Pirates - the truth?

These are stereotypes of pirates.

What were pirates really like in the 18th century Atlantic?

It is difficult to know because most of the records we have were written by people in government, army and navy officers or victims of pirates.

This evidence can be one-sided (biased)

One way to find out is through marine archaeology: looking at the wrecked ships at the bottom of the sea. In the 1980s an explorer found the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship that sank off Cape Cod in the USA.

We now know a lot about the pirate captain, Black Sam Bellamy, and his crew.

The Whydah is telling us - bit by bit - what pirate life was like.

LINKS:

All about the Whydah.

The crew.

The exploration.

Another shipwreck - this time a treasure ship.
Pirates of the Whydah

YOUR TASK

You have been commissioned by the editor of a magazine to write an article about the pirate ship Whydah.
The article should be fun, interesting to read and easy to understand. It should contain ideas to make the reader think.
Use the links above to find information about the ship, the crew and how experts have found out about them.
Your article can be handwritten or wordprocessed using Word. It should have some illustrations.

It should cover:

• The story of the ship
• The lives of the crew members
• How it was discovered
• What was found on the ship
• What we learn from the Whydah about the real world of pirates.

You can also try some pirate adventures.

Treachery on the Titanic

For links to the game click here.

FLOs

For a FLO on witch trials click here.


For a FLO on the Civil Wars click here.

A World Turned Upside Down

FLO

For details of the task go to the Year 8 wikispace and open the file called Civil War Mysteries.

Some useful links:

Timelines TV on the Civil War - watch the video
Cromwell - watch the video

Channel 4

The English Civil Wars

Cultures in Contact

In 1500 Britain was a small country on the edge of Europe just recovering from over a hundred years of war.
In other parts of the world there were much bigger, richer empires:

The Aztecs in Central America
The Ming in China
Benin, Mali and Songhay in West Africa
The Incas in South America
The Mughals in India

400 years later in 1900 Britain was the richest, most powerful country in the world.
All the above empires had fallen.
Their were now controlled by Europeans.
Britain was rich: Asia, Africa and Latin America had become much poorer.

How and why did this happen?
Create a presentation with images and your own words with your answer to this.
There are many different factors. See if you can make links between them.

Use the worksheet you did yesterday to help you.
You can also ‘google’ key words like slave trade, British Empire, Kingdom of Benin, opium wars, Captain Cook, Scramble for Africa etc etc.

These pages take you some other links:
Slave trade (scroll right down for the links)
British Empire

British Museum

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

For a new FLO click here.

15th century worlds

For Ming China go here.

For the Aztecs go here.

For a FLO go here.