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JAMES FERGUSON
THE LONGEST LIST OF THE LONGEST
STUFF AT THE LONGEST DOMAIN NAME AT LONG LAST
Who was James Ferguson?
Curiously, James Ferguson was a Scottish man of science
who was involved in piracy. Ferguson was born in Paisley, Scotland, although a
few dates come into play when it comes to the life of this surgeon-pirate.
All the facts about Ferguson’s early life are a
mystery and as an active pirate, just sparse reference has been found, including
an artifact recovered from a shipwreck resembling an old syringe that might have
belonged to James Ferguson.
Ferguson worked as a surgeon aboard the ship
"Whydah" commanded by Captain Samuel Bellamy, an English pirate best known as
"Black Sam" or "Black Bellamy". Dr. Ferguson was not actively involved in piracy
and he never captured any booty, but curing sick or wounded pirates with the
limited medical resources available in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Having Ferguson aboard the Whydah was
"advantageous" due to the lack of antibiotics because he simply cut parts of
their bodies off, cauterizing the wound with a red hot ax while patients were
awake, procedure that was always "better" than just to let them die.
As other people involved with pirates were
considered pirates themselves so Dr. Ferguson was usually referred as to just
another pirate that deserved to be hanged, especially because Captain Bellamy
was one of the most successful pirates in the West Indies.
As other Scottish, Dr. Ferguson disliked George I,
who became King of Great Britain in 1714. George I was the first Hanoverian King
(a royal dynasty from Hannover, Germany) and founder of the British House of
Hanover. The Hanoverians were the ruling dynasty for the next 200 years an even
under greater German influence when Queen Victoria married her cousin Prince
Albert of the House of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha in the 19th century.
The Scottish tried to conjure the power of Germans in Great Britain into joining
to their English allies in an effort to restore the exiled Royal House of
Stewart starting up a rebellion in 1715, in which the name of the pirate Dr.
James Ferguson was recorded.
The revolt failed and Ferguson escaped punishment.
He returned to the sea aboard the "Whydah", where he drowned with all the crew
after the ship sank during a storm off Cape Cod in 1717, facts known through the
words of Thomas Davis, one of the two only pirates that survived the shipwreck.
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