1718
Charleston Bar blockade
The setting
The bar off Charles Town, Province of South Carolina (approx. 32.72 N, 79.88 W - approximate to the engagement area, sufficient for the map layer, not for the site)
terrain_class `bar`. Shoal bar across the approach to a port, crossed by every hull entering or leaving. draft_gate = 1: the province had no hull that could contest the anchorage. scale_type `nominal` - bar and draft_gate are categories, never indices; refuse any read path that sums or rates them.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideProvince of South Carolina (Gov. Robert Johnson)
Recorded resultdefeat
Thatch's squadron victory; the province defeated. No shots exchanged - none are recorded. A port was reduced and a ransom extracted without an exchange of fire.
How the atlas explains it
Reputation did the work of the broadside. The flag was accepted as evidence that resistance was fatal and surrender was not, so the cost per prize collapsed to nothing - no powder, no casualties, no damage to the hulls. The pattern has a stated expiry: it prices in a belief, and it decays the moment someone resists and survives, or surrenders and hangs anyway. That is precisely what the post-1718 vice-admiralty trials manufactured. The suppression campaign attacked the reputation, not the ships.
What followed
Admitted deliberately as a zero-fire engagement. If the atlas only admits engagements where guns fired, it systematically undercounts the era's most effective operation type - and the omission is not random, it deletes exactly the cases where reputation substituted for force. Read with the Ouidah striking of January 1722 (eleven ships struck to Roberts without a fight) as the two named instances of reputation-as-force-substitute; the prereg registration `reputation_substitution` requires at least five cases each side of the 1718 boundary before any comparison, and is recorded as 'open, below threshold'.