Yay Pirates!

Due to various High Street purveyors of entertainment failing to keep up with the century of the Fruitbat, I have been able to expand my DVD collection considerably over the past few months. This means I have been viewing a variety of anti-piracy adverts lately, from the scary-techno-music "You wouldn't steal a car" one (which apparently got sued for using the music without permission - oh the irony), to the one which shows a sterotypical "pirate" and a load of VHS tapes (seriously! On a DVD!), whilst telling me that pirates are terrorists (which is quite insulting to famous pirates like Jeanne de Clisson who were cruicial to the English war effort at the time).

This really pisses me off. I don't pirate films or music, and I never have (apart from one time I was forced to borrow a [redacted] CD of don't-ask-don't-tell origin when trying to rebuild my computer, and [redacted] told me that the genuine software which I had paid for and legally owned was "pirated" and refused to install it). So why, as the person who has paid for the goods, am I forced to watch a load of shit accusing me of being a thief, but if I had pirated the goods, I'd probably not? Going to the cinema is just as bad - I pay for my ticket, and have to watch some smarmy sleb-I-don't-recognise simpering at me to say "thank you for not being a criminal".

My plan is simple. When I win the lottery, I am going to open a clothes store in Hollywood, or wherever the ad-executives who dream up these campaigns shop. Security guards will greet potential customers on the door with "Good morning DON'T!STEAL!SHIT!" Furthermore, each item of clothing will only be allowed to be worn in one way. Bought a jumper? You're only allowed to wear it normally. If you want to tie it around your waist, you will have to come back to the store and buy the "tying-around-the-waist" licence. This blouse can only be worn with jeans unless you purchase the "Licence to Skirt".

This would probably cheer me up.

Pyrate, pyrate, burning bright

Is it any wonder some memories are a bit hazy?

 

During the summer, we attended a party at the house of my good friends who are generally known as the Weasels, for reasons too tedious to go into here.¹ Parties at their house invariably involve fire, mediaeval weaponry, and a muchness of alcohol. During the evening, someone (I can’t for the life of me remember whom) strongly recommended that I read the Tim Powers book On Stranger Tides, upon which the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie had been loosely (very loosely!) based.

The next day, when the hangover had dissipated, the burns soothed, and the photos of Mr Weasel with his beard aflame duly uploaded and laughed at, I vaguely remembered this book’s title and downloaded the sample to my Kindle. Later that summer, sitting on a dhow in the Mozambique Channel, I began reading.

Now, it may be that there are better places to read a book about pirates and voodoo than on tropical beaches and boat-decks above coral reefs whilst drinking copious quantities of rum, but personally I can’t come up with a better one. Certainly, I consider this to be the best book I read in 2011, and have since re-read it in dreary old Blighty, and still hold this opinion. It has all the good bits of the POTC films without any of the naff bits. Or mermaids. There’s a wonderful blending of the natural with the supernatural, and the fact with the fiction. Many of the characters genuinely existed, and, on searching Wikipedia at a later date like the sad little nerd I am, I realised that several of the events referenced in the novel actually happened (although probably without the supernatural voodoo explanation offered by the author).

Whilst doing my internetty-research, I kept finding reference to A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, so eventually I tracked down an electronic copy here. It is very clear that Mr Powers used it heavily as his source material for the above novel, and it’s fascinating reading. Admittedly, the veracity is dubious – the author’s true identity unknown and writing for a public who loved sensation more than truth, but there are certainly many facts in there. What I found most intriguing was that Madagascar was on the Pirate Round, and that many of Captain Every/Avery's associates had settled there and still have descendants alive on the island today. Even those pirates who didn't settle would frequently visit the island in order to replenish stocks and careen their vessels.

Having learnt this, I resolved to read Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe is popularly thought to have been the author of A General History of the Pyrates, although nothing has ever been proven), and The Diary of Robert Drury - an account (also believed to have been written by Defoe) of a shipwrecked sailor who washed up on the shores of Madagascar, and was kept as a slave for ten years, before finally escaping and returning to England. The latter was long thought to be a complete fiction, based on the fantastical nature of the tale, until recently the wreck of the ship was discovered and archaeological evidence shown to prove that there was indeed a Malagasy settlement exactly as described in the tale.

Yarr!

Then I accidentally discovered the Game of Thrones novels and have become distracted by trashy Swords-and-Sorcery. But mostly swords. But I’ll let you know how the pirates got on when I get back to my educational and improving reading. 

1 I often think that there ought to be a less patriarchal collective noun for their household, since the “Weasel” derives from Iain’s nickname, and might be thought to exclude Bryony who is a person in her own right and not at all a possession of Iain’s. But nicknames are an organic thing, and “Weasels” seems to have stuck.