Indigenous Ability

How’s this for a full life? ·         Hugh Glass, if you saw the film The Revenant , or read the book by Michael Punke or were already familiar with this mountain man who survived a tussle with a bear to crawl an injured 300 miles through hostile territory and still put more years in front of him. ·         Pre-Legendary Bear Attack he… ·         Was a sailor who was captured by Jean the “Gentleman Pirate of Barataria” Lafitte and forced to become a pirate for a spell. ·         He and a shipmate eventually jumped ship off the coast of Texas and swam to shore. ·         End of the adventure? Not quite. ·         The two ex-pirates were then captured by the Pawnee. They endured well enough to be adopted by the tribe where Glass accrued much of his survival...

Let’s talk buccaneers for a paragraph or few and then settle into a mighty pragmatic lesson that these spoilers of the seas took for granted and that many of we, the 21 st Century coddled crew, a bit less so. Hand-to-hand fights were quite common in the days of sailing piracy, in fact we get our phrase “hand-to-hand combat” from this very fact. A crewman on a sailing vessel was and is a “Hand” and thusly hand-to-hand combat in piratical parlance is just that, a one-on-one affair between marauder and mauradee. Contrary to cinematic depictions of rival ships holing one another willy-nilly with cannon shot, the preferred tactic was to fire upon masts and other standing rigging and leaving as much of the ship intact as possible. Afterall, a sunk ship cannot be looted, a sunk ship cannot be taken over as additional transportation booty. No, the crux, more often than not, was to use sailing prowess and well-placed shot to make boarding feasible. With boarding an ulti...

In today’s sermon we shall ramble through WWI nautical ingeniousness, Old West architecture, Major League Baseball fashion, and, if we’ve done the job right, wind up with an observation or two regarding the cost-to-benefit analysis of being a bad-ass or simply “ dressing like a bad-ass.” Let’s start with our WWI history. Q-Ships. What exactly is/was a Q-Ship? Let me back up a little, let’s discuss why Q-Ships were conjured in the first place. U-Boats. We all know what these are. The U-Boat, or “ Unterseeboot ” [you guessed it, “undersea boat”] was a major contribution to Germany’s success at sea. These roving bands of submarines sank exhaustive tons of ships, cargo, let alone the number of lives lost. Many were lost on both sides, as submarine duty is particularly hazardous-even today, all the more so in the early days of the technology. U-Boats stalked shipping lanes, looking for ship profiles that read as easy prey and then they struck. ...

[From the introduction to Boxing Like the Champs, Round Two , but this applies to all the historical wok we do around here. From boxing, to old school wrestling, to rough ‘n’ tumble we must dig hard to find the real gold.  The book will be released in the Fall of this year. See our other products for more of this approach to training.] You’ve likely heard this quote before…   “ Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it .” It was uttered by the Spanish philosopher George Santayana. In context, he issued it as a warning to those who seek solutions on the world stage, urging them to have a bit of long-view perspective before they plunge on merrily and or madly with this or that “save the world” scheme. In that context, Mr. Santayana was likely sage. But…on this smaller stage of a canvas covered ring, bordered by ropes and turnbuckles it is a bit of untruth. Oh, but only if it were true for we lovers of fistic mayhem. ...

Let’s tell a few tales from the fighting days of sail. Our tales will come a bit later than the usual Master & Commander Napoleonic battles and also a wee bit later than the buccaneer days in the Caribbean. These two periods of nautical mayhem overlapped to some degree and have much to contribute to our modern understanding of war at sea. Another day. We want to jump forward in our timeline just a bit and have a look at some aspects of violence aboard sailing vessels from approximately 1800 on into the 1920s when we see the last of the windjammers still plying their trade on the seven seas. We will not be speaking of military vessels or pirate ships. One expects to find tips and tactics in matters of violence in these two cases. Instead we will focus on private ships of commerce. Vessels that were charged to move cargo from destination A to destination B as quickly and efficiently as possible. We want to have a look at the bit of melee wisdom that spawned o...