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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

Off topic I know, but what's with the tonnes (nearly 70?) bullet points? It's like the author had a normal piece of text and semi-randomly decided where to split it into bullets, losing context and structure along the way. Some of the items are sequential, others are standalone. Some are paragraphs, others are tiny addendums to the previous point.

Cochrane sounds like a very unique character, but after the first few bullets I just wants to go and read his Wikipedia page.

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It's sadly becoming more and more common because too many people aren't used to reading stuff longer than a Tweet at a time. Put a regular paragraph of text in from of them and they will just close the browser tab and move on.

I mentioned in another comment, I enjoyed the structure and found it much easier to process. This is despite mostly reading long form articles and never having been a huge twitter user.

> all of the above is sourced from Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf by Donald Thomas

Thats pretty much what they did. I do sort of like the idea of sharing less-than-perfectly-polished writing. But it does make for an odd read.

FWIW, I found the layout entertaining.

I think it's a really nice example of form matching content: a very long list of roughly equally improbable events. No prose could ever express the sheer quantity of it all like that seemingly endless list of bullet points. I kind of expected the last bullet point to be "wrote and published his own own biography, few other sources remain"

Agreed, it kind of reads like an overly long and insanely impressive CV passed along in a blasé sort of way. It paints Cochrane as someone who was a lot more interested in doing things than convincing people what cool things he had done, which by the raw facts seems plausible haha.

+1 to that. tl;dr

This needs a whole series of novels. Oh wait. There already is one:

https://www.soundingsonline.com/features/the-real-jack-aubre...

So that's where both Stephenson and Disney got the first name of their concurrently written Jacks from (I assume that both Shaftoe and Sparrow were already public when BBC writers created Harkness who is basically the same character as the other two)

"Jack" - a great name for a pirate or sea captain.

"Morris", "Herman", "Nigel", "Cuthbert" - not so much.

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I always assumed that at least one of them was inspired by the Billy Joel song

Hah, I was thinking this sounded a lot like "Lucky Jack".

I remembered that O'Brian had drawn on a lot of captain's logs for the novels but still based a lot of him on a single captain, but I wasn't sure if this was the man until your comment.

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