I love autocomplete and the random paths it takes me down. When I was researching pirates, I found some excellent books on the subject, but I also – of course – used Google. I started to type in a perfectly reasonable question that autocomplete turned into Did pirates wear socks? Another I stumbled across recently was Can dragons blow out candles? The sort of thing that would never occur to me, and I love that there are people out there thinking about these important issues.
When I looked into Caribbean pirates’ footwear before writing the book, I found opinions are split. Some say they wore sandals and others say their feet remained bare. The sandals side argue that climbing the rigging in bare feet would have been very uncomfortable; the barefoot people argue that it would be safer to climb with bare feet.
Looking at various engravings of famous pirate captains from the time, they’re variously wearing shoes or boots, but there are often bare-footed pirates around them. And given that I have a bit of a horror of feet, studying them in engravings is not something I undertook lightly! I’m still not quite certain on pirates’ footwear. The one thing I am (almost) sure of is that pirates did not wear socks.
A Star to Sail By is released on 30th August and is now available for pre-order.
MM romance novels 