants to put them all in jail. he is unbelievable when he talks about his opponents, donald trump could roll the score on congress and the supreme court and he wants to own every one and all because he is the dictator. kayleigh: firing squad? i remember them pulling these mischaracterizations, but they don t have the focal and they do not care about the full quote. ian: they don t care about the full quote, and these people look like they are hallucinating, this physical manifestation trump brings up
Intolerance of anyone who does not fit in their left side. it is a rejection by these people of the ethical values. ian: what are we doing here? we just had a law enforcement officer who was killed. and we are sitting here catering to local town council members, and there flag disputes. there is a thin blue line and red flag and yellow flat, are those races as well? do i have to run these flags through the pc world police? obviously you can t fly the israel flag because that will be divisive, but other flags are going to be labeled by the left? hateful, intolerant. because the flag of the united states of america was carried on january 6th, the act
ahoy, mate and welcome to tonight s great lives presentation on america s pirates. the talk is sponsored by the community bank of the chesapeake to whom we are grateful for their generous support over the past several years and it s that kind of commitment that enables us the program to to bring to the university into the community outstanding speakers such as our guest tonight. eric j. dolan is the author of the fascinating book black flags blue waters. the epic history of america s most notorious pirates. eric grew up near the coasts of new york and connecticut and from an early age developed an interest in maritime affairs. toward that end. he earned a double major in biology and environmental studies then getting a master s degree in environmental management from yale. that was followed by a phd. in environmental policy and planning from mit where his dissertation focused on the role of the courts in the cleanup of boston harbor. erica s held an interesting variety of jobs many of them related to his interest in the natural world. the one thing that remained constant throughout his career. has said is his enjoyment of writing and telling stories about topics that he has found most intriguing. this is led to the publication of more than 60 articles for magazines newspapers and professional journals. it is also resulted in the publication of a number of very popular books that include. today is the titles. the furious sky the 500-year history of america s hurricanes. brilliant bacons a history of the american lighthouse when america first met china and exotic history of tea drugs and money in the age of sail. for our fortune and empire the epic history of fur trade in america. leviathan the history of whaling in america as well as the previously mentioned black flags blue waters. all of these books have achieved not only popular but critical acclaim. that s a very difficult task indeed to pull off. as one reviewer of the pirate book wrote quote the book is a fascinating adventure story filled with robes rascals and ruthless renegades. this is staring history that reads like a novel. another has said that in that book dolan quote proves again. skillfully presented narrative nonfiction is even more gripping than swashbuckling mythology. if you ve never read dolan before prepare to have a new favorite historian. and so it is a great pleasure to welcome tonight to the university of mary washington and to the great lives podium a truly gifted writer eric j dolan. thank you bill for that wonderful introduction and thanks to bill and terry and ali for giving me a wonderful meal a few minutes ago and ali for organizing all of this. last time i was in fredericksburg was back from my wife and i lived in maryland in 1996. and i remembered then all the antique stores and today i went down to fredericksburg and they re still there and it was a lot of fun. but anyway, thanks for coming out tonight. i know it s kind of a tough situation. i m just getting back into the swing of giving talks. i ve given about 40 or 50 zoom talks over the past two years and now i m just starting to give talks in person. so this is really a thrill for me to have an audience. now pirates have long been among the most colorful and memorable celebrities in popular culture. a lot of that has to do with books that use pirates as a motif and the most famous example of that of course is robert louis stevenson s treasure island, which was published in 1883 stevenson weaves a wonderfully dramatic tale of the search for pirate treasure replete with a map of skeleton island. where an x marks the spot where treasure is to be found. treasure island is also the book that gave us that familiar sea shanty refrain 15 men on the dead man s chest yoho and a bottle of rum drink in the devil had done for the rest yoho and a bottle of rum and now you know why i became a writer and not a singer. now during this talk. i m going to be showing a number of new yorker cartoons that relate to the pirate theme in case you can t read them. i will read the the punchline for what it s worth yoho and a chilled pinot grigio actually rhymes you d be amazed. there are hundreds of cartoons that the new yorkers put out over the decades that use pirates as a theme now movies have also had a major impact on how we view pirates. most recently disney s pirates of the caribbean franchise is generated a renewed pirate mania. this fellow looks like johnny depp, right? actually, i wanted to have a picture of johnny depp in the book. i reached out to disney and i tried to get a hold of johnny depp s agent, but i was unsuccessful. so i found this at the library of congress. it is a johnny depp impersonator in front of grahman s chinese restaurant in california. i think he did a pretty good job now with all these cultural references. it s no wonder than that pirate costumes are among the most popular worn on halloween on halloween night and international talk like a pirate day is eagerly anticipated by millions every september 19th. and this one says no i don t know where your pirate shirt is. there s no denying. it pirates of grabbed hold of our imagination many of daydreamed about leaving traditional society behind boarding a ship and throwing in their lot with the hearty men and women intent on taking what they want and getting rich while enjoying the luxurious freedom of sailing the world s oceans with a hold full of rome mark twain captured this longing in his memoir life in the mississippi when he admitted that even though ian ian his friends had but one ambition to be steamboat men now and then we had a hope that if we lived and we re good. god would permit us to be pirates. there are plenty of children out there who would love being a pirate? historians can certainly poke holes at these fictional fictional representations of pirates, especially those that depict them as unnaturally attractive rakish yet good-natured rapscallions having a grand old time looking for love adventure and treasure on the waves. the reality of piracy is nothing like the breathless musings of a new york times reporter in 1892 who bitterly complained it cannot but be a source of regret to every true lover of the picturesque that pirates are no more and piracy has lost its popularity what tremendous fellows they must have been what heroes dandy s wits were to be found among them. they were immensely superior to land brigands who are mere milk compared with blackbeard and captain kidd. while real pirates were incredibly intriguing and compelling characters. they most definitely were not tremendous fellows instead. they were seaborn criminals who were neither endearing nor heroic. this says half of me loves being a pirate and half of me regrets it. now black flags blue waters cuts through the hollywood imagery and mythology surrounding pirates and reveals the dramatic and surprising history of american piracies golden age spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s when lawless pirates plied the waters of north america and beyond the golden age was the most dramatic era of maritime marauding the world has ever known it produced such iconic characters as william kidd and blackbeard along with thousands of others whose names are less familiar, but who s despicable deeds are no less riveting. much has been written about that time period and this book adds to that literary lineage, but with a twist. rather than focusing broadly on this era black flags blue waters zeros in on the history of the pirates who either operated out of britain s american colonies or plundered the ships along the american coast from the early 1680s to 1726. these pirates had an exceedingly close often tempestuous and frequently deadly relationship with the colonies. many people view pirates in a romantic light, but there was absolutely nothing romantic about them other than the legends woven about their exploits after they were gone. that is not to say that pirates were born boring far from it while the pirates of black flags blue waters can t compete with the magnetic charms of and witty reparte of captain jack sparrow. they are compelling characters nonetheless and when i read this slide makes me laugh because there s somebody that wrote a comment about the book on amazon and he gave the book one star and his first line he said for some reason this guy hates pirates and he went on to complain about the fact that my book dispelled a lot of the myths about piracy. and the real story of american pirate american pirates is even more astonishing and fascinating than any fictional pirate adventure ever written or cast on the silver screen. this says i m sorry you tapped into something. no one cares about. and that relates to how i picked topics for my books. the most difficult thing is finding a topic that i think will excite me and potential readers the origin story for black flags blue waters started with my kids, lilly and harry are shown here as a teenagers after i finished my book on lighthouses. brilliant beacons a history of the american lighthouse. i was looking around for a new topic and i asked lily and harry what they thought i should write about and i had a couple of ideas one of them was pirates when i mentioned pirates both of their eyes lit up and they say dad that s it. you have to write about pirates and i got very excited because neither of my children had up to that point read any of my books, so i thought this is gonna be my big chance lily even throughout a possible a few possible titles for the books including swords sales and swashbucklers. and arg, which i had to tell lily much to her chagrin is a word that no pirate of this era ever uttered. it is more a byproduct of hollywood in the mid 20th century. when i began working on this book, i knew very little about pirates, but that was by design. i always choose topics. i know very little about you may be thinking maybe i don t know much about anything, but it s really because i have to spend two years working on these books and i get bored rather easily if you ever saw my resume, you would think i couldn t keep a job and part of the reason i go to very different topics is because i like being excited by what i m working on and i hope that that excitement translates to the written page. now sure i d seen a number of movies with pirates in them including all the pirates of the caribbean movies the last three of which are rather poor treasure muppets treasure island one of my favorites the goonies hook and even princess bride the princess bride with its dread pirate roberts. but i hadn t read any books about pirates not even treasure island, which i somehow missed in my misspent youth. i knew what pirates dreamed about the big score. capturing a ship with a hold full of spanish silver pieces of eight gold doubloons. i had heard about blackbeard, but really didn t know much about him other than the fact that he had a black beard. i d also heard about captain kidd, but the only thing i knew about him was that he supposedly buried treasure all along the eastern seaboard from delaware all the way on up to oak island, nova scotia. of course, that is a total myth but it hasn t stopped many people over the years from spending significant amounts of time and money searching for buried treasure and coming up empty. so leaving it with a broker didn t do any good at all. i d also heard that pirates drank a lot, especially rum, which was supposedly the pirates drink of choice and that fact is 100% true one pirate even admitted that the love of drink and a lazy life were stronger motives than gold in learning in into piracy. unfortunately for him. he uttered these words a few before he was hanged. the more i learned about pirates, however, the more fascinated i became pirates were an important part of american history and their story was more complicated and intriguing than i suspected. the first known instance of pirate piracy off the american coast occurred in the summer of 1632 when a pirate named dixie bull and his men plundered a number of english ships before disappearing from sight. other than that the main collect connection that the colonies had with piracy during these early years was twofold first some american merchants traveled to jamaica and other caribbean islands to trade with the pirates and in turn some pirates who had gotten wealthy retired to the colonies to enjoy their riches. in 1684, for example jamaican governor sir thomas lynch noted that the northern colonies are now full of pirate s money pirates had lynch claimed carried the equivalent of 80,000 pounds sterling into boston alone a city that one english official labeled as the common receptacle of pirates of all nations now to get an idea of the magnitude of this loot consider that at the time an average labor in the colony earned about 10 pounds per year. and a woman got roughly half of that while a captain of a merchant vessel pulled down about 72 pounds. now the mid-1600 is also an era of the buccaneers. does anybody know who this is? he s got a rum named after him. henry morgan, yes was when men like henry morgan who s more famous now for his run than for his exploits rome the caribbean in search of spanish treasure ships to plunder the treasure ships were full of silver and gold that came from mines and mints in central and south america. the men s produced copious quantities of coins including gleaming gold doubloons and most importantly eight real coins those so-called pieces of eight or spanish silver dollars and at dinner i was talking about the fact that after i write a book. i always try to get something that reminds me of the book. and i thought naively when i started this book that maybe i could buy a piece of eight after i was done, but once i realized the actual prices for good piece of eight that idea left me rather quickly. now the buccaneers favorite haunt was point royal on the english island of jamaica arguably the wealthiest english city in the new world by 1680 port royal s veneer of sophistication could not hide its decidedly sleazy underbelly, this is when port royal gained the weller earned reputation as the sodom of the west indies and the wickedest city in the world. an unsavory melange of buccaneers and privateers prowled port royal streets and alleyways in search of liquid and current and carnal pleasure as one buccaneer said of his peers whenever they have got a hold of something they don t keep it for long. they are busy dicing and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day and the next day not of a shirt on their back. he continued my own master used to buy a of wine and set it in the middle of the street with. carol had knocked in and stand barring the way every passerby had to drink with them or he d shot them dead with a gun. he kept handy. on june 7 1692 a massive earthquake struck port royal and jamaica when it was all over nearly two-thirds of the city had slipped beneath the waves and more than 5,000 people were killed including many buccaneers the gruesome aftermath integris of aftermath hundreds of dead bodies. a bloated bodies could be seen floating on the surface of the harbor and washed up on the shore a local ministers survived the earthquake called it a terrible judgment of god. that was brought down upon the heads of the most ungodly devouched people in the world. by the late 1600s buccaneers had been largely replaced by the so-called red the pirates who left from the american colonies and sailed to the indian ocean where they prayed on ships coming from the mughal empire or what we know today as india and they were traveling between india and the see ports of jetta and mocha on the surface red sea men appeared to be nothing more than privateers for a fee. they had been issued privateering licenses or letters of mark by colonial governors, which gave them permission to attack french ships since at the time england was at war with france, but these governors knew full. well that the red sea men had no intention of attacking french ships instead. they planned to go around the cape horn cape good hope indonesian ocean and attack moogle ships the red sea men were the most successful pirates of all with some of them such as henry avery amassing considerable fortunes. avery s greatest success was capturing the ganja salway, which was one of the flagships of the emperor aurangzeb on board were more than a thousand people going to mecca and they were loaded with jewels and money. the pirates plundered the ship for several days. when they weren t gathering loot, the pirates engaged in an animalistic and vile viciously raping numerous women a few of the intended victims unable to bear to have their families and friends see them ravished in defiled killed themselves by either jumping over the side of the ship or stabbing themselves. while in the indian ocean the red sea men used the island of saint marie off the off northeast the northeastern coast of madagascar mainland as their home base. there is plenty of gambling on the island as one might imagine a single toss of dice earned the lucky pirate from new york. 1300 pieces of eight in one brawl 14 pirates who were bitterly unsatisfied with the amount of loot. they had managed to obtain in their last voyage decided to split into two groups of seven and fight to the death to see who would get the money. one group of seven was completely demolished and five of the other group of seven were killed the last two guys must have just looked at each other and said, okay, let s just split the money. now the red sea men were welcomed with open arms in america because they were in many cases the father s sons and brothers. of the the people in the colonies they were much beloved members of their communities and they were seen as going halfway around the world to rob quote unquote infidels and bring all that valuable money and jewels and silk back to america. now although the red sea men were welcomed in the colonies the british parliament and the crown the sprunt despise them not only did pirates break the law, but they also threatened the entire east indian trade which was a bulwark of the english economy the resulting crackdown on pirates used a combination of stricter laws more effective prosecutions naval attacks on pirate ships and increased hangings to greatly reduce the pirate threat in the atlantic and by 1700. it was almost completely eliminated. this general reprieve from piracy continued for the duration of the war of the spanish succession between 1702 and 1713 and if you were like me the war of the spanish succession is one of those wars they taught you about in high school and you still have absolutely no idea what it was and why they fought it. the only significant case of piracy in the colonies during the war was when captain john. welch sailed with his fellow mutineers from marblehead my hometown marblehead, massachusetts in august of 1703 after murdering the captain. of the privateer they were on they then headed to brazil where they plundered a number of ships and came back to marblehead with more than 10,000 pounds worth of including a bag full of gold dust. crouching part of his gang were caught after returning to marblehead and they were hanged on friday, june 30th 1704 at the edge of boston harbor thousands of people came out to see them be sent off to eternity the famous purits and preacher cotton mather spoke to the assembled throng. he stood up and steadied himself on a boat. that was just offshore and if you ever been in boston, they were hanged right down the hill from cops hill burial ground near the old north church. and so cotton mather got up and he gave his sermon and he began. we the ministers have told you often. yay. we have told you weeping that you have by sin undone yourself. we have shown you how to commit yourself into his saving and healing hands and how to express repentance. we can do no more but leave you in his merciful hands when the scaffold platform is pulled away and the men dropped to their death the screams of the crowd were so loud that they could be heard more than a mile away and almost 3,000 people showed up to watch them die a few years after the end of the war piracy came roaring back inaugurating the second major phase of piracy, which lasted from 1715 to 1726 and this is what you most people know about this is the pirates of the caribbean era and it s when as many as 4,000 pirates were active this is in this time the focus of activity was not the red sea, but rather the waters off the american colonies and in the caribbean. there are many reasons for the explosion empire see a significant number of navy men and privateers who lost their positions when the war ended decided to turn to piracy many men rose up in mutinied and turned to piracy as well the sinking of a huge spanish treasure fleet in 1715 off the california coast created a stampede of men from almost all of the world. mainly europe who came to that area. it s a dive on the wreck and get as much money as they could they didn t get much money because the spaniards who own the ships got there first and managed to retrieve a lot of the money but many of the men who would come seeking their fortune decided to stay in the caribbean and get their fortune as pirates. although many men voluntarily signed on to become pirates others were forced. to go on the account becoming a pirates against their will 1715 to 1726 is also the periods when pirates used the black flag or the jolly roger as their terrifying calling card the black flag was intended to strike fear into the hearts of any merchant ship that sought fluttering atop the main mass of the pirate ship sending the unmistakable message surrender immediately or else we will attack being risk averse pyre s always hope for surrender. and they never wanted to fight if they could avoid it because there was no upside to battle fortunately for the pirates. they rarely had to resort to force since intimidation courtesy of the black flag worked. so well, this flag is purportedly the flag of blackbeard, but in my research, i could find no reference to this being blackbeard s flag, but it was a flag of a pir. ned lowe i m going to talk about a little bit later and you can this is a modern representation of it, but you can understand the iconography these skeleton and the harpoon piercing the heart with drops of blood falling from it was supposed to signify death and raised in his right arm is an hourglass indicating that you don t have much time to make a decision. you better make the right one. this is when pirates vote voted in democratic fashion to determine who would be their captain and where they would go to hunt for prizes and which ships they were attacked would attack. this is when pirate signed the articles of agreement where the pirates code which laid out the rules for their behavior and also mandated the virtually even distribution of wealth. and at the bottom of this cartoon it says there s the flag will fly a top our pirate ship. this is also in many black men served as pirates a significant number that were african slaves who have been captured by the pirates and they continued to be in servitude on the pirate ship until they were sold off as slaves to generate money, but that s only part of the story. many black pirates became value crew members and fought alongside their white brethren and shared equally in the prizes. this is when anne bonnie and mary reid the only two women known to have served on pirate ships in the atlantic during the golden age appeared briefly on history s stage both were put on trial in port royal for being part of calico jack rackham s pirate crew and bonnie all so happened to be rakim s lover. the trials in jamaica are memorable not only for the multiple hangings that ensued rackham included but even more so for the unusual legal gambit unique among pirates used by bonnie and reed. the court found them guilty of piracy and they were condemned to hang immediately after that sentence was handed down. they pleaded their bellies to the court informing the judge that they were both pregnant. upon investigation. it was found to be the case and they were given a temporary stay of execution. on the day that rackham went to the gallows bonnie his lover made it clear that she was extremely disappointed in him saying that she was sorry to see him there, but he had fought like a man. he need not have been hanged like a dog as for the ladies. we died in jail from an unspecified illness soon. thereafter and bonnie simply disappears from the historical record. this is also when edward thatch or teach better known as blackbeard and 400 was men blockaded, charleston, south carolina for a week and traumatized the rest of the coast with their exploits. now you see this picture. this is from a 1924 book on pirates a general history of pirates, and if you look closely you can see smoke coming off the end of blackbeard s hair and in this book it said that when blackbeard went into battle, he would time matches to the end of his hair and sometimes the end of his beard light them. so as to be enrolled and smoke and look more fearsome when he went into battle what a bunch of baloney. could you imagine having a lit flame at the end of your hair and nobody who was attacked by blackbeard ever mentioned this tag technique? it s just one of many myths about black beard including the other one that a lot of people bring up that he had 14 wives that he used. prostitute out to his men. so be careful when you read about pirate history that you re not reading the myths and you re getting the real thing. now blackbeard met his grizzly end at the hands of british naval lieutenant robert maynard whose forces battled him and his men off north carolina s island of ocracoke. after the battle was over maynard severed blackbeard s head and he hung it from the bowsprit of his sloop blackbeard s headless body was then pitched into the dark waters of pamlico sound. where according to legend it took a few laps around the ship before sinking from sight. now blackbeard s story has recently come full circle in 1996 salvagers in north carolina discovered. the remains of blackbeard s flagship queen. anne s revenge in the relatively shallow waters of beaufort inlet. this period is also in steed bonnet a wealthy sugar plantation owner from barbados decided to leave his gentlemanly life and become a pirate. or the gentleman pirate as he is often called he even built his own pirate ship and had the captain s cabin lined with shelves so he could bring along his personal library. it is not clear why bonnet took the dramatic step of leaving his comfortable life leaving his wife and becoming a pirate some of speculated that his sudden change in behavior was due to depression or perhaps insanity or perhaps some discomforts that he found in married life if it was last one. he must have had a miserable marriage and i just learned a few days ago that one of the television stations. i think it s a hbo. i m not sure there s a whole series on steve bonnet and it looks like a humorous series and i think the director of it or one of the actors is that guy tyco watiti who was the director of thor anyway, look it up you ll be hearing about it. it looks like it s a funny play on steve bonnets life. on his own and league with blackbeard bonnet had some success along with many failures. he was finally captured in september of 1718 when colonel william retz forces came upon bonnet and his men near the mouth of the cape fear river in north carolina the trial of bonnet and his men in charleston was a dramatic affair to say the least first bonnet and one of his men escaped they were captured the next day and brought back to jail then all the upper class individuals or people in charleston begged the judge to let bonnet off basically saying that he was of aristocratic bearing and lineage. he should not be treated in this manner fortunately for those who wanted justice to be meted out the judge didn t agree tried bonnet and his men and 19 all 19 and then we re hanged at the edge of the harbor. this is also when pirate sam bellamy captured a british slave ship called the widow, which was carrying a fortune in gold and silver the proceeds from selling 500 slaves in port royal jamaica. he also had the for more than 50 captures than he and his men had achieved just in the prior year. excuse me. i m having my allergies are sort of kicking up. so. throats a little itchy. however bellamine as men would not be able to enjoy their riches because in april of 1717 as the widow was making its way up these coasts and was just about to go around the outstretched arm of cape cod a nor easter came barreling down the coast and sent the wida into the shallows right near wellfleet and east ham on the cape about 1500 feet from shore. the ship is back was broken on a sand reef and 161 men were killed thrown into the water including bellamy. only two people survived and managed to climb up the cliffs and later they were if you want to learn about what happens to them, you can read the book. it s fascinating story. but all that treasure the key point is all the treasure also sank into the sand off of cape cod for 267 years the witness treasure remained there many people tried to find it one guy edward rose snow writer from massachusetts spending considerable amount of money and dove many times off the coast trying to find those gold doubloons and silver pieces of eight, but no luck. but then in 1984 a salvager and diver named barry clifford and his team which at the time included john f kennedy junior where i went to college with found the wida and began recovering its treasure the item that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. that all these artifacts came from the widow is this this is the witness bell. the reason it s green is if you go to the pirate museum the widow pirate museum in west yarmouth on the cape, which is well worth a visit fascinating pirate museum when you walk in this is the first thing you see it s the bell suspended in a greenish preservative solution. so they knew they found the wida and it is the first authenticated pirate treasure ever found now how much the recovered treasure is worth is not exactly clear. there have been estimates that range from an unreasonably low 200,000 to a ridiculously high 400 million whatever it s worth. it s worth a lot and the thing it s amazing is barry clifford and his investors to this day have not sold a single piece of eight the balloon cannon anything which i think is amazing. now one other particularly nasty pirate who wanted for pray off the american coast during this period was the despicable and arguably mentally deranged edward low or ned lowe that i talked about before the guy who had the flag with the harpoon and the skeleton. he seemed to relish torturing and killing his victims one of his signature moves was cutting off people s ears or lips roasting them and then forcing the victim to eat their own flesh. by the way, he was much nastier than blackbeard. there s almost no evidence of blackbeard doing anything violent towards anybody. anyway when the captain of one of the ships low caught had the temerity to cut the rope holding a bag of gold that was hovering over the surface of the water when he cut that rope and let the gold plunge into the depths when low found out about that. he shot the captain and all 32 members of his crew. another time when low sees casts of wine and brandy from a captured vessel, it s captain asked of load be so kind is to write a sentence or two that he give to the cat the owner of the ship. that would show that low had taken it and that the captain hadn t sold it and pocketed the prophets. low cheerily agreed and said that he d be right back with what the man requested a few minutes later low return with two loaded pistols and presenting one at the captain s bowels. he told the petrified man that this was for his wine and discharged it and then he pointed the other pistol at the captain s head saying this one is for your brandy and fired. louis also the pirate who forced a marblehead man a fisherman named philip ashton. to join his crew in the summer of 1722 ashton however was able to escape and make his way to an uninhabited island called roatan in the bay of honduras. is about 40 miles from the honduran mainland? and he stayed there for almost two years before he was picked up by a ship from salem and brought back home after returning to marblehead ashton saga of suffering and endurance became the talk of new england one reason why ashton s story struck such a chord was that it came in the wake of daniel devos wildly popular robinson crusoe, which appeared in 1719 ashton was a real life robinson crusoe. now one thing that didn t happen during this period was this walking the plank no pirates during the golden age are known to have done this to any of their victims. why would they there are plenty easier ways to kill somebody you could shoot them run them through with the cutlass or just pitch them over the side of the ship. there are a few instances of pirates forcing people to walk the plank, but those took place in the early 1800s in the caribbean when there was another outbreak of piracy mainly off the islands cuba and puerto rico. now the second and very bloody period of piracy came to an end in the mid 1720s when the number of pirates plummeted to an insignificant level of the many factors contributing to this decline one was colonial resolve to fight piracy at sea and in the courts, which resulted in numerous pirates being killed in battle or hanged on land and well publicized trials in boston, williamsburg, charleston and charleston colonial officials condemned 68 men to the gallows and if you look at the broader atlantic more than 400 pirates were hanged. another critical determinant was britain s increased efforts to eliminate pirates throughout the atlantic using a combination of pardons stricter laws and force force executions and the eradication of the pirate strong hold at nasa on new in the bahamas. the last pirate to be hanged during this period was william fly and a few of his men fly had plundered a number of ships off the east coast, but he got too greedy. he had too many prisoners on board. they inspired rose up took over the ship put flying as men and chains sailed to boston where they were put on trial the pirates were executed on july 20 in july of 1726 at the edge of boston harbor after the execution their bodies were rode out to nix s mate a very small island. it s not an island today, but it was back then and flies to compatriots were buried but fly himself was hung up in chains. and the local boston paper said that the reason that he was hung up and chains was to serve as a spectacle for the warning of others, especially seafaring men, but the warning was hardly necessary flies spectacular bloody and brief heretical campaign was the last gasp of the golden age of piracy and this is where my book ends as well. the pirates depicted in black flags blue waters blaze the fiery and unforgettable path through the history of colonial america for centuries their turbulent destructive and fascinating lives have beguiled horrified and entertained us leaving an indelible and unique mark on our culture. undoubtedly, there will be more pirate movies. i hope better ones books and television shows in the future many of which will perpetuate myths or create them anew but in the end there is no need to embellish the history of these pirates for what they did actually did was amazing enough now, i have three more slides. it s become a tradition of mine with my books to have my daughter paint a picture that relates to the book and towards the end of writing black flags blue waters. my daughter painted this very small painting. it s three by four inches about and she said this is a pirate looking for his next victim and i didn t have the heart to tell lily at the time. although i ve told her since that i think she was too heavily influenced by my wailing book because no no, you know, a self regarding pirate would be in a pirate ship that says boxy and slow moving is this one likely is this looks just like a whaling ship to me. but anyway, that picture is in the book. and this is really what pirates did during their downtime. it says jazzercise lito deck 4 pm and the last slide i have is a picture of my new book, which i have to give a plug to it s coming out of may 31st. it relates to pirates in the sense that part of the reason i m i wrote this book is when i gave talks on black flags blue waters, i would invariably get a question our pirates the same as privateers or our privateers just legalized pirates. so i started reading more about privateering and yes privateering in the 1600s 1500 early 1700s. it did look a lot like piracy sometimes but privateering during the american revolution was absolutely not legalized piracy and what fascinated me and totally blew me away is how important of a role nearly 2,000 privateers and that s ships. they re almost 40,000 privateers men. a during the war in helping us win our battle against britain. so anyway that is the end of my talk? i m happy to answer any questions you might have and thanks for coming out under these trying circumstances. thank you. thank you eric. so if you have questions and raise your hand kelly will seek you out and if you ll stand and ask your question, i d be good. yes, you spent a lot of time telling us about power to. after they repires they got their money and then they got drunk or such or saturn. they were killed. do you know any that she got their money their name became? respectable citizens and live whatever life until they passed them. i wish i could say i knew a lot about that. they re undoubtedly. we re at especially in the during men who came back and were welcomed by their community was much of us likely during the pirates of the caribbean phase of the problem is none of these pirates successful or not wrote memoirs once they melted back into society. most of them came from the lower rungs of society to begin with once they melted back into society. you don t have a lot of echoes about them society history, especially back then is written by about important people or notorious people. so the pirates got caught and got put on trial we have trial records. we have depositions. we know a lot about them not so much about their early life, but the pirates that made a couple thousand pounds maybe and decided to go back to bristol, rhode island and give back with their wife or whatever and their kids and start a farm. we know very little very very little about any of them henry avery. he survived there was a global manhunt. they never found him, but there s no record of what actually happened to him. we know he was never found. he was never hanged. he s never tried and there are theories that he just resettled some place in england and different stories about what happened to him, but we have absolutely no. idea, and i wish you know if i get a drink with some of these pirates i can get some really good information, but it s very frustrating. it s big. it was very nice that there were so many trials and this is just that just at the period when the united states when the colonies not the united states and england started to really publish their pirate trials. so we have that record to pull from but in terms of knowing what they did the many pirates that must have come home and not been hanged. i don t know they could be our great great. great. great great great great grandparents. i mean, i m sure some of them are. in the back and you re talking about the various pirate and pirate myths. did they ever leave someone on a deserted island with a gun and a couple of bullets? and yes. yes that actually did happen a number. there are a number of instances where that very thing is is mentioned marooning. i m not sure they always left them with the bullet and some balls, but there were unruly pirates that were sometimes kicked off the crew by their fellows and left in very dangerous positions. there was one part when i talked about john quelch when he went down to the caribbean and not the caribbean we went down off brazil during their gold rush and was plundering ships. there was a danish pirate who they met along the way one of the ships they plundered he decided he wanted to become a pirate. but they need demanded a bigger cut of the share and the other guy said forget that and they just dropped them off on an uninhabited part of the south american coast. who knows what happened to him? excellent talk excellent. thank you. so two questions actually my first how would you characterize or describe blackbeard s relationship to caesar? because he does briefly come up in the book and this is something i m personally trying to find more out about in regard to race and slavery amongst piracy. i did not find much more than the couple of references to caesar, especially in the final battle on ocracoke island. i don t i don t think anybody s written tried to write a book about caesar. although people have tried have written books about ann bonnie mary reed, even though there s only a page and a half of real information on and they ve written entire books. i don t know much more what i know about the pirates interactions with black men of the time and well i get to women in a second but black men of the time it s very limited. they re mentioned once in a while. they definitely are mentioned his crew crew members. they also are very often sold to make money for the pirates but black women. it s very interesting madagascar. there are a lot of descendants on madagascar the pirates used to hang out there for a number of years and they had sex with local women. and so there are people in madagascar who can trace their lineage back to the ellie 1700s when these white predominantly white pirates came along had sex with local women and then left. but if you find anything more about caesar, i mean, that would be fascinating. yeah in my in my private hearing book. i have a pretty decent section on slavery because there was an interact there was a strong intersection between privateering and slave ships and there s a great book coming out on that and about a month or two, but if you can find that kind of stuff, it s great because it gives you another perspective on history that we all think we know about because just like poor people don t show up on our history books a lot black people, especially in the 1700s and early 1800s. don t show up a lot or insubstantial ways where we can really give a profile and say something important about them. okay, and second question is education is kind of ith in this new time period especially education amongst pirates there have been some accounts. i think that describe blackbeard is pretty being a pretty somewhat educated highly educated individuals there any truth behind this. i mean regard to his like early life as upbringing that would give some truth behind this notion. not sure about how educated he was proof. there s some people think he was a privateer during the war the spanish succession. there s some people think he was born in jamaica. there s some people think he was born in north carolina. there s some people think he was born in bristol england. there are different theories. i haven t seen the definitive. in detailing of his early life, so it s very hard to say much about him, but i have no doubt that a number of pirates were educated. i mean certainly as well educated is the average person of the day whether they were as educated as steve bonnet was for example an aristocrat. i doubt that that was quite common, but they were just like their fellow of the era people who went to see and were before the masked or weren t the officers and weren t the head guys. they often had very minimal education, but you have to remember back then. a lot of people didn t go to school at all. i mean they had very different kinds of careers. they were physical labor again if you can find more maybe it s out there. it would be wonderful if there was a great journal or something that nobody s found that gives us greater insights and i have no doubt that something will be found but a lot of people have poured over the records of piracy. and i didn t see anything that would substantiate his scholarly. bent hi, you had mentioned a couple of times that there were kind of a mix of people that went into piracy sort of their eyes open voluntarily others were sort of dragooned into it. right and you also mentioned that there was a kind of an egalitarian mood on the ships where they shared everything and but you also mentioned there was sort of a discipline. i guess was it was it more common that the crews were sort of cohesive and and you know shared out or was there more was it more common that you had sort of a strong leader that controlled everything and that there was a significant portion of people that were there because that was what they were forced to do as opposed to their choice all the above. i mean there there are examples of pirates getting into brawls amongst each other voting captains in and out. there are examples of men who were forced to join becoming very active participants and eager pirates. there are examples of men who are forced to join and escaped in various ways or ultimately killed because they wouldn t be subservient to the other pirates and sort of fall into line. i could imagine. i mean based on the accounts that we have sometimes the pirates got along quite well, especially when they were totally drunk and they were just in between plundering or if they were doing well, but they re also examples in the history of pirates attacking each other killing each other getting into fights. i think a lot of it depended on the quality of the leader and again here people like to well i m too my wife always tells me i m too literal. maybe that s why i write history not fiction. i once wrote a murder mystery. i showed it to my agent. he told me to stick with nonfiction, but i m very literal so the but people take small things that they find out about pirates and expanded. i think there s even a book. there s an article written on blackbeard s captain abilities sort of like the seven. effective habits of highly effective people whatever that is, and there s whole article written on how blackbeard maintained order and it was fascinating article, but based on what i read about blackbeard. there s really very little information about how he actually ran his ships. and again, those aren t the kinds of details that come out in in trials what they mostly talk about is who they attacked where they attack them what they got whether they killed somebody but once in a while you get a glimmer of that and some of these pirate captains must have been good in the sense good leaders because a lot of them remain the captain for many months or even years and on a captain ship the pirates code you could be voted in and out and there are examples of that as well. so you can imagine if you had a leader who wasn t leading you to much treasure or you didn t like very much the crew just vote that person out. so some of them must have had some good leadership skills. again, getting back to that comment about the guy said i i hated pirates and other thing you mentioned democracy. this is something i deal with in the book. there was a comment that but one of sam bellamy s med and then made once where he said to somebody they were plenty they were plundering there on ship and he said we re like robin hood s men and from that one comment, a lot of people have said well, they were really democratic they were taking to the rich to give to the poor. no, they weren t they were taken from whoever they could to give to themselves. they weren t, you know, going through nottingham wood and they were they weren t democratic warriors. they weren t the predecessors of the democratic ideals that we talk about during the american revolution. although certainly not fully realized or the french revolution when it started and a lot of people want to take these little nuggets of information we have about the pirates and the fact that they had a somewhat. you know quote unquote democratic system, which is fascinating, but they were not. democratic philosophers, they were not political philosophers. so you have to sort of keep them in their own lane and not make them more of what they were even calling the republic of pirates. not the book, but they called jamaica and and nasa on the bahamas this little pirate republic. well, yes, it was it was a gathering place for pirates. they maybe had some form of loose government there. i haven t watched black sail so i don t really know what they talk about there, but it was not a breakaway republic. they were not trying to establish a new country. they just wanted to place to repair to in between plundering and hopefully had this place be all their own for as long as possible so they can continue robbing people at sea now just because i don t particularly like pirates in the sense that i don t think they re good people. i love them because they re fascinating to write about because a lot of great stories. so i guess we will be looking for a book on piracy as a model for modern business leadership from you anytime soon. no. as leaders act like pirates all the questions and he had you see any kelly. all right seeing god. i ll ask you a couple of quick questions myself, okay? did pirates really dress like captain sparrow? did they wear flashy clothes? yes, when they i m not sure they dress exactly like camden sparrow jack sparrow, but it is true and we do have records of this that once they plundered a ship on board. there might be jewels or jeweled scabbards or silk or nice uniforms or clothes or jackets. they would often put those on and some of them were quite flamboyant and was sort of their way of giving the middle finger to society the society that they were outcasts from so it is definitely true. there s one account of thomas too a pirate and apparently he had this blue silk brocade and he had a bandolier of pistols and he wore fancy rings or rubies in them and he had a scabbard on one of his swords that had gemstones. so yes, we do have some record that people would dress a little bit like jack spar. even maybe more flamboyantly, but you have to remember regular of the time merchant , you know, they were you know big pantaloons, so you call them or they were things that were sometimes colorful not quite to the extent of jack sparrow. so yes, that s sort of true. but about barry tragedy they have a bury their treasure. no, there s not a single record of any pirate bearing the treasure. that doesn t mean there s not it s not out there. but if you watched oak island again, i only watch one episode and it was so boring. i i don t know how they strung it out for so many seasons and they never really found the treasure from i understand, but there s not a single shred of evidence that a pirate ever buried their treasure on land and then left. why would they first they may never get back there, you know their life was short and brutish and who knows that they re gonna get back. second they might find it difficult to get back there just navigationally and third wouldn t they be worried about somebody doubling back or somebody else stealing their treasure? so if you find a real example of somebody who s buried treasure? that would be wonderful. well lastly. and now you don t like them very much. understandably the size would be a good topic to write about. but who s your favorite pirate? oh, yeah. this gives you a great insight in my war personality. my favorite pirate is ned lowe. the guy who cut people s noses and ears off just because he was so out there and so crazy and so horrific and his story is was so much fun to write again this i m giving you a unintentional window into my personality. it was fun to write because it had so much energy and so many people were killed and so many people were treated poorly and then he got his sort of just desserts in the end and it just a fascinating story. because he was he was one of the worst pirates that i encountered. i didn t find blackbeard that interesting to tell you the truth. i found what has been written about blackbeard more interesting than blackbeard himself. yeah, i was i was surprised your book that i don t know much about piracy, but i was surprised how little. blackbeard seem to engage in really yes, he was all nice. he was only as somebody s wrote about him said that he s like a meteor streaking through the sky. he was only his piracy career only lasted about a year and a half. and at the end from all that we know he didn t accumulate a lot of money. in fact when he blockaded charleston harbor he had the entire city under his thumb. he captured five ships. he had four ships himself. he had about 400 pirates and all he asked for was a medicine chest instead of asking for money or ransom. he stole some money from some of the ships that he was he had out in the water, but he asked for a medicine chest and the thinking is that a lot of his men probably got syphilis or some venereal disease and the medicine chest had mercury and some things that he could treat it with now the other argument is if he had gone in an attack, charleston. he probably would have been destroyed. i mean because there are enough people in charleston and there were enough cannons and they re enough guns that it wouldn t have been easy to take over charleston, but i am surprised that he didn t ask for some serious money because the governor was scared to death of what was going to happen because his reputation preceded him, but he didn t well, it s edge to you here in frank spark. is it not true that perhaps his main nemesis was a person associated with with this area that is government spotswood. right after yeah, he went he s he s the guy he s the impetus behind the final denouement right of blackbeard in listening the british naval officers in their ships to go down and get them at thatch s hole and ocracoke island. yeah. he was a fascinating guy and one of the things that s fun is i have facebook page and i talk about my books and i talk about history stuff and nature and whatever s of interest and a lot of people read my books follow the page. and there s one guy. i can t remember his name now, but he s a descendant direct descendant of spotswood and he s added some information for me, but i didn t know but he s a really interesting character and they re been a couple of books written about him. so, yes, okay. well pretty much out of time. so we ll conclude tonight s program with many. thanks once again to eric for terrific presentation. and yes and like all of you for being here and
to whom we are grateful for their generous support over the past several years and it s that kind of commitment that enables us the program to to bring to the university into the community outstanding speakers such as our guest tonight. eric j. dolan is the author of the fascinating book black flags blue waters. the epic history of america s most notorious pirates. eric grew up near the coasts of new york and connecticut and from an early age developed an interest in maritime affairs. toward that end. he earned a double major in biology and environmental studies then getting a master s degree in environmental management from yale. that was followed by a phd. in environmental policy and planning from mit where his dissertation focused on the role of the courts in the cleanup of boston harbor. erica s held an interesting variety of jobs many of them related to his interest in the natural world. the one thing that remained constant throughout his career. has said is his enjoyment of writing and telling stories about topics that he has found most intriguing. this is led to the publication of more than 60 articles for magazines newspapers and professional journals. it is also resulted in the publication of a number of very popular books that include. today is the titles. the furious sky the 500-year history of america s hurricanes. brilliant bacons a history of the american lighthouse when america first met china and exotic history of tea drugs and money in the age of sail. for our fortune and empire the epic history of fur trade in america. leviathan the history of whaling in america as well as the previously mentioned black flags blue waters. all of these books have achieved not only popular but critical acclaim. that s a very difficult task indeed to pull off. as one reviewer of the pirate book wrote quote the book is a fascinating adventure story filled with robes rascals and ruthless renegades. this is staring history that reads like a novel. another has said that in that book dolan quote proves again. skillfully presented narrative nonfiction is even more gripping than swashbuckling mythology. if you ve never read dolan before prepare to have a new favorite historian. and so it is a great pleasure to welcome tonight to the university of mary washington and to the great lives podium a truly gifted writer eric j dolan. thank you bill for that wonderful introduction and thanks to bill and terry and ali for giving me a wonderful meal a few minutes ago and ali for organizing all of this. last time i was in fredericksburg was back from my wife and i lived in maryland in 1996. and i remembered then all the antique stores and today i went down to fredericksburg and they re still there and it was a lot of fun. but anyway, thanks for coming out tonight. i know it s kind of a tough situation. i m just getting back into the swing of giving talks. i ve given about 40 or 50 zoom talks over the past two years and now i m just starting to give talks in person. so this is really a thrill for me to have an audience. now pirates have long been among the most colorful and memorable celebrities in popular culture. a lot of that has to do with books that use pirates as a motif and the most famous example of that of course is robert louis stevenson s treasure island, which was published in 1883 stevenson weaves a wonderfully dramatic tale of the search for pirate treasure replete with a map of skeleton island. where an x marks the spot where treasure is to be found. treasure island is also the book that gave us that familiar sea shanty refrain 15 men on the dead man s chest yoho and a bottle of rum drink in the devil had done for the rest yoho and a bottle of rum and now you know why i became a writer and not a singer. now during this talk. i m going to be showing a number of new yorker cartoons that relate to the pirate theme in case you can t read them. i will read the the punchline for what it s worth yoho and a chilled pinot grigio actually rhymes you d be amazed. there are hundreds of cartoons that the new yorkers put out over the decades that use pirates as a theme now movies have also had a major impact on how we view pirates. most recently disney s pirates of the caribbean franchise is generated a renewed pirate mania. this fellow looks like johnny depp, right? actually, i wanted to have a picture of johnny depp in the book. i reached out to disney and i tried to get a hold of johnny depp s agent, but i was unsuccessful. so i found this at the library of congress. it is a johnny depp impersonator in front of grahman s chinese restaurant in california. i think he did a pretty good job now with all these cultural references. it s no wonder than that pirate costumes are among the most popular worn on halloween on halloween night and international talk like a pirate day is eagerly anticipated by millions every september 19th. and this one says no i don t know where your pirate shirt is. there s no denying. it pirates of grabbed hold of our imagination many of daydreamed about leaving traditional society behind boarding a ship and throwing in their lot with the hearty men and women intent on taking what they want and getting rich while enjoying the luxurious freedom of sailing the world s oceans with a hold full of rome mark twain captured this longing in his memoir life in the mississippi when he admitted that even though ian ian his friends had but one ambition to be steamboat men now and then we had a hope that if we lived and we re good. god would permit us to be pirates. there are plenty of children out there who would love being a pirate? historians can certainly poke holes at these fictional fictional representations of pirates, especially those that depict them as unnaturally attractive rakish yet good-natured rapscallions having a grand old time looking for love adventure and treasure on the waves. the reality of piracy is nothing like the breathless musings of a new york times reporter in 1892 who bitterly complained it cannot but be a source of regret to every true lover of the picturesque that pirates are no more and piracy has lost its popularity what tremendous fellows they must have been what heroes dandy s wits were to be found among them. they were immensely superior to land brigands who are mere milk compared with blackbeard and captain kidd. while real pirates were incredibly intriguing and compelling characters. they most definitely were not tremendous fellows instead. they were seaborn criminals who were neither endearing nor heroic. this says half of me loves being a pirate and half of me regrets it. now black flags blue waters cuts through the hollywood imagery and mythology surrounding pirates and reveals the dramatic and surprising history of american piracies golden age spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s when lawless pirates plied the waters of north america and beyond the golden age was the most dramatic era of maritime marauding the world has ever known it produced such iconic characters as william kidd and blackbeard along with thousands of others whose names are less familiar, but who s despicable deeds are no less riveting. much has been written about that time period and this book adds to that literary lineage, but with a twist. rather than focusing broadly on this era black flags blue waters zeros in on the history of the pirates who either operated out of britain s american colonies or plundered the ships along the american coast from the early 1680s to 1726. these pirates had an exceedingly close often tempestuous and frequently deadly relationship with the colonies. many people view pirates in a romantic light, but there was absolutely nothing romantic about them other than the legends woven about their exploits after they were gone. that is not to say that pirates were born boring far from it while the pirates of black flags blue waters can t compete with the magnetic charms of and witty reparte of captain jack sparrow. they are compelling characters nonetheless and when i read this slide makes me laugh because there s somebody that wrote a comment about the book on amazon and he gave the book one star and his first line he said for some reason this guy hates pirates and he went on to complain about the fact that my book dispelled a lot of the myths about piracy. and the real story of american pirate american pirates is even more astonishing and fascinating than any fictional pirate adventure ever written or cast on the silver screen. this says i m sorry you tapped into something. no one cares about. and that relates to how i picked topics for my books. the most difficult thing is finding a topic that i think will excite me and potential readers the origin story for black flags blue waters started with my kids, lilly and harry are shown here as a teenagers after i finished my book on lighthouses. brilliant beacons a history of the american lighthouse. i was looking around for a new topic and i asked lily and harry what they thought i should write about and i had a couple of ideas one of them was pirates when i mentioned pirates both of their eyes lit up and they say dad that s it. you have to write about pirates and i got very excited because neither of my children had up to that point read any of my books, so i thought this is gonna be my big chance lily even throughout a possible a few possible titles for the books including swords sales and swashbucklers. and arg, which i had to tell lily much to her chagrin is a word that no pirate of this era ever uttered. it is more a byproduct of hollywood in the mid 20th century. when i began working on this book, i knew very little about pirates, but that was by design. i always choose topics. i know very little about you may be thinking maybe i don t know much about anything, but it s really because i have to spend two years working on these books and i get bored rather easily if you ever saw my resume, you would think i couldn t keep a job and part of the reason i go to very different topics is because i like being excited by what i m working on and i hope that that excitement translates to the written page. now sure i d seen a number of movies with pirates in them including all the pirates of the caribbean movies the last three of which are rather poor treasure muppets treasure island one of my favorites the goonies hook and even princess bride the princess bride with its dread pirate roberts. but i hadn t read any books about pirates not even treasure island, which i somehow missed in my misspent youth. i knew what pirates dreamed about the big score. capturing a ship with a hold full of spanish silver pieces of eight gold doubloons. i had heard about blackbeard, but really didn t know much about him other than the fact that he had a black beard. i d also heard about captain kidd, but the only thing i knew about him was that he supposedly buried treasure all along the eastern seaboard from delaware all the way on up to oak island, nova scotia. of course, that is a total myth but it hasn t stopped many people over the years from spending significant amounts of time and money searching for buried treasure and coming up empty. so leaving it with a broker didn t do any good at all. i d also heard that pirates drank a lot, especially rum, which was supposedly the pirates drink of choice and that fact is 100% true one pirate even admitted that the love of drink and a lazy life were stronger motives than gold in learning in into piracy. unfortunately for him. he uttered these words a few before he was hanged. the more i learned about pirates, however, the more fascinated i became pirates were an important part of american history and their story was more complicated and intriguing than i suspected. the first known instance of pirate piracy off the american coast occurred in the summer of 1632 when a pirate named dixie bull and his men plundered a number of english ships before disappearing from sight. other than that the main collect connection that the colonies had with piracy during these early years was twofold first some american merchants traveled to jamaica and other caribbean islands to trade with the pirates and in turn some pirates who had gotten wealthy retired to the colonies to enjoy their riches. in 1684, for example jamaican governor sir thomas lynch noted that the northern colonies are now full of pirate s money pirates had lynch claimed carried the equivalent of 80,000 pounds sterling into boston alone a city that one english official labeled as the common receptacle of pirates of all nations now to get an idea of the magnitude of this loot consider that at the time an average labor in the colony earned about 10 pounds per year. and a woman got roughly half of that while a captain of a merchant vessel pulled down about 72 pounds. now the mid-1600 is also an era of the buccaneers. does anybody know who this is? he s got a rum named after him. henry morgan, yes was when men like henry morgan who s more famous now for his run than for his exploits rome the caribbean in search of spanish treasure ships to plunder the treasure ships were full of silver and gold that came from mines and mints in central and south america. the men s produced copious quantities of coins including gleaming gold doubloons and most importantly eight real coins those so-called pieces of eight or spanish silver dollars and at dinner i was talking about the fact that after i write a book. i always try to get something that reminds me of the book. and i thought naively when i started this book that maybe i could buy a piece of eight after i was done, but once i realized the actual prices for good piece of eight that idea left me rather quickly. now the buccaneers favorite haunt was point royal on the english island of jamaica arguably the wealthiest english city in the new world by 1680 port royal s veneer of sophistication could not hide its decidedly sleazy underbelly, this is when port royal gained the weller earned reputation as the sodom of the west indies and the wickedest city in the world. an unsavory melange of buccaneers and privateers prowled port royal streets and alleyways in search of liquid and current and carnal pleasure as one buccaneer said of his peers whenever they have got a hold of something they don t keep it for long. they are busy dicing and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day and the next day not of a shirt on their back. he continued my own master used to buy a of wine and set it in the middle of the street with. carol had knocked in and stand barring the way every passerby had to drink with them or he d shot them dead with a gun. he kept handy. on june 7 1692 a massive earthquake struck port royal and jamaica when it was all over nearly two-thirds of the city had slipped beneath the waves and more than 5,000 people were killed including many buccaneers the gruesome aftermath integris of aftermath hundreds of dead bodies. a bloated bodies could be seen floating on the surface of the harbor and washed up on the shore a local ministers survived the earthquake called it a terrible judgment of god. that was brought down upon the heads of the most ungodly devouched people in the world. by the late 1600s buccaneers had been largely replaced by the so-called red the pirates who left from the american colonies and sailed to the indian ocean where they prayed on ships coming from the mughal empire or what we know today as india and they were traveling between india and the see ports of jetta and mocha on the surface red sea men appeared to be nothing more than privateers for a fee. they had been issued privateering licenses or letters of mark by colonial governors, which gave them permission to attack french ships since at the time england was at war with france, but these governors knew full. well that the red sea men had no intention of attacking french ships instead. they planned to go around the cape horn cape good hope indonesian ocean and attack moogle ships the red sea men were the most successful pirates of all with some of them such as henry avery amassing considerable fortunes. avery s greatest success was capturing the ganja salway, which was one of the flagships of the emperor aurangzeb on board were more than a thousand people going to mecca and they were loaded with jewels and money. the pirates plundered the ship for several days. when they weren t gathering loot, the pirates engaged in an animalistic and vile viciously raping numerous women a few of the intended victims unable to bear to have their families and friends see them ravished in defiled killed themselves by either jumping over the side of the ship or stabbing themselves. while in the indian ocean the red sea men used the island of saint marie off the off northeast the northeastern coast of madagascar mainland as their home base. there is plenty of gambling on the island as one might imagine a single toss of dice earned the lucky pirate from new york. 1300 pieces of eight in one brawl 14 pirates who were bitterly unsatisfied with the amount of loot. they had managed to obtain in their last voyage decided to split into two groups of seven and fight to the death to see who would get the money. one group of seven was completely demolished and five of the other group of seven were killed the last two guys must have just looked at each other and said, okay, let s just split the money. now the red sea men were welcomed with open arms in america because they were in many cases the father s sons and brothers. of the the people in the colonies they were much beloved members of their communities and they were seen as going halfway around the world to rob quote unquote infidels and bring all that valuable money and jewels and silk back to america. now although the red sea men were welcomed in the colonies the british parliament and the crown the sprunt despise them not only did pirates break the law, but they also threatened the entire east indian trade which was a bulwark of the english economy the resulting crackdown on pirates used a combination of stricter laws more effective prosecutions naval attacks on pirate ships and increased hangings to greatly reduce the pirate threat in the atlantic and by 1700. it was almost completely eliminated. this general reprieve from piracy continued for the duration of the war of the spanish succession between 1702 and 1713 and if you were like me the war of the spanish succession is one of those wars they taught you about in high school and you still have absolutely no idea what it was and why they fought it. the only significant case of piracy in the colonies during the war was when captain john. welch sailed with his fellow mutineers from marblehead my hometown marblehead, massachusetts in august of 1703 after murdering the captain. of the privateer they were on they then headed to brazil where they plundered a number of ships and came back to marblehead with more than 10,000 pounds worth of including a bag full of gold dust. crouching part of his gang were caught after returning to marblehead and they were hanged on friday, june 30th 1704 at the edge of boston harbor thousands of people came out to see them be sent off to eternity the famous purits and preacher cotton mather spoke to the assembled throng. he stood up and steadied himself on a boat. that was just offshore and if you ever been in boston, they were hanged right down the hill from cops hill burial ground near the old north church. and so cotton mather got up and he gave his sermon and he began. we the ministers have told you often. yay. we have told you weeping that you have by sin undone yourself. we have shown you how to commit yourself into his saving and healing hands and how to express repentance. we can do no more but leave you in his merciful hands when the scaffold platform is pulled away and the men dropped to their death the screams of the crowd were so loud that they could be heard more than a mile away and almost 3,000 people showed up to watch them die a few years after the end of the war piracy came roaring back inaugurating the second major phase of piracy, which lasted from 1715 to 1726 and this is what you most people know about this is the pirates of the caribbean era and it s when as many as 4,000 pirates were active this is in this time the focus of activity was not the red sea, but rather the waters off the american colonies and in the caribbean. there are many reasons for the explosion empire see a significant number of navy men and privateers who lost their positions when the war ended decided to turn to piracy many men rose up in mutinied and turned to piracy as well the sinking of a huge spanish treasure fleet in 1715 off the california coast created a stampede of men from almost all of the world. mainly europe who came to that area. it s a dive on the wreck and get as much money as they could they didn t get much money because the spaniards who own the ships got there first and managed to retrieve a lot of the money but many of the men who would come seeking their fortune decided to stay in the caribbean and get their fortune as pirates. although many men voluntarily signed on to become pirates others were forced. to go on the account becoming a pirates against their will 1715 to 1726 is also the periods when pirates used the black flag or the jolly roger as their terrifying calling card the black flag was intended to strike fear into the hearts of any merchant ship that sought fluttering atop the main mass of the pirate ship sending the unmistakable message surrender immediately or else we will attack being risk averse pyre s always hope for surrender. and they never wanted to fight if they could avoid it because there was no upside to battle fortunately for the pirates. they rarely had to resort to force since intimidation courtesy of the black flag worked. so well, this flag is purportedly the flag of blackbeard, but in my research, i could find no reference to this being blackbeard s flag, but it was a flag of a pir. ned lowe i m going to talk about a little bit later and you can this is a modern representation of it, but you can understand the iconography these skeleton and the harpoon piercing the heart with drops of blood falling from it was supposed to signify death and raised in his right arm is an hourglass indicating that you don t have much time to make a decision. you better make the right one. this is when pirates vote voted in democratic fashion to determine who would be their captain and where they would go to hunt for prizes and which ships they were attacked would attack. this is when pirate signed the articles of agreement where the pirates code which laid out the rules for their behavior and also mandated the virtually even distribution of wealth. and at the bottom of this cartoon it says there s the flag will fly a top our pirate ship. this is also in many black men served as pirates a significant number that were african slaves who have been captured by the pirates and they continued to be in servitude on the pirate ship until they were sold off as slaves to generate money, but that s only part of the story. many black pirates became value crew members and fought alongside their white brethren and shared equally in the prizes. this is when anne bonnie and mary reid the only two women known to have served on pirate ships in the atlantic during the golden age appeared briefly on history s stage both were put on trial in port royal for being part of calico jack rackham s pirate crew and bonnie all so happened to be rakim s lover. the trials in jamaica are memorable not only for the multiple hangings that ensued rackham included but even more so for the unusual legal gambit unique among pirates used by bonnie and reed. the court found them guilty of piracy and they were condemned to hang immediately after that sentence was handed down. they pleaded their bellies to the court informing the judge that they were both pregnant. upon investigation. it was found to be the case and they were given a temporary stay of execution. on the day that rackham went to the gallows bonnie his lover made it clear that she was extremely disappointed in him saying that she was sorry to see him there, but he had fought like a man. he need not have been hanged like a dog as for the ladies. we died in jail from an unspecified illness soon. thereafter and bonnie simply disappears from the historical record. this is also when edward thatch or teach better known as blackbeard and 400 was men blockaded, charleston, south carolina for a week and traumatized the rest of the coast with their exploits. now you see this picture. this is from a 1924 book on pirates a general history of pirates, and if you look closely you can see smoke coming off the end of blackbeard s hair and in this book it said that when blackbeard went into battle, he would time matches to the end of his hair and sometimes the end of his beard light them. so as to be enrolled and smoke and look more fearsome when he went into battle what a bunch of baloney. could you imagine having a lit flame at the end of your hair and nobody who was attacked by blackbeard ever mentioned this tag technique? it s just one of many myths about black beard including the other one that a lot of people bring up that he had 14 wives that he used. prostitute out to his men. so be careful when you read about pirate history that you re not reading the myths and you re getting the real thing. now blackbeard met his grizzly end at the hands of british naval lieutenant robert maynard whose forces battled him and his men off north carolina s island of ocracoke. after the battle was over maynard severed blackbeard s head and he hung it from the bowsprit of his sloop blackbeard s headless body was then pitched into the dark waters of pamlico sound. where according to legend it took a few laps around the ship before sinking from sight. now blackbeard s story has recently come full circle in 1996 salvagers in north carolina discovered. the remains of blackbeard s flagship queen. anne s revenge in the relatively shallow waters of beaufort inlet. this period is also in steed bonnet a wealthy sugar plantation owner from barbados decided to leave his gentlemanly life and become a pirate. or the gentleman pirate as he is often called he even built his own pirate ship and had the captain s cabin lined with shelves so he could bring along his personal library. it is not clear why bonnet took the dramatic step of leaving his comfortable life leaving his wife and becoming a pirate some of speculated that his sudden change in behavior was due to depression or perhaps insanity or perhaps some discomforts that he found in married life if it was last one. he must have had a miserable marriage and i just learned a few days ago that one of the television stations. i think it s a hbo. i m not sure there s a whole series on steve bonnet and it looks like a humorous series and i think the director of it or one of the actors is that guy tyco watiti who was the director of thor anyway, look it up you ll be hearing about it. it looks like it s a funny play on steve bonnets life. on his own and league with blackbeard bonnet had some success along with many failures. he was finally captured in september of 1718 when colonel william retz forces came upon bonnet and his men near the mouth of the cape fear river in north carolina the trial of bonnet and his men in charleston was a dramatic affair to say the least first bonnet and one of his men escaped they were captured the next day and brought back to jail then all the upper class individuals or people in charleston begged the judge to let bonnet off basically saying that he was of aristocratic bearing and lineage. he should not be treated in this manner fortunately for those who wanted justice to be meted out the judge didn t agree tried bonnet and his men and 19 all 19 and then we re hanged at the edge of the harbor. this is also when pirate sam bellamy captured a british slave ship called the widow, which was carrying a fortune in gold and silver the proceeds from selling 500 slaves in port royal jamaica. he also had the for more than 50 captures than he and his men had achieved just in the prior year. excuse me. i m having my allergies are sort of kicking up. so. throats a little itchy. however bellamine as men would not be able to enjoy their riches because in april of 1717 as the widow was making its way up these coasts and was just about to go around the outstretched arm of cape cod a nor easter came barreling down the coast and sent the wida into the shallows right near wellfleet and east ham on the cape about 1500 feet from shore. the ship is back was broken on a sand reef and 161 men were killed thrown into the water including bellamy. only two people survived and managed to climb up the cliffs and later they were if you want to learn about what happens to them, you can read the book. it s fascinating story. but all that treasure the key point is all the treasure also sank into the sand off of cape cod for 267 years the witness treasure remained there many people tried to find it one guy edward rose snow writer from massachusetts spending considerable amount of money and dove many times off the coast trying to find those gold doubloons and silver pieces of eight, but no luck. but then in 1984 a salvager and diver named barry clifford and his team which at the time included john f kennedy junior where i went to college with found the wida and began recovering its treasure the item that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. that all these artifacts came from the widow is this this is the witness bell. the reason it s green is if you go to the pirate museum the widow pirate museum in west yarmouth on the cape, which is well worth a visit fascinating pirate museum when you walk in this is the first thing you see it s the bell suspended in a greenish preservative solution. so they knew they found the wida and it is the first authenticated pirate treasure ever found now how much the recovered treasure is worth is not exactly clear. there have been estimates that range from an unreasonably low 200,000 to a ridiculously high 400 million whatever it s worth. it s worth a lot and the thing it s amazing is barry clifford and his investors to this day have not sold a single piece of eight the balloon cannon anything which i think is amazing. now one other particularly nasty pirate who wanted for pray off the american coast during this period was the despicable and arguably mentally deranged edward low or ned lowe that i talked about before the guy who had the flag with the harpoon and the skeleton. he seemed to relish torturing and killing his victims one of his signature moves was cutting off people s ears or lips roasting them and then forcing the victim to eat their own flesh. by the way, he was much nastier than blackbeard. there s almost no evidence of blackbeard doing anything violent towards anybody. anyway when the captain of one of the ships low caught had the temerity to cut the rope holding a bag of gold that was hovering over the surface of the water when he cut that rope and let the gold plunge into the depths when low found out about that. he shot the captain and all 32 members of his crew. another time when low sees casts of wine and brandy from a captured vessel, it s captain asked of load be so kind is to write a sentence or two that he give to the cat the owner of the ship. that would show that low had taken it and that the captain hadn t sold it and pocketed the prophets. low cheerily agreed and said that he d be right back with what the man requested a few minutes later low return with two loaded pistols and presenting one at the captain s bowels. he told the petrified man that this was for his wine and discharged it and then he pointed the other pistol at the captain s head saying this one is for your brandy and fired. louis also the pirate who forced a marblehead man a fisherman named philip ashton. to join his crew in the summer of 1722 ashton however was able to escape and make his way to an uninhabited island called roatan in the bay of honduras. is about 40 miles from the honduran mainland? and he stayed there for almost two years before he was picked up by a ship from salem and brought back home after returning to marblehead ashton saga of suffering and endurance became the talk of new england one reason why ashton s story struck such a chord was that it came in the wake of daniel devos wildly popular robinson crusoe, which appeared in 1719 ashton was a real life robinson crusoe. now one thing that didn t happen during this period was this walking the plank no pirates during the golden age are known to have done this to any of their victims. why would they there are plenty easier ways to kill somebody you could shoot them run them through with the cutlass or just pitch them over the side of the ship. there are a few instances of pirates forcing people to walk the plank, but those took place in the early 1800s in the caribbean when there was another outbreak of piracy mainly off the islands cuba and puerto rico. now the second and very bloody period of piracy came to an end in the mid 1720s when the number of pirates plummeted to an insignificant level of the many factors contributing to this decline one was colonial resolve to fight piracy at sea and in the courts, which resulted in numerous pirates being killed in battle or hanged on land and well publicized trials in boston, williamsburg, charleston and charleston colonial officials condemned 68 men to the gallows and if you look at the broader atlantic more than 400 pirates were hanged. another critical determinant was britain s increased efforts to eliminate pirates throughout the atlantic using a combination of pardons stricter laws and force force executions and the eradication of the pirate strong hold at nasa on new in the bahamas. the last pirate to be hanged during this period was william fly and a few of his men fly had plundered a number of ships off the east coast, but he got too greedy. he had too many prisoners on board. they inspired rose up took over the ship put flying as men and chains sailed to boston where they were put on trial the pirates were executed on july 20 in july of 1726 at the edge of boston harbor after the execution their bodies were rode out to nix s mate a very small island. it s not an island today, but it was back then and flies to compatriots were buried but fly himself was hung up in chains. and the local boston paper said that the reason that he was hung up and chains was to serve as a spectacle for the warning of others, especially seafaring men, but the warning was hardly necessary flies spectacular bloody and brief heretical campaign was the last gasp of the golden age of piracy and this is where my book ends as well. the pirates depicted in black flags blue waters blaze the fiery and unforgettable path through the history of colonial america for centuries their turbulent destructive and fascinating lives have beguiled horrified and entertained us leaving an indelible and unique mark on our culture. undoubtedly, there will be more pirate movies. i hope better ones books and television shows in the future many of which will perpetuate myths or create them anew but in the end there is no need to embellish the history of these pirates for what they did actually did was amazing enough now, i have three more slides. it s become a tradition of mine with my books to have my daughter paint a picture that relates to the book and towards the end of writing black flags blue waters. my daughter painted this very small painting. it s three by four inches about and she said this is a pirate looking for his next victim and i didn t have the heart to tell lily at the time. although i ve told her since that i think she was too heavily influenced by my wailing book because no no, you know, a self regarding pirate would be in a pirate ship that says boxy and slow moving is this one likely is this looks just like a whaling ship to me. but anyway, that picture is in the book. and this is really what pirates did during their downtime. it says jazzercise lito deck 4 pm and the last slide i have is a picture of my new book, which i have to give a plug to it s coming out of may 31st. it relates to pirates in the sense that part of the reason i m i wrote this book is when i gave talks on black flags blue waters, i would invariably get a question our pirates the same as privateers or our privateers just legalized pirates. so i started reading more about privateering and yes privateering in the 1600s 1500 early 1700s. it did look a lot like piracy sometimes but privateering during the american revolution was absolutely not legalized piracy and what fascinated me and totally blew me away is how important of a role nearly 2,000 privateers and that s ships. they re almost 40,000 privateers men. a during the war in helping us win our battle against britain. so anyway that is the end of my talk? i m happy to answer any questions you might have and thanks for coming out under these trying circumstances. thank you. thank you eric. so if you have questions and raise your hand kelly will seek you out and if you ll stand and ask your question, i d be good. yes, you spent a lot of time telling us about power to. after they repires they got their money and then they got drunk or such or saturn. they were killed. do you know any that she got their money their name became? respectable citizens and live whatever life until they passed them. i wish i could say i knew a lot about that. they re undoubtedly. we re at especially in the during men who came back and were welcomed by their community was much of us likely during the pirates of the caribbean phase of the problem is none of these pirates successful or not wrote memoirs once they melted back into society. most of them came from the lower rungs of society to begin with once they melted back into society. you don t have a lot of echoes about them society history, especially back then is written by about important people or notorious people. so the pirates got caught and got put on trial we have trial records. we have depositions. we know a lot about them not so much about their early life, but the pirates that made a couple thousand pounds maybe and decided to go back to bristol, rhode island and give back with their wife or whatever and their kids and start a farm. we know very little very very little about any of them henry avery. he survived there was a global manhunt. they never found him, but there s no record of what actually happened to him. we know he was never found. he was never hanged. he s never tried and there are theories that he just resettled some place in england and different stories about what happened to him, but we have absolutely no. idea, and i wish you know if i get a drink with some of these pirates i can get some really good information, but it s very frustrating. it s big. it was very nice that there were so many trials and this is just that just at the period when the united states when the colonies not the united states and england started to really publish their pirate trials. so we have that record to pull from but in terms of knowing what they did the many pirates that must have come home and not been hanged. i don t know they could be our great great. great. great great great great grandparents. i mean, i m sure some of them are. in the back and you re talking about the various pirate and pirate myths. did they ever leave someone on a deserted island with a gun and a couple of bullets? and yes. yes that actually did happen a number. there are a number of instances where that very thing is is mentioned marooning. i m not sure they always left them with the bullet and some balls, but there were unruly pirates that were sometimes kicked off the crew by their fellows and left in very dangerous positions. there was one part when i talked about john quelch when he went down to the caribbean and not the caribbean we went down off brazil during their gold rush and was plundering ships. there was a danish pirate who they met along the way one of the ships they plundered he decided he wanted to become a pirate. but they need demanded a bigger cut of the share and the other guy said forget that and they just dropped them off on an uninhabited part of the south american coast. who knows what happened to him? excellent talk excellent. thank you. so two questions actually my first how would you characterize or describe blackbeard s relationship to caesar? because he does briefly come up in the book and this is something i m personally trying to find more out about in regard to race and slavery amongst piracy. i did not find much more than the couple of references to caesar, especially in the final battle on ocracoke island. i don t i don t think anybody s written tried to write a book about caesar. although people have tried have written books about ann bonnie mary reed, even though there s only a page and a half of real information on and they ve written entire books. i don t know much more what i know about the pirates interactions with black men of the time and well i get to women in a second but black men of the time it s very limited. they re mentioned once in a while. they definitely are mentioned his crew crew members. they also are very often sold to make money for the pirates but black women. it s very interesting madagascar. there are a lot of descendants on madagascar the pirates used to hang out there for a number of years and they had sex with local women. and so there are people in madagascar who can trace their lineage back to the ellie 1700s when these white predominantly white pirates came along had sex with local women and then left. but if you find anything more about caesar, i mean, that would be fascinating. yeah in my in my private hearing book. i have a pretty decent section on slavery because there was an interact there was a strong intersection between privateering and slave ships and there s a great book coming out on that and about a month or two, but if you can find that kind of stuff, it s great because it gives you another perspective on history that we all think we know about because just like poor people don t show up on our history books a lot black people, especially in the 1700s and early 1800s. don t show up a lot or insubstantial ways where we can really give a profile and say something important about them. okay, and second question is education is kind of ith in this new time period especially education amongst pirates there have been some accounts. i think that describe blackbeard is pretty being a pretty somewhat educated highly educated individuals there any truth behind this. i mean regard to his like early life as upbringing that would give some truth behind this notion. not sure about how educated he was proof. there s some people think he was a privateer during the war the spanish succession. there s some people think he was born in jamaica. there s some people think he was born in north carolina. there s some people think he was born in bristol england. there are different theories. i haven t seen the definitive. in detailing of his early life, so it s very hard to say much about him, but i have no doubt that a number of pirates were educated. i mean certainly as well educated is the average person of the day whether they were as educated as steve bonnet was for example an aristocrat. i doubt that that was quite common, but they were just like their fellow of the era people who went to see and were before the masked or weren t the officers and weren t the head guys. they often had very minimal education, but you have to remember back then. a lot of people didn t go to school at all. i mean they had very different kinds of careers. they were physical labor again if you can find more maybe it s out there. it would be wonderful if there was a great journal or something that nobody s found that gives us greater insights and i have no doubt that something will be found but a lot of people have poured over the records of piracy. and i didn t see anything that would substantiate his scholarly. bent hi, you had mentioned a couple of times that there were kind of a mix of people that went into piracy sort of their eyes open voluntarily others were sort of dragooned into it. right and you also mentioned that there was a kind of an egalitarian mood on the ships where they shared everything and but you also mentioned there was sort of a discipline. i guess was it was it more common that the crews were sort of cohesive and and you know shared out or was there more was it more common that you had sort of a strong leader that controlled everything and that there was a significant portion of people that were there because that was what they were forced to do as opposed to their choice all the above. i mean there there are examples of pirates getting into brawls amongst each other voting captains in and out. there are examples of men who were forced to join becoming very active participants and eager pirates. there are examples of men who are forced to join and escaped in various ways or ultimately killed because they wouldn t be subservient to the other pirates and sort of fall into line. i could imagine. i mean based on the accounts that we have sometimes the pirates got along quite well, especially when they were totally drunk and they were just in between plundering or if they were doing well, but they re also examples in the history of pirates attacking each other killing each other getting into fights. i think a lot of it depended on the quality of the leader and again here people like to well i m too my wife always tells me i m too literal. maybe that s why i write history not fiction. i once wrote a murder mystery. i showed it to my agent. he told me to stick with nonfiction, but i m very literal so the but people take small things that they find out about pirates and expanded. i think there s even a book. there s an article written on blackbeard s captain abilities sort of like the seven. effective habits of highly effective people whatever that is, and there s whole article written on how blackbeard maintained order and it was fascinating article, but based on what i read about blackbeard. there s really very little information about how he actually ran his ships. and again, those aren t the kinds of details that come out in in trials what they mostly talk about is who they attacked where they attack them what they got whether they killed somebody but once in a while you get a glimmer of that and some of these pirate captains must have been good in the sense good leaders because a lot of them remain the captain for many months or even years and on a captain ship the pirates code you could be voted in and out and there are examples of that as well. so you can imagine if you had a leader who wasn t leading you to much treasure or you didn t like very much the crew just vote that person out. so some of them must have had some good leadership skills. again, getting back to that comment about the guy said i i hated pirates and other thing you mentioned democracy. this is something i deal with in the book. there was a comment that but one of sam bellamy s med and then made once where he said to somebody they were plenty they were plundering there on ship and he said we re like robin hood s men and from that one comment, a lot of people have said well, they were really democratic they were taking to the rich to give to the poor. no, they weren t they were taken from whoever they could to give to themselves. they weren t, you know, going through nottingham wood and they were they weren t democratic warriors. they weren t the predecessors of the democratic ideals that we talk about during the american revolution. although certainly not fully realized or the french revolution when it started and a lot of people want to take these little nuggets of information we have about the pirates and the fact that they had a somewhat. you know quote unquote democratic system, which is fascinating, but they were not. democratic philosophers, they were not political philosophers. so you have to sort of keep them in their own lane and not make them more of what they were even calling the republic of pirates. not the book, but they called jamaica and and nasa on the bahamas this little pirate republic. well, yes, it was it was a gathering place for pirates. they maybe had some form of loose government there. i haven t watched black sail so i don t really know what they talk about there, but it was not a breakaway republic. they were not trying to establish a new country. they just wanted to place to repair to in between plundering and hopefully had this place be all their own for as long as possible so they can continue robbing people at sea now just because i don t particularly like pirates in the sense that i don t think they re good people. i love them because they re fascinating to write about because a lot of great stories. so i guess we will be looking for a book on piracy as a model for modern business leadership from you anytime soon. no. as leaders act like pirates all the questions and he had you see any kelly. all right seeing god. i ll ask you a couple of quick questions myself, okay? did pirates really dress like captain sparrow? did they wear flashy clothes? yes, when they i m not sure they dress exactly like camden sparrow jack sparrow, but it is true and we do have records of this that once they plundered a ship on board. there might be jewels or jeweled scabbards or silk or nice uniforms or clothes or jackets. they would often put those on and some of them were quite flamboyant and was sort of their way of giving the middle finger to society the society that they were outcasts from so it is definitely true. there s one account of thomas too a pirate and apparently he had this blue silk brocade and he had a bandolier of pistols and he wore fancy rings or rubies in them and he had a scabbard on one of his swords that had gemstones. so yes, we do have some record that people would dress a little bit like jack spar. even maybe more flamboyantly, but you have to remember regular of the time merchant , you know, they were you know big pantaloons, so you call them or they were things that were sometimes colorful not quite to the extent of jack sparrow. so yes, that s sort of true. but about barry tragedy they have a bury their treasure. no, there s not a single record of any pirate bearing the treasure. that doesn t mean there s not it s not out there. but if you watched oak island again, i only watch one episode and it was so boring. i i don t know how they strung it out for so many seasons and they never really found the treasure from i understand, but there s not a single shred of evidence that a pirate ever buried their treasure on land and then left. why would they first they may never get back there, you know their life was short and brutish and who knows that they re gonna get back. second they might find it difficult to get back there just navigationally and third wouldn t they be worried about somebody doubling back or somebody else stealing their treasure? so if you find a real example of somebody who s buried treasure? that would be wonderful. well lastly. and now you don t like them very much. understandably the size would be a good topic to write about. but who s your favorite pirate? oh, yeah. this gives you a great insight in my war personality. my favorite pirate is ned lowe. the guy who cut people s noses and ears off just because he was so out there and so crazy and so horrific and his story is was so much fun to write again this i m giving you a unintentional window into my personality. it was fun to write because it had so much energy and so many people were killed and so many people were treated poorly and then he got his sort of just desserts in the end and it just a fascinating story. because he was he was one of the worst pirates that i encountered. i didn t find blackbeard that interesting to tell you the truth. i found what has been written about blackbeard more interesting than blackbeard himself. yeah, i was i was surprised your book that i don t know much about piracy, but i was surprised how little. blackbeard seem to engage in really yes, he was all nice. he was only as somebody s wrote about him said that he s like a meteor streaking through the sky. he was only his piracy career only lasted about a year and a half. and at the end from all that we know he didn t accumulate a lot of money. in fact when he blockaded charleston harbor he had the entire city under his thumb. he captured five ships. he had four ships himself. he had about 400 pirates and all he asked for was a medicine chest instead of asking for money or ransom. he stole some money from some of the ships that he was he had out in the water, but he asked for a medicine chest and the thinking is that a lot of his men probably got syphilis or some venereal disease and the medicine chest had mercury and some things that he could treat it with now the other argument is if he had gone in an attack, charleston. he probably would have been destroyed. i mean because there are enough people in charleston and there were enough cannons and they re enough guns that it wouldn t have been easy to take over charleston, but i am surprised that he didn t ask for some serious money because the governor was scared to death of what was going to happen because his reputation preceded him, but he didn t well, it s edge to you here in frank spark. is it not true that perhaps his main nemesis was a person associated with with this area that is government spotswood. right after yeah, he went he s he s the guy he s the impetus behind the final denouement right of blackbeard in listening the british naval officers in their ships to go down and get them at thatch s hole and ocracoke island. yeah. he was a fascinating guy and one of the things that s fun is i have facebook page and i talk about my books and i talk about history stuff and nature and whatever s of interest and a lot of people read my books follow the page. and there s one guy. i can t remember his name now, but he s a descendant direct descendant of spotswood and he s added some information for me, but i didn t know but he s a really interesting character and they re been a couple of books written about him. so, yes, okay. well pretty much out of time. so we ll conclude tonight s program with many. thanks once again to eric for terrific presentation. and yes and like all of you for being here and
future super bowl party. the new 3-d tv sets come with a warning. if you drink, don t watch. well, a merry monday to everyone. i hope everyone s had a terrific weekend but not those trying to catch a flight somewhere. i felt lucky getting out of washington just in time. european ministers are meeting today to discuss when and how they ll reopen airspace over europe. more than 20 countries are affected, and the volcano is still affective. right now, it s spewing about 750,000 tons a second. and the misery also in the usa continuing for travelers as well. more than 63,000 flights have been canceled last thursday at a cost of $2 million a day at the airlines. they are temporarily laying off employees to cope with the lost revenue. the backlog for passengers waiting to get on flights so huge, many are facing days even weeks. but there say glimmer of hope this morning. some of the major airlines have sent test flights into the sky, and so far, the planes haven t encountereded any ash. that could mean by the end of the day, you could have half the level of flights. our team of correspondents covered all the angles for you. you see neal karlinsky, nick watt and sharyn alfonsi. let s bin with neal. neal? reporter: you can see the volcano behind me and the ash plume that s blowing out the top due south, this is a sample of some of the ash that we gathered up over the weekend. this is the stuff blowing over the top of people by the bucket load who live underneath it. the real question is how long will it last? and scientists tell us the worst could be over within the next couple of days. sha they re shoveling their rooftops in iceland in case more coming raining down. you re sealing it off, who s going in there? sheep. reporter: they re all locked in tight and you think they ll be safy. they ll be safe. reporter: for the first time they say the menacing mountain should ease into that type of eruption within a week. it s difficult to know when it will stop, when it will last, but it is likely that it will stop after a few day. reporter: it s pumping out an incredible 750 tons of ash every second. that s like having a one-foot snowstorm in one second in a typical sports arena or filling an olympic size swimming pool in three seconds. we saw the results during a surreal trip inside the ash zone filled with swans, horses and other animals left helpless some a dark haze. a day later, the ash has shifted elsewhere. and this is what s been left behind. the ash has poisoned everything here. there s actually a green lawn underneath all of this. but after a day of snow, hail and rain, it s all been matted down after a thick coating of something that s more like cement than mud. it s terrible to see it so black. reporter: this woman told us last week the volcano has always been like a good friend. that was before the ash buried her father s farm. i think it s a bad volcano. it s not my friend anymore. reporter: it s all about the wind here. i can tell you, even though it s bright sunshine where we are right now. the wind is blowing all of the ash directly on top of the people who live on the south side of the mountain. it is likely pitch black in there just a few miles away right now, george? okay, neal. thanks. major airlines have already been hit by billions of dollars in losses because of that volcano and they re pushing hard to get back into business. they flew their own test flights measuring at altitude of 40,000 feet to 10,000 feet. we go to nick watt at london s heathrow airport still shut down this morning. nick? reporter: good morning, george. well, the major news out of here is the british navy has dispatched two warships to bring stranded brits back home. yes, it really is that bad. heathrow airport still a ghost town, as robin mentioned. we ve got restrictions in operation in 19 european countries, ten of those countries in total lockdown. we are now talking about millions of passengers affected by this. now, this morning, some flights did take off from scandinavia and south france. but the british government, they have launch third own test flights, and they say there are still very dangerous levels of ash up there. and the winds are not changing. so, george, they say this cloud could be hanging over britain and europe at least through the end of this week. u.s. carriers have been hard hit, too, they canceled more than 1,000 flights. delta canceled 170 over the weekend alone. continent, 70 flights and america, 50 flights. and every grounded flight means hundreds of very frustrated passengers. sharyn alfonsi is at kennedy airport with their story. reporter: good morning, george. we spoke with families who have literally been stuck in the terminal since thursday. they say they can t afford a hotel and can t figure out a way home. at jfk airport, europe-bound passengers passed out under the the escalators. how long have you been here? since thursday. reporter: this woman sleeping here all weekend with her 8-year-old son. have you had a shower? no. reporter: no shower? no shower. reporter: is it hard? it s really hard because we have no extra money to take in a hotel reservation. reporter: from coast to coast, thousands of travelers struck. on the west coast. can t get out. get get through brussels. reporter: and the east. really frustrated. we re getting no information. reporter: the world seemed to come to a standstill. the world displaced. like europe. we were told there s nothing available. no trains no planes, nothing. air companies are they re giving us refund. it s full of bus. reporter: but also cities half a world away. i just want to go home. seem to be stuck in cyd fli, we re supposed to be flying london via shanghai. we re stuck here until friday. reporter: such a nightmare. keep in mind, for a lot of people stuck here. this is not where they intended to go. this was just supposed to be a layover, so they ve got things like flip-flops and bathing suits packed. instead of buying souvenirs, they re looking for winter coats. the government on friday issued the first major charges against wall street for its role in the mortgage fiasco. the s.e.c. charged the investment giant goldman sachs with fraud. that news sent the dow on a nosedive friday. bianna golodryga is at the new york stock exchange. we ve heard from the asian markets, haven t we? reporter: you re right. they opened lower. as the major catalyst for the passing of tougher regulatory reform, we know any sort of government intervention makes wall street notice. we saw goldman stock drop 13% on friday but the entire investment sector took a hit. releases its earnings tomorrow. the global attack from government officials over the weekend. even warren buffett who owns a $5 billion stake in the bank recently joked that the company is so unpopular that they re going to be rewrite genesis and have goldman offer adam the apple. you got that right, bianna. thank you. how will the goldman sachs news affect the president s push for bank reform? tim geithner said on sunday he is confident democrats have enough republican votes to bring a sweeping financial reform bill to the senate form. jon karl is in washington. has more on that. geithner may be confident at that votes are there. others not so much, right, jon? not yet. they believe this plays right into the agent for sweeping new regulations for wall street and the timing from their perspective couldn t be any better. this comes just as democrats are prepared to bring their bill to the senate floor this week. just as the white house is going to launch a major campaign bill that s going to include appearances by the president around the country for health care. but republicans are united in opposition to the bill as it is written. 41 senators, that s every republican in the senate, signed a letter saying that the bill needs to be changed from they can support it. as you said, as it it is written right now it could change. jon, have a great day. let s go to juju chang with the rest of the monk s news. good morning, everyone. we begin with toyota paying up. today, the company has reportedly agreed to pay a record $16.4 million fine for waiting to disclose gas pedal defects. however, the company is not expected to admit any wrongdoing. criminal charges are still possible. today marks 15 years since the oklahoma city bombing. hundreds of survivors and family members are gathering at the memorial today to honor the 168 people killed in the murrah federal building. it was the de leest domestic terror attack. a 68-year-old woman was pulled out, you can see her there, alive, from beneath the rubble today. and then a 4-year-old, and still the quake death toll is now approaching 2,000. and finally, a new record at the academy of country music awards, care carrie underwood became the first woman to win the award twice. that s news at 7 a 11. wouldn t be it great that lady antebellum came to the summer concert series? well, they are? i m not saying. it would be wonderful. wouldn t that be great. i didn t get that memo. time for the weather, heidi jones in for wabc and the long weekend for sam champion. you re looking mighty springy and fresh. a beautiful day. gorgeous start to the monday. 60s in new york. five degrees milder than yesterday. hey, beantown, big day today, patriots day. the boston marathon kicks off later this morning. it was waterlogged in texas over the weekend. 3 to 4 inches in the hill country west of austin. 7 much improved, still scattered showers in west texas. the bigger story, the pacific northwest. you got a good start. rain moves in later today, that will be with them overnight, this comes on the heels of what was some of the warmest temperatures of the year over the weekend. that s a look at the national forecast. you ll get to your local forecast after good morning america s pick cities. and we re talking florida the next half hour. you don t want to miss that, george? heidi, you bring a lot of fun to the south this morning. we re going to turn to my exclusive interview of israel prime minister netanyahu speaking out for the first time in a year. president obama is pushing netanyahu to make peace with the palestinians and the prime minister is pushing obama to take a harder line on iran. on that subject, i ll ask netanyahu to respond to a the new york times report that defense secretary robert gates had written a secret memo questioning the effectiveness of u.s. efforts to block iran s nuclear program. look, we all are concerned with iran, i don t get into internal american calculations. it s the biggest issue facing our times. and i think that the i think that the president has expressed his understanding of how serious a challenge it is. but is the current effort designed to get a sanctions resolution of the u.n. security council, is that effective? i don t know about the security council. i hope so. and certainly, the international community can deliver crippling sanctions. let me tell you what they are. if you stop iran from importing refined petroleum, a fancy word for gasoline, then this regime comes to a halt. china is not willing to go along with those crippling sanctions. i spoke with dmeitry medvedev, and he said he was not willing to go along with those crippling sanctions. where are you letter? well, you could have powerful sanctions. they ve expressed a willingness to go along with the kind of sanctions you ve outlined. so far, president obama has not been willing to state that publicly. has he given you an assurance that he s willing to go for crippling sanctions? well what the united states has ted, they re determined to prevent iran from developing nuclear weapons. i think that s an important statement. but it s safe to say, israel will not permanent, on your view, on your watch, for iran to get a nuclear weapon? our preference is that the international community led by the united states stop this nuclear weapons program. having said that, i would say on the eve of israel s independence day and the fortunes of the jewish people were such that we could never defend ourselves. we paid a horrible price on the holocaust and before the holocaust. the changes that that always reserves the right to defend the jewish nation. but the effort is compromised in a stalemate on a piece process. vice president biden surprised by new israeli settlements out of jerusalem. and then an intense meeting between president obama and netanyahu and the israeli prime minister was a no show at obama s nuclear conference. it s pretty clear that the relationship has hit hard bumps. who s the blame to that? i think in any family, you have ups and downs, you have disagreements. but i think this relationship between the united states of america and people of israel is rock solid. march 23rd, an extraordinary visit to the white house. no public pictures. the president apparently kept you waiting while he went up and had dinner and left you waiting in the roosevelt room. it s been reported that the president made several demands that israel freeze all settlements and that they be prepared in the peace talks to talk about the substance of boundaries on refugee. you have told the president that they re prepared to meet what he s set out? one, i don t know how the meeting was perceived. but i don t think there was any such intention on the part of the president. i think we have outstanding issues. we re trying to resolve them through diplomatic challenge in the best way we can. we have on jerusalem, not my personal policy, but all presidents, for the last 42 years. now the palestinian demand, and i i m not saying what the american position is, but the palestinian demand is that we prevent jews from building in jewish neighborhoods in jerusalem. that is you know, that is an unacceptable demand. so it seems like you and president obama are still at outs on this whole issue of whether there should be a settlement freeze right now. if that s the case, how do you get these talks started again? no, in fact, i m the one who initiated that s unprecede unprecedented. in jerusalem, we re talking about neighborhoods, right in the heart of jerusalem. as you know, sir, a lot of those neighborhoods in east jerusalem were empty, as recently as 1993. they were next to palestinian neighborhoods not contiguous to other settlements which is one of the reasons president obama has called for a freeze. what would be your reaction then first the president decides, as he s been advised by some, to put a united states peace plan on the table? well, first of all, in these neighborhoods which are part and parcel of jerusalem have not displaced anyone. palestinians live in their neighborhoods, jews live in jerusalem. i don t believe you can seriously think you can impose peace. peace has to come from the parties sitting down with each other. resolving their differences. this is what we want to achieve. the prime minister also repeated his opinion be sitting down without any precautions. they have not had any formal response. but last night, secretary state clinton did put out a statement saying the united states would share your risks and burdens. you can read more at abcnews.com. an american student convicted of murder of a british roommate. she files appeals and says there s no proof she was at the scene of the crime. we have the latest on the amanda knox indicate. and later, could 3-d television be bad for your health? 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(announcer) right now, all over the country, discover card customers are getting five percent cashback bonus at home improvement stores. it pays to get more, it pays to discover. good morning. 7:24 on 24 monday. at least bouncing to 39,000. winds are light and in some sheltered areas, west and north of the beltway, starting off many the 30s. could be patchy frost, openfully the valley locations if your car is parked outside. 31 in baltimore. and freezing back towards oakland. that s it. we shift up to the north. and we actually also watch what s happening in boston because they are about two hours away from starting the boston marathon. we ve got ourselves the influence of the wind off of a storm that will bring them some building clouds and showers. that s important because some of the building clouds will slide down the coast and could reach us here in maryland through mid and latter part of the afternoon. until then, a quick warm up. temperatures back to near normal, 46 degree. but by mid afternoon, we build in clouds and could get a late day cool down. the outlook for the rest of the week, mid to upper 60s tomorrow. showers and cooler on wednesday. and then clearing back to 70 thursday and friday afternoon. thank you. traffic is heavy and slow on the outer loop of the beltway on the east and west side as you take a look this morning on your ride into work around 7:00. 695, stop and go traffic. on the outer loop. flowing freely on the inner loop. and take a look at the maps. injury accident on the inner loop of the beltway at security boulevard and a disabled vehicle on 695 prior to the key bridge and the toll booth there. and an accident at old fredrick road and st. john s landing. dry times like this, 895 southbound, 795, six minute ride. 83 southbound to 495, eight minutes. stay close. we have more coming up. the news up date next. news time now 7:27. it started as a fight, but then escalated into a murder. police say the victim, a 28- year-old and a 21-year-old showed up at a 21-year-old s door to confront him about allegations that he assaulted a female at a party. police say he pulled out a shotgun and fired two round, hitting both victims in the stomach. a candle light vigil is scheduled at the university tomorrow. a 22-year-old baltimore man charged with measuring his own daughter. police say the 2-year-old was rushed to the hospital on saturday after her father told police he found her on the bath room floor. but during questioning, he told police he beat the child, disciplining her with a belt. at first, he was charged with child abuse, but an autopsy found additional injuries that lead to murder charges. and an 83-year-old is now formally charged with murdering his wife in their home. investigators say he killed his 28-year-old wife and then set their home own fire. police have not released a motive. he is charged now with first degree murder, arson and related offenses. he is in the detention center. that will do it for us for now. we will be back with up another update in about 25 minutes. good morn america america now continues in new york. 3-d movies are all the rage right now. how to train your dragon took the box office this weekend. could the new 3-d tvs be bad for your health? they ve come out with warnings for pregnant women, even little kids, not to drink while you watc watch. good morning, america. i m george stephanopoulos. when we come in, we look at all the stories we re going to talk about. we kind of figure out what is going to light up the board. imagine a world without school. no teachers, no books, no lessons. kids are cheering across the country. well, parents have cut formal education out of their kids lives completely. it s called radical un-school. are they putting your kid s futures in jeopardy? i know there are two sides to this side. also, a special this half hour, a once in a lifetime opportunity. your greatest dream come true. first in this half hour, george. the latest on amanda knox, the former college student convicted of murdering her roommate while study ago broad in italy. she has filed a new appeal. we re going to talk to one of her attorneys in a moment but first andrea canning has the latest. reporter: facing 25 years behind bars, amanda knox is fighting for freedom with her family at her side. amanda has zero history of violence on her side. your first crime. murder. reporter: over the weekend, knox s attorneys have filed a 200-page appeal they re hoping to overturn her conviction and bring her home. it s raising doubt about the accuracy of the dna found on a knife, alleged to be the weapon used in the murder of meredith kercher. authorities are again asking for an independent investigation of that evidence. the appeal also claims knox was denied her legal rights during the initial police interrogation, where she gave conflicting statements. she was not provided with a professional interpreter. she was not provided with a lawyer. she was smacked in the back of the head. she was threatened. she was screamed at. reporter: the two judges issued an opinion explaining the 26-year sentence. prosecutors had suggested several different motives from robbery to intention. but they suggest it happened at the spur of a moment. they say knox participated in the murder and its cover-up but did not act maliciously and wasn t the mastermind behind the crime. the judge is asking to increase the sentence to life in prison. we will never leave her over there. she will come home, no matter what it takes. any parent would do that for their innocent child. reporter: for good morning america, andrea canning, abc news. joining us now from philadelphia is one of amanda knox s attorneys, ted simon, joins us live. good to see you, ted. good morning. good morning to you. amanda s parents are saying understandably, she s having good days and bad days there in italy. anything more you can tell us? under the circumstances, we believe she s doing very well. this say tough situation to be in. i know, robin, you and your audience have been following this case. there s no evidence of any sort on amanda knox in the room or on her person. given the sad and violent nature of this murder, one would think some evidence of amanda would be found in that room or on her person but it was not. as we said before, there s no, hair no fiber, no footprint, no shoe print, no dna no blood, nothing. the remaining question is why is amanda knox still in jail. and this 200-page appeal persuasively demonstrates whatever evidence that was produced was insubstantial, unpersuasive and unreliable. southwest it was fraught with speculation, conjecture and contradiction. and we think ultimately, this appellate court would realize the meritetous position of amanda knox and the evidence. were you suggesting she was not there at the time? there will be additional evidence that was not heard before. part of the evidence was committed by sollecito s attorney. and as well as there s brand-new information presented as mart of amanda s appeal, by another person, independent of that, that also states for the first time that amanda knox and raffaele sollecito were not present or were not involved. bring up rudy guede. he appeals and was sentenced to 16 years. that encouraging to amanda knox at all? we know as a factual matter, all the forensic evidence points to rudy guede. and there s no forensic evidence that points to amanda knox, with respect, particularly, in the room or on the person of meredith kercher. given the fact she has no history of violence. she has an otherwise unblemished record and academically has excelled. including the trial court found that there was no motive whatsoever constantly rejecting the theories the prosecution. all of this is helpful to the defense. and we think ultimately, the appellate court, after a searching inquiry, will recognize the injustices of this conviction. we know there s a difference in the systems there. tell us about the appeal process in italy as compared to here in the u.s. yes. the systems are different, but that doesn t mean they re unnecessarily unfair. in fact, because of the differences in italy on appeal it very well may help amanda in the appeal. in the u.s., in an appeal, the appellate court simply looks at whether or not there s a legal error. in italy, there s an opportunity to look at legal errors, as well as revisit the facts. so there s a broader range of appeal and a greater opportunity to have any case, particularly this one, reversed. prosecutors are filing their own appeal wanting the sentence to be a life sentence. will the appeals be heard at the same time? and what kind of effect do you think that will have on amanda s appeal? yes, they will be heard at the same time. we don t believe at that prosecutor s appeal is substantial. they think it s wanton, more strategic than substantive. recognize at that trial court rejected each of ever-changing motives, first that it was a satanic killing and a drug-killed orgy gone awry and then vengeance. and the court ultimately concluded there was no motive. given the fact there was no motive, we think that s helpful to the defense because why would amanda do such a thing without a motive? there s no physical evidence. it makes no sense. and we think this is very supportive of the appeal. everyone, the family, amanda, lawyers are very encouraged that we have a great opportunity to reverse this injustice. ted simon. thanks very much. it s a long month ahead. it s time for the weather, heidi jones from wabc in for sam this morning. good morning. good morning, robin, good morning, everyone. we start off with a live shot from south florida, wplg out of miami, florida. a rainy start to the day. we ll see some breaks later today. but it s a bit of a slow start to the sunslight state. let s talk about it. we have an inch of rain in miami yesterday, we re not going to see that today. it s not going to be full sunshine. we will see improving conditions, next 24 hours. the big story has to be the rain that s moving into the pacific northwest throughout the duration of today and into tonight. the wind picks up as we get into tuesday, wednesday. mountain snow as well. a little bit of a different and this weather report has been brought do you by dairy queen, robin? heidi, boston mare that ron. isn t that today? yes. didn t you run. i ran last year, the elite women and men today. you look like you could still knock it off. next, is the new 3-d tv bad for your health? we ll talk about that next. come on back. to get more of the fiber you need every day, try fiberchoice. with the natural fiber found in fruits and vegetables and 33% more fiber per serving than benefiber. go to fiberchoice.com o get savings and rewards. for all active families. our advanced 2-in-1 power cleans tough stains like grass better than the leading oxi detergent and helps get your family s wash incredibly white and bright. try new all oxi-active. it s all good. now to those 3-d tvs. they were supposed to be the biggest entertainment hit of the year. here s the hitch, watching them may be bad for your health. becky worley joins us live from oakland. we can becky, i was surprised to know, the user manuals actually warn about the side effects? that s right, george, four 3-d tv sets prepared to sell this year. they have a new warning could they make you feel like you re in the action actually make you feel sick? 3-d tvs have created a lot of buzz do you see that? reporter: but now a manufacturer warns that some viewers shouldn t watch the displays. in the samsung manual, warn the elderly suffers of serious medical conditions those who are sleep deprived should avoid using the 3-d functionality. primary things i would worry about would be blurred vision, headache, difficulty concentrating, perhaps imbalance difficulties. is it disorienting? it made me feel a little bit like, you know, light-headed. i don t know whether my brain is switching or the unit is switching. i remember during the movie, i had to take my glasses off at one point because i just felt like something hurt. my eyes or my head, i forgot. reporter: but this mother to-be felt no side effects. queasy. no. reporter: you passed that part of being pregnant a couple months ago, didn t you? but one viewer found tv viewing could increase eye strain and headaches. two emerge from a slightly different vantage point. the glasses help overlay the image, tricking the brain thinking it s in front of you. if your brain is putting a lot of effort into doing something like a three-dimensioned image, that s a lot of extra work. reporter: extra work that s taxing while sober. but the samsung manual specifically warning against viewing under the influence of alcohol, which some think would put a damper on the 3-d super bowl party. would that prevent from you buying one? it would definitely make you think about it. reporter: now, we spoke with s samsung, and they said they re just trying to provide viewers with as much information as possible. the doctor we talked to said the advice is straightforward. if watching 3-d tvs makes you sick, stop watching. but if you just plunk down $3,500 for a new tv, george, that could lead to a serious case of buyer s resource. i would think so. when we come back, we will attempt to make one of your fun dreams come true. find out in just a minute. so i gave it a try and wow. it works. now she has a springon her step. i m loving it, every morning. mmmm. back on track. activia with bifidus regularis helps regulate your digestive system would you recomend activia? i already #have. she reommends it. what are you waiting for? bye-bye. you be careful on your way home. -happy mother s day. -okay. bye-bye. [ female announcer ] this mother s day, give her something she can hold on to. a card. it s the biggest little thing you can do. the only garden feeder. that works with ready-to-use liquid miracle-gro. it s a revolutionary way to grow a great garden. liquafeed makes feeding .as easy as watering. no measuring, mixig or guessing. just attach, insert and feed. plants get the perfect balance. of water and nutrients. to grow twice as big. liquafeed from miracle-gro. and prevent weeds up to 3 months with miracle-gro garden weed preventer. the forecast is full of ifs. retirement these days, if i m too exposed to downturns. if i ll go through my avings too fast. to help you feel more confident consider putting a portion of your savings in a metlife variable annuity. when the market goes up, it gives your assets a potential to grow. while protecting you if the market goes down with a steady stream of income. let america s number one annuity provider help you stay on course with guarantees for the if in life. get answers about annuties at metlife.com. each and every morning, we feel like we live the dream. we really do. we do! everyone should have dreams. dream big and all of that. oftentimes, it just remains a dream. we just fantasize about it. we don t do anything to achieve it. that is going to change. this morning, we re going for it. we re going to not chase our dreams. we re going to live our dreams. we re going to help you do it too when you sign up for our living the dream contest. you got to turn in 100 words to us by april 25th. dream realistic, george, right. we all want world peace, but that s not going to help. personal. right, something that s personal. some reason why you want the dream to come true, right? you haval april 25th to register. 100 words or less. may 10th will be the three finalists. we ll let you weigh in on the three finalists to see if they will have their dream come true. we re weighing in on this, too, because we re going to do something, living our dream. we re going to give you clues to see if you can figure out what they are. we re all doing it. and may 27th is the day we announce the winner. i have a feeling we re going to be hearing annie lennox a lot the next few weeks. it took all of us out of our comfort zone. abcnews.com beginning tomorrow. and when we come back, on schooling, juju has a great story about something called radical on schooling. these parents say their kids don t need school discipline or any rules at all. what! what! it was my idea. well, little things like that mae a difference. for example. scott naturals. you get the high-quality performance you need. and just the right blend of recycled fibers. best of both worlds. i like that. yep, it s like having your cake and eating it too. exactly. it s green done right. do you know scott? scott naturals are green done right. but my allergies put me in a fog. so now, i m claritin clear! claritin works great on all my allergies like dust, mold, pollen, or pets without making me drowsy, cause i want to be alert around this big guy. live claritin clear. indoors and out. sweet n sour filled twizzlers. the twist you can t resist. because right now it s rollback time at walmart. which means thousands of rollbacks all over the store. it s another way to master your budget. and another great day for the savers. save money. live better. walmart. good morning. it s 7:56. after an hour and a half of sunshine, up to 41 degrees at the veterans elementary school. winds ging to 11 miles per hour. and a breeze this afternoon, but a lot 60 sunshine will take us into the afternoon hours. clear skies across the region. northerly flow will take in some clouds across new england and slide them our way this afternoon. but overall, it s a nice day, at least as we start off and aim for the two-degree guaranteed high of 64. by mid-afternoon, clouds beginning to slide in across the sky and they make for an exthat chill as you ride home. tonight we clear back out, down to 42. tonight looks like we shift the winds and under a partly cloudy skies, a high of 68. let s check on the roads right now. thank you. heavy traffic on the topside of the beltway, 695 and hartford road is stop and go, mostly stop. 695 and fredrick moving smoothly though. slow traffic on the outer loop. and slow 695between 795 and will kins avenue. pikesville and 795 southbound just before 695, an accident. and an accident at st. john s lane. still dealing with an earlier disabled vehicle. the inner loop at the tops just prior to the key bridge. and disabled vehicle on the parkway at route 3 2 . a lookty drive times. 795 in the reds. 759 southbound about five minute ride. take a break and we ll be back to new york for more good morning america after this. do you know what s in your spread ? in land o lakes spreadable butter with canola oil, there are just three natural ingredients. delicious sweet cream, canola oil and salt. nothing hidden, nothing artificial. spread pure, natural goodness straight from the fridge. discover land o lakes spreadable butter with canola oil. land o lakes, where simple goodness begins. joy to joy to the world and we say good morning to all of you, this monday morning. we hope you had a terrific weekend. now, this is the story, we were talking a little bit at the end of last half hour. you can imagine a life without school? any school kids? we re talking with the parents. life without school? you can imagine never going to school? never having books? never having teachers, can you imagine life like that? all: no. see. it s called radical un-schooling. some people are imagining it right now. this is like no school, no discipline, no rules, no nothing. a lot of families are getting into it. the girl scouts are saying, we can t imagine that. we like school, we re girl scouts. also coming up, behind the scenes of dancing with the stars. you kind of feel like something is going on? some heat. yeah, some heat. chad and cheryl talking fob the first time about the ring. he gave her a ring. he s the man! he gave her a ring. i think so also, in the last half hour, we got vanessa williams here, cease going from ugly betty to broadway. and alyssa milano, she s got the show. good morning, everyone. we begin with the airspace over britain, france, germany and holland, all of which remains shut down today on day five of the travel chaos, resulting from that icelandic volcano. more than two-thirds of the flights in and out of europe are still canceled. the situation is now so desperate, england is sending warships to bring stranded travelers home. british airways say its and other airlines have lost so much money, they re asking the european union for help. and the volcano is spewing less ash, but we re not out of the woods yet. our neal karlinsky is in iceland this morning. good morning, neal. reporter: juju, good morning. the wind, this is the wind taking all of that ash across europe right now. the volcano just behind me, and the ash is blowing due south, over the lower flanks and out over the coast of iceland. while this eruption could go on for a year, the dangerous part, the part causing all the trouble, could stop within the next couple of days. and that is also extremely good news from the people who live here who have been taking a pounding from all of the ash coming down on the small communities and farmlands to the south. they re beginning to dig out of some of the ash and hope they re not buried in yet more. there is yet a nearby monster called kutla, that could be the next to go, juju. neal karlinsky from the volcano zone. one airport that is hit hardest is charles de gaulle airport outside of paris. our miguel marquez is there. how are they coping? reporter: well, they re coping by staying out of the airport. for another day, every single departure is canceled. there s no word when they will come back on line. but there s a tiny bit of good news, a few handful of airlines have reopened to get travelers back to their home countries. more than a dozen test flights have been done so far. and another seven prepared by air france today. still, 20,000 flights across europe will be canceled because of the ash. european officials are meeting to look for a way to open up partially the airspace here. there s one estimate out there, but europe, the tourism industry here could suffer as much as $10 billion a week if this not taken care of, juju. thanks so much. in other news, the former mortgage giant countrywide which was bank of america is not subject to a criminal investigation. wall street journal is reporting the grand jury is hearing from witnesses. three former executives also face charges about allegedly lying to investors about how risky the public prime mortgages they held. there is proof that fewer americans have faith in their government. a new pol from the pew research center said four out of five americans don t trust the federal government and one in three believe the government is a major threat to their personal freedoms. that s the news at 8:05. time for the weather with heidi jones who is in for sam. good morning. good morning. we welcome red sox nation. it says, new york is awesome but red sox what? rule. that might be debatable here, boys. big day in boston. one of my favorite days as the world s oldest, most prestigious race, the boston marathon. the stretching, working it out. look at the numbers. this is the most ideals numbers you want. 40s to near 50 degrees. it s going to be a stiff window out of the northwest. rain coming in in the pacific northwest and just scatt and apparently are when you re from new hampshire, you don t need a jacket. are you cold, casey? yes. let s go back inside to george. that is a nice hug, heidi. this is what we ve been talking about all morning. we ve heard of home schooling, but what about unschooling? it s a growing new movement that permits students to do whatever they want during the day, instead of going to school. i admit, i think it sounds crazy. but juju reported the story and you did find people who think this is a powerful way to help kids learn. absolutely. it feels like playing hooky, the premise is let a child follow his or her own passions and the learning will come from the doing. but most educators say there s a huge gap between the ewe taupe n i ian ideal and reality. reporter: imagine a world without school. for bigger kids, it s a reality, they re at home not being home schooled. they re being unschooled. we re talking about no textbooks, no tests no formal education at all. living your life as if the school system didn t exist. reporter: they ll never get x plus y equals z? no, if they need formal algebra understanding, then they will find that information. reporter: kidding doing whatever they want. they might watch television, they might play games on the computers. might read. reporter: i know my kids if they have a choice between watching tv and reading the key there is you got to trust your kids to find their own interests. reporter: but can we? really? this to me is putting way too much power in the hands of the kids. something we know kids can find anxiety-producing. reporter: the beiglers are allowing their children to make their own rules. how can you parent without any rules? we find that we don t need a whole lot of rules. reporter: your daughter stays up all night. yeah. reporter: isn t that counterproductive? no, she s getting done what she wants to get done. reporter: though it varies from state to state, it s perfectly legal in massachusetts. they just have to report once a year to the local skul. school. discovery health chronicled the life of one young unschooled family. today, we re going to the local farm. how much money did you bring? $1.10. at amazing when you broaden the scope. there is no hierarchy in our house. there s no punishment. no judgment, no discipline. they just get to what they need for breakfast. you re going to have a doughnut? are you going to brush your teeth? heidi was the last one to go for us as far as being relaxed in the parenting style. reporter: we wonder what happens. the teenagers had been unschooled for six year s. when was the last grade you went to school? first grade. reporter: do you ever miss or regret not being in a normal school? i don t regret it, but sometimes i wonder what my life would be if i continued going to school. i never was really into some of the stuff that i had to do in the school. reporter: but you were 7. what do you know? in pe, you learn volleyball and basketball and football. have you explored any sport? no, they don t have an interest of mine. reporter: that s what school is about, to be exposed to all of these things that maybe you would like one of them. you would be, what, a junior in high school? i really don t know. reporter: do you feel prepared for college? do you feel like you re prepared academically? no, not really. i haven t done traditional look at a textbook and learn about such and such. if i wanted to go to college, i d pick up a textbook and i would learn. reporter: isn t the job of the parent to teach the child to do things that they don t want to do? they will do what they need to do whether or not they enjoy it because they see the purpose in it. reporter: do you ever worry, though, about raising your kids so far out of the mainstream that they will be handicapped in some way? the way they learn, you know, growing up is different than what most other people do. but in all other aspects, they re living in the mainstream. they have experiences and knowledge that other people don t. now, the reaction to this has been intense. and everyone keeps asking, is this legal? well, unschoolers typically register as home schoolers. they have major here that each state handles it differently. others such as colorado require testing or evaluation every other year. and parents check in with curriculum. basically, they on their own. do you have any sense of how many families are actually trying this? it s a growing number, 10% to 20% of home schoolers. it s a small faction. it s a growing movement online. a lot of families are opting out of the bullying and sort of the competitiveness of public schools. but the truth is, how do you give children choices unless you expose them to things that they don t necessarily know that they want to do. a lot of educators are doubtful that the curriculum can be sustained. weigh in on our message board at abcnews.com. elliott and harper, you re not allowed to weigh in. and when we come back, the dancing with the stars, where is all of that on-screen chemistry coming from? do, do, do it together do, do it together it s all right, it s all right do, do it together do, do it together it s all right, it s all right it s all ri-i-i-ght [ female announcer ] why not bring the whole family together? visit royalcaribbean.com today. i have missed you. pollen in the air kept hunter cooped up itching his eyes and sneezing. but now i found zyrtec®. it s #1 allergist recommended. with children s zyrtec® he can get 24-hour allergy relief indoors and outdoors. now he can run wild. with the rest of the pack. with children s zyrtec®, he can love the air®. and now try children s zyrtec® perfect measure®. a premeasured spoon. just twist squeeze and go™. a premeasured spoon. your frizz revolution stars now. new frizz-ease smooth start. the only shampoo and conditioner with frizz mending complex. transforms frizz by repairing it. to restore hair s natural defense gainst frizz. for 100% flawless, frizz-free style frizz-ease smooth start. yeah, we re still buzzing about unschooling, too. really? seriously? go to our website and let us know what you think about that. in the meantime, let s go inside dancing with the stars and take a look at the chemistry on and off the dance floor. who s got it, who doesn t. and does it ever get personal? or is it more for the judges? no one knows better than our own cameron mathison who is live this morning in los angeles. do tell, cameron. i don t know about that, robin. what i do know, i talked to three couples, nicole and derrick, maks and sharon and cheryl and chad. after looking to their body language, listening to their comments, you be the judge. reporter: when dancing with the stars producers choose who to pair up, the decision is based not on dancing experience, but on height and potential chemistry. having chemistry is very important. when we dance, it s not just dance moves, it s a connection. chemistry to me isn t just necessarily romance or love. it s something that you see in each other. you just build it slowly through the weeks. i know derrick and i, ke weren t stand each other because we re so close. it s tough. it s all right. it s a hard job, dancing with me every day. i think so maks and i do have the best chemistry on the show. one minute it s like this, another is, i love you. another is, i quit. reporter: erin and maks have danced around published rumors that they might be romantically involved. they re at least good friends it seems. i was sad last night when we didn t go to dinner. it was weird. really? why didn t you tell me anything? well, because i feel like you re over me. really? yeah. reporter: how important is chemistry on dancing with the stars ? it s what s going to make it or break it for you. i think chemistry you need to have it in order for people to believe in what you do. you can see it right through the television screen. why are you looking at me like that, cameron? no you hear actors say that. sometimes, people say, oh, my god, these two are in love but they re trained actors. but a professional dancer, someone who is not trained. all of my previous competitive dance partners, i couldn t be competitive with anyone that i didn t have chemistry with. so you re saying you have chemistry with everybodiy. everybody. what kind of chemistry is this, we re nothing like your past partners. keep going. it we re totally different than no, we re not. we re not? huh-uh. okay. we re no different than anybody else. i have different types of chemistry with people. oh, there are different types of chemistry now. right. chemistry doesn t mean that we re together. we re not boyfriend and girlfriend. huh? does chad know that? actually, i do love her. he gave me this ring. if there s no chemistry off camera, then why do you want to keep the ring on? it s his way of showing his appreciation and it s my way of showing my appreciation by keeping it on the finger. i can t wait to see what he s going to give me. to my understand, he bought a ring for her teacher, teaching the new style of dancing. for me, i m waiting for my gift. the way i look at it, i m just a big shining light that i want to bring to derek s life every day. and i m just waiting for that i m a thank you. i like a princess cut. i ll get you starbursts. that will have to do. nicole also makes a good point that besides the chemistry between a dancing couple, there s also the chemistry between them and you, the viewer, and sometimes, it s that chemistry that can keep the celebrity, even if they re not the best dancer on the show. robin. cameron, come on now, you know some things. being on a show. you have a gorgeous wife. you re so happy at home and all of those things. what are we seeing really on camera? hey, you know, i go to work like you say every day on all my children. i have a new love interest like every other month. i have to make people at home believe that i m madly in love with these people. for me, it s all an act. they spend a lot of time together. some of these couples are single. they re playing it up, aren t they? yeah, they are. all right, cameron, thanks so much. it just so happens that chemistry will be tested on abc s dancing with the stars tonight at 8:00, 7:00 central. two scoops!™ of raisins in some oxes. t you know what will really ge us in the spirit? 99 boxes of raisin bran crunch if you re nice to me i ll share some with you , you take one down ( and pass it around ) 98 boxes of raisin bran crunch , three tasty ingredients, one great combination. raisin bran crunch! from kellogg! i m a free runner. .national champion gymnast. .martial artist. and a stuntwoman. if you want to be incredible, ! eat incredible. announcer: eggs. incredible energyfor body and mind. 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your secret is safe with me. hello. new bush s black bean fiesta. and try new texas ranchero, along with our other grillin beans flavors. good morning. 8:25. greets us this morning. sunshine, 48 degrees. wins starting to gust, 14 miles per hour. we will have a breeze today that battles the sunshine and holds us below normal. 46 in easton. baltimore, 44. that s up ten degrees from the near freezing mark in pennsylvania. the wind out of the north and with clear skies this morning, watching clouds develop across the catskills in new york and dealing with a band of clouds trying to move in in the afternoon. and the afternoon clouds will halt progress at 64 for the two- degree guarantee. we clear out tonight and settle down to about 42 degrees. tomorrow, we should see an improvement up to about 68 under a partly cloudy sky. thank you. it is monday. there is heavy traffic on the beltway, especially the topside. 695 and hartford road, traffic stopped on the outer loop. on the inner loop, traffic flowing freely. if you take a look at the city cameras, you can see that the northern parkway, heading into the city, also heavy traffic. not expected around this time of the day. the maps quickly, 795southbound just before 695 as traffic jammed and a disabled vehicle on 83 northbound. that vehicle is on the shoulder. and also look out for a disabled vehicle on the parkway northbound at route 32. and an accident involving a pedestrian at bell branch road. watch out for lane blockages in the area. 95 southbound white marsh boulevard to 695, eight minute ride. 83 southbound, to 795, seven minute ride. good monday morning. a frost university student was shot can killed over the weekend. police say there are two victim, a 21-year-old and a 20- year-old of washington, d.c. they got into a fight with a 21- year-old at his off-campus residents. police say hall pulled out a shotgun, fired two rounds, hitting both victims in the stomach area, killing one. investigators say the three men knew each other. police found the gun plus rounds of shotgun shells and other evidence. hall is being held without bail and facing multiple charges. a 2-year-old is dead this morning and her father has been arrested in the death. police a the 2-year-old was rushed to the hospital on saturday after her father told police he found her dead many the bath room on the floor. but during questioning, he told police that he beat the child with a belt to discipline her. at first, he was charged with child abuse, but an autopsy found additional injuries that lead to additional charges. the city is coming together to reclaim the streets. a large group including the mayor, county commission members, police chief and fire chief and people all over the city marched as they are determined to get back their streets. and in the simple step, the police commissioner is asking everyone to do whatever they can do, even when the cameras are off. a message from the councilwoman, step aside and do no harm. montgomery county police this morning are looking for clues inside a car of a popular middle school principle who was murdered. the principal was found dead inside of his home last thursday night. detectives found him shot to death in the upstairs bedroom. more on this later this morning. back to good morning america. now even on faded glory, which has been completely re-engineered for quality with soft, organic cotton. better fits. and lockstitch seams. and because everyone deserves clothes guaranteed for quality, we ve rolled back the price. faded glory. one of thousands of rollbacks at walmart. save money. live better. walmart. ladies night. vanessa williams with the all-star ticket on broadway. and alyssa milano heading the cast of a new tv comedy.way. we talked to both of them. look at them, they both liven up the big screen out there on times square. give us attitude, vanessa. we ll talk to both of them coming up, as we say good morning, america. on this monday morning. that will lighten up the crowd here as well. also, this morning, we ll go to the five questions now ask in a job interview. we went to the top recruiter in the country, tory johnson talked to them. first to the weather with heidi jones. we ve got a lot going on so we got to get right to the weather. a lot going on. i take a poll, this is fairly significant. show you of hands. who is red sox nation. where are my yankees at? what do you have to say to all of those red sox fans here? they ll never win the world series. we start out in the east. a little scattered shower. sunshine state, you ll get some later today. quiet in dallas after all the rain they did have. the big story, wet weather in the pacific northwest. here s the highs, good looking in the middle of the country. as that heat building all the way from minneapolis down to dallas. you ll get back to normal, just give it time. 75 in atlanta, five to six degrees below normal. northeast, gorgeous weather. timing out perfectly, happy birthday. how old are you today? 7 years fold. 7 years old. and you love kitties? yes. we all love kitties. happy birthday, march was a good month for new jobs, more than 162,000 new positions were added. tory johnson has coached job seekers on how to prepare for the top five jobs for interviewers. she s back. the interview says, do you have any questions, and there is one bad answer. that s right. you never want to say no. you always want to have questions prepared to ask. it shows a couple things that you are curious and interested in this particular position. it s not just that you re going for any job at any company, but you re really interested in this one. and i think it also allows you to get potentially critical intelligence about the opportunity, you would not have gotten, had you not chosen to be curious. so you want to ask questions. so it shows intelligence when you get intelligence. exactly. you talked to recruiters. we got their tips via skype. this is micky gordon. she s a talent manager at 7-eleven. why is this position vacant? very important to ask, why is this position vacant? i think it can offer you insight into this particular role and how it fits in with the company. so, for example, is this position vacant because it s newly created with growth within the company. is it a good sign because it was promoted from within. or is it vacant because there s high turnover. you don t want to zuv on day one that you re the eighth person in six months to sit in that seat. you want to ask that question in advance to try to get a question of how important this position is, where it fits in with the larger organization. this is real important information for a person looking for a job. the next question comes from pam webster at enterprise rent acar. we love it when candidates ask us to describe our company culture. another important one. company culture. what exactly is that? the values of that company. the atmosphere. the work styles and preferences. the environment that you re going to be working in. a really important question that you want to get a sense of what it s like to work there. they re sizing you up, what makes you tick, what ticks off. you re going to enjoy working at that particular place every single day. and i think a really good follow-up question to that is, if you could change one thing about the company, what would it be? or if you could change one thing about the culture, what would it be? it s a way to be curious. a woman told me a couple weeks ago, she asked that question, and the answer was, you know, i wish people were less intense. that it s a group that works past 8:00 at night. and i wish people would realize it s okay to go home. that s a real eye-opener and hopefully you d want to learn in advance before you start. is there any danger when you push too hard that people might think you re looking for gossip or a good time. i think it s the way you ask, if i were to say, hey, buddy, tell me what s wrong with this place. that s not going to go over very well. i think change and adaptability are really important in the workplace. i m asking you, if there was something that you could change, what might it be. the next one comes from rich from the staffing firm. our candidates wants to know what s the number one success. what manager isn t going to know what you re focused on success. you want to know how you re going to be measured, how your performance is going to be measured, especially because every organization evaluates people differently. i think anyone s going to be impressed to hear that question. and the one that i would always end with, i think it s really important to say, what are the next steps in the process? the last thing you want to do is leave the interview hanging are not knowing. am i expected to be interviewed with other people. is there any testing involved? when do you expect to be making a decision? if i don t hear from you, when should i follow up? is it ever okay after the interview to follow up with more questions? absolutely. absolutely. i think it s great to follow up with more questions if things come to mind. and certainly follow up with answers that you think you either perhaps didn t answer as well as you could or might want to add some addition. so always follow up. good stuff as always. you can get more tips from tory on our website at abcnews.com. now pay just $99.99 a month for verizon fios tv, internet and phone guaranteed for two years! it s an amazing offer that could save you hundreds of dollars. call now to lock in this guaranteed low price for two years. with 100% true fiber optics to your home, fios delivers the future and gives you more of what cable doesn t. the best channel lineup and more hd. america s top-rated internet. even facebook and twitter on your tv. enjoy a bigger, better entertainment experience. and the peace of mind that comes from knowing you ll pay the same low price year after year. call now and you ll also get a free dvr for 6 months. get it all for just $99.99 a month with a two-year agreement a price guaranteed for two years! don t wait. call 1-877-4fiostv. that s 1-877-4fiostv. this is beyond cable. call the verizon center for customers with disabilities this is fios. at 800-974-6006 tty/v. vanessa williams is back on broadway with a new musical that celebrates leyrilyricist. and he was nominated for a tony for one of his shows into the woods. she s in sondheim. people know who sondheim is, but people do have no idea get a chance to spend an evening listening to sondheim talk about his background, his teachers, his mentors but also seeing his life come to work. you get a chance to sing and dance. as you can see, we re doing bits of company which was one of his big shows as well. it s fascinating, it s like a documentary because you get a chance to hear his stories. with the interviews? right. and thenen you get song and dance. he keeps to himself. he s a shy guy? he s a shy guy. and he comes to rehearsal. we comes at least once a week. we get notes from s.s. we make sure we apply the notes from s.s. he s a creator. isn t it a little intimidating when you re at rehearsal and he s sitting there with a legal pad out? of course, it s intimidating. the beginning of act two a song that he wrote for sondheim & sondheim is called god. it s very tongue in cheek but it s hilarious. what s it like to be on broadway? we know you from tv, film. you ve done things so well. it comes back to the stage. and the timing couldn t be more perfect. and i literally finished the last episode wednesday. no! i know, it saddens me, too. we open this thursday and this week. so it couldn t be orchestrated better. and i signed up james who i had done as a director. and it s accommodating when you work back and forth. absolutely. there s nothing like a live audience, every night. being able to make it new and fresh. it s a grind. it s definitely worth it. and heidi, there s nothing like a live audience every morning. you there go. but you feed off of it, you absolutely do. yeah. ugly betty. uh-huh. okay. this season had really found its voice and the cast and everything. how difficult was it to say good-bye? oh, it was tough. i mean, when i saw the last episode, they didn t show all the cuts and tapes that we were bawling our eyes out. it was tough. it s almost like high school. your freshman year, your senior year. we did not want to leave. the last one, none of us wanted to leave the table. none of us wanted to finish the words. the ensemble was great. the direction was great. the writing. it was unique. i m going to start a petition. let s have a movie. that s right. ugly betty, the movie. i think that would be something else? absolutely. do you also sing in your church choir? i do. i do. the new york times followed me on a sunday, and i started out at 10:30 mass singing for easter. my daughter is in the children s choir. i m in the adult choir. i sang, jumped in my car and did a 2:00 matinee on broadway with sondheim & sondheim. how do you do it? you can t have an off night. you can t have an off night. it s the electricity. you have your voice, it s a muscle, an instrument, it has to be taken care of well. you got to be in shape. i love it. you do love it. and you look fantastic. thank you. you bring it every night. it s a limited run until july? mid-june. if they want tickets they can go to a web suit or come to studio 54. eight shows a week every night except monday. this is my day off. thank you for sharing your day off. continued blessings in all of do. for more on vanessa s musical, go to our website, we have watched alyssa milano grow up in the spot light ever since she was a kid stealing scenes in who s the boss? and she showed us one of the scariest things, the dating scene. good morning. last week, you were on jimmy kimmel. you go on jimmy kimmel and you send out a tweet this morning saying he s dreaming. i check this morning, i get nothing. i didn t know your tweet address. i ll have to do a post one after i get out of here. i will send you a tweet, absolutely. how did you get into twitter? because you re a big user now? you know, it was actually my mother suggested that i join twitter which was odd. she s teaching me about technology. so i joined. and i didn t really get it at first. you know, i followed a bunch of celebrities who just did a lot of self-promoting. and it was just like a weird concept to me. like who cares what i m doing? i fully grasped the power of twitter during the protests in iran. of course. and to be getting realtime updates from students and people that were personally affected, it was pretty amazing because there wasn t that filter of network news, you know, bringing you the news. it was realtime accounts. putting us out of a job? you found a way to do some good with 2 as well? yeah, i m an ambassador for unicef and for the global network. and i think the true power of twitter lies in the fact you that can have a platform to share ideas and information and empower bepeople to, you know, want to make effect change. and that s what i really enjoy about it because i think everyone innately wants to help or give back. but sometimes, people don t know how to do it. let s talk about the show romantically challenged, you play a divorcee getting back into the dating scene. i play the single mother of a 15-year-old recently divorced. in the first episode, found out that her husband is getting remarried. it s very hard for her. her friends, this is an ensemble comedy, they convince her to go out on her first, you know, post divorce date. she s terrified. she married the first guy she ever slept with. let s take a look. do you have any pictures of yours? yeah, of course i do. you know what, he s not very photogenic. wow. he s pretty mature for 7. that s not a picture of my son. that s a picture of my ex. it s your ex. hey, mom, sorry to barge in but my teacher wants to see you right now. definition of a date gone wrong. yeah, exactly. you know, i am so in love with this show because it really takes the angle of the humorous side of what everyone has to go through to find their happily ever after. i think everyone can relate to it in some form. and it comes on after dancing with the stars. yes. a very nice lead-in. would you ever do that show? you know what, if they did like an 80s dancing with the stars, i would do that because i ve got moves from the 80s. we actually know you have moves from the 80s. take a look at this, everyone, 1988. oh, yeah. toe raises. wow. yeah. the good old days aerobics, huh? the good, old days of aerobics. that was a time when they started cutting the funds for p.e. in schools. we did this workout video. it haunts me to this day. you know, you re career you ve kept going in this business for so long. we ve got a lot of viewer questions. they re all around the same thing. how did you stay so normal in the spotlight? you know, it s a hard business to grow up in, and i had the best circumstance which is a family that didn t care what i did, just as long as there was food on the table and we had dinner together. and i really think that having that stability saved me. i mean, i think a child can go through anything, just as long as they have parents behind them that support them. and remind them what s important in life. you know, i have a brother that s ten years younger than i am. and he never for a second missed the opportunity to tell me about my acne. and very normal, n syin sync, s grounded. very instilled in me that family, love, friendship it doesn t matter what you do in life, as long as you have those things, you re a success. congratulations. the show is called now pay just $99.99 a month for verizon fios tv, internet and phone guaranteed for two years! it s an amazing offer that could save you hundreds of dollars. call now to lock in this guaranteed low price for two years. with 100% true fiber optics to your home, fios delivers the future and gives you more of what cable doesn t. the best channel lineup and more hd. america s top-rated internet. even facebook and twitter on your tv. enjoy a bigger, better entertainment experience. and the peace of mind that comes from knowing you ll pay the same low price year after year. call now and you ll also get a free dvr for 6 months. get it all for just $99.99 a month with a two-year agreement a price guaranteed for two years! don t wait. call 1-877-4fiostv. that s 1-877-4fiostv. this is beyond cable. call the verizon center for customers with disabilities this is fios. at 800-974-6006 tty/v. about all the discounts boswe re offering. i ve got. i some catchphrases that llideas make these savings even more memorable. gecko: all right. gecko: good driver discounts. w that s the stuff.? boss: how bout this? gecko: .they re the bee s knees? boss: or this? gecko: sir, how bout just fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. boss: ha, yeah, good luck with that catching on! anncr: geico. fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance. since george won t do it, i m going to stand over here because george s family members are in from the west coast. hey, everyone. celebrating independence day, i m sure. all the family from portland, oregon, and california. yea. was that so bad? tomorrow on gma, we have a reunion of charlie s angels. sunshine doing its thing and trying warm us up here just before 9:00. 48degrees. but we have the wind out of the northwest at ability 11 miles per hour. and that will pick up as the day goes on. a storm in the north atlantic keeping the temperatures in check today. 44degrees. their winds pushing 16 miles per hour. and although we have ourselves that sunshine, we are looking up towards the north, a storm system that brings snow showers into you england and maybe the boston marathon today, clouds sliding down the coast and the possibility continues to slide into maryland by late afternoon. until then, mostly sunny day. clouds try to push in. we ll get to the two-degree guaranteed high of 6 4 . tonight, clear out, slide down to 42. and warmer day tomorrow as we get back up into the upper 6s. the complete forecast at 9:00. right now, a final check on traffic. thank you. we can t seem to shake the heavy traffic on the topside of the beltway, 695, hard ford road, an issue all morning long. take a look. 695 and liberty road looking good. we had earlier issues on the map quickly. we had a problem a disabled vehicle at hartford road ford road. and heavy volume causing jam- ups all morning long. and will kins, an early crash. and also a disabled vehicle on parkway northbound at 695. and police activity ionosol for spring road at 95. a look at the drive times this morning. good morning maryland coming up next.