A Yarn by Smart Ken
Being landlocked from the ocean by a thousand miles in every direction, I never had the opportunity to experience the sea. During a period of travel I found myself near a rundown port in the city of
Darwin near the Timor Sea. This region of the world is full of pirates. During my childhood, I read Treasure Island and wondered what it would be like to be a pirate. In pursuit of my childhood fantasy, I started to hang around this dive of a pub near the docks in search of the modern day pirate with the hopes of joining his crew. After going to this pub for several weeks, I hadn't made any headway with the locals. They would ignore me at every turn. I would buy them drinks and try to get in on the conversation to no avail. I was desperate to get in on the high seas adventure of the pirate's life.

Finally, the captain of one of the boats came up to me and said, "Mate, I have seen you come here everyday and I would like to invite
you to a party."

"I'd love to come to your party," was my enthusiastic response.

"There'll be lots of drinking," he said.

"No problem Captain, I can hold my own," I responded.

"There'll most likely be some fightin'," the captain warned me.

"I have been in a few bar room brawls, no worries there either mate," I said.

"And there will be plenty of sex," he informed me.

I was absolutely
thrilled with this prospect and I had one question to ask the captain. "How many people are going to be at this party?"

"Just myself," came the response.


P.S. Here's a scrimshaw of Smart Ken by Flarq:

P.P.S. Send in a pirate-related yarn 500 words long or shorter to [email protected] and if it gets posted, Flarq'll do you too.

P.P.S. There's more scrimshaws and other useful pirate info at: PiratesOfPensacola.com.

If You Know How to Write (or know someone who does), You Could Get Scrimshawed
As you know, there's a lot of downtime between pirate gigs, and unless they're firing at you, it even gets dull when you're chasing down brigs. That's why the thing we need most on this site is entertainment. So if you've got a decent pirate-related yarn, experience, joke or whatever, write it down (in 500 words or less, as these will be read by your fellow pirates, not literature scholars) and e-mail it the heck in to: [email protected]. If you don't know how to write, find someone who can and threaten to stab them if they don't do it for you. Me and my friends'll pick the best ones and post them. And if yours is chosen, Flarq the harpooner will do your scrimshaw from a photo of yourself you send in.

Sample Flarqs:

* Flarq has a thing for kitchen implements (you want to call him a nancy boy, be my guest, just make sure you're wearing underwear you wouldn`t mind being found dead in). So if you want something from your kitchen scrimshawed, you can get that as a prize too.

P.S. See more scrimshaws, including one that's animated, at the PiratesOfPensacola.com.

Nelson Cooke: Expert Historyologist
Flarq's smoking new vixenfriend Jill has got the hots for me. (Fortunately Flarq can't read or I'd be harpooned through the face for writing that.) How do I know? For one thing, this sort of thing happens to me a lot. Also, she was saying she's interested in pirate history. Unfortunately, all I know about the old days is they used to not have guns. But I do know Keith, the writer working on Pirates of Pensacola, and one of the great things about Keith is he's afraid of getting stabbed. He put a little write-up together for me lickety-split. Mates, give it a read-through, will you? I need to know if Capt. Computer made any mistakes before I call Jill:



Piracy is as old as the art of transportation by water. The first Phoenician boatmen feared pirates even more than they did resentful sea gods, vicious sea monsters, and spiteful giant sea rocks who ganged up to crush ships--a common nemesis, if Phoenician maritime annals are to be believed.

It was not until the Sixteenth Century, and the onset of transatlantic imperialism, that piracy entered the realm of common dinnertime topic. "Imperialism," in that day, meant countless Spanish galleons returning home along the "Spanish Main" listing from tons of gold stolen (or, according to some Spanish sources, received as part of fair business transactions) from the Aztecs and Incas.

The growing number of sailors in turn stealing the stolen gold became a problem for all of the Colonial Empires. According to British Royal Navy, in 1563, there were four hundred such pirates known to be sailing the Four Seas, and the number was increasing daily. In naval service, as well as on merchant ships, pay was poor and rations worse. The menu consisted solely of cold hardtack biscuits accompanied by salt beef, salt pork or salt fish--called "Hairy Willy." But it was the puny ration of grog (rum diluted with water to stretch supplies) that irked the men most of all, and ranked among their chief motivations for going "on the account" (pirate for "pirating"). Ironically, many of these men had enlisted in the Navy in hope that the very same grog limit, as well as the job's regular hours and strenuous exercise, might provide an asylum for their alcoholism.

Then there were the conditions. Hard work was the least of it. On overcrowded man o' wars--frequently crewed by five hundred--space was so limited that a man could scarcely move without brushing against another. Something as simple as how a man gargled could, over time, so grate on a shipmate's nerves that no one would be shocked if the gargler "fell overboard" on a dark night, never to be found. On the infrequent occasions the men were given the respite of sleep, they had to do so in hammocks eighteen inches wide, to a lullaby of the snoring of dozens of others who hadn't bathed in months and were crammed side to side and above and below one another. On hot nights, the hammocks proved veritable frying pans. On cold, the men longed for the hot.

Many more sailors suffered--though they likely wouldn't have put it as such--psychologically. The frequent summons of "All hands witness punishment ahoy!" sent a shudder through all but the stoutest of hearts. Incessant floggings made many sailors feel like beasts, rather than men. And the long lists of rules made the sailors who still felt like men feel like children. Most man o' war captains forbade the sordid game of draughts (checkers).

A scrimshaw by Flarq of a harsh man o' war captain

As consequence of all this, many a cold nasty night was warmed by tales of pirate voyages to places where the weather was fair, the water easy and the lasses both fair and easy. Furthermore, there was tobacco, grub aplenty, and rivers of grog, and the only time quarters were cramped was because they were stacked starboard to larboard with gold doubloons.

Others, for whom grub and lasses held less appeal, found themselves persuaded to go on the account simply by the increasing occupational hazard of being an honest sailorman. For instance, between 1569 and 1616, nearly five hundred British ships were captured by the Barbary pirates, who cut the throats of those captives deemed not worth the trouble of feeding and transporting to the slave market. It is due to such practices, some historians theorize, that the term "barbarian" came to mean more than simply a native of Barbary...



I'm going to cut off the story here.* I just got some rum-necessitating news: Ricardo Verman, former Tortolan Navy admiral, has escaped from jail and is on his way to try and kill me. He's pissed that, once, I double-crossed him. Yeah, it led to his getting captured and locked up for life. But to kill a bloke for that? Clearly he needs some meds.

*Keith posted the rest of it at http://piratesofpensacola.com/id6.html

Crappy Title, Sorry
My name's Nelson Cooke and I'm a pirate--when I can get the work. This blog's intended to be a resource for today's pirating needs. When I've got some more time, I'll be posting up stuff like specials at brothels, reports of plump brigs weighing anchor, and yarns to keep us entertained during those long chases (the movies've never gotten right the tedium of a fourteen-hour pursuit--am I on the money there or what, shipmates?).

Before I sign off today, I've got to apologize for one thing: the use of "arg" in the title. The publishing company who put up this site needs to pander to all the folks who think that we say--or that any pirate in all of history ever said--"arg." Of course you and me know that this happens only in tourist places where the staff wears plastic hooks over good hands and patches over working eyes and the customers think it's funny only because they've had lots of frozen fruity drinks or light beer in bottles that've had the labels replaced with fake old parchments that say GROG. Maybe we can educate the poor swabs. And if that doesn't work, we can always stab them.


P.S. Working for me I've got a West Indian harpooner named Flarq who does scrimshaws. Below's one of me. I've got to say, my cheekbones are a little higher in real life, and my eyes are way sexier, but when you're scrimshawist is the size of a silo like Flarq is and has a harpoon with him at all times, you simply tell him "Great job!"

P.P.S.: For more scrimshaw and other stuff, check out this site's homepage, http://piratesofpensacola.com.