The Quieter Side of Piracy

Piracy, one usually thinks, is a matter of buckled swashes and grappling hooks and cannonballs, with smoke and shouting and the acrid carbon sting of powder-smoke wreathing everything in merry ribbons of grievous bodily damage. And it is that, not going to pretend otherwise.

But sometimes, piracy gets to be a little less murdery than that.

Well I suppose at that point it’s more “plunder” than “piracy,” but po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, really. Certainly the crew never minds not having to check their gizzards for cold steel.

What, did you think my frankly hedonistic lifestyle was bankrolled entirely by my legitimate business endeavors? Ask any United States Senator: such a course is all but a guarantee of poverty and unremarkability. Listen, there are no good guys, OK? I haven’t claimed to be one for what may be centuries now, it’s easy to lose track of time when all of it is your playground.

To return to the subject with an example: not long hence, my old friend Jack Daring sent me word of a massive haul too large for his own sleek vessel alone. My own pirate ship is a tall galleon named the Hawk. I had it whitewashed rather than tarred, and more than once just the sight of so unmistakable a vessel has led to its holds being filled with tribute and sea-tax.

Jack, once an archaeologist, had discovered the ruins of a temple buried deep underground in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Since the gendarmes of the French colony which had sprouted up around it would likely just burn all of it to cinders–it not being godly and all, or rather too-many-godly–Jack, ever with an eye for posterity, resolved to liberate whatever could be carried, to save it from such a terrible fate.

I, with my stout moral fiber, could not help but agree to aid him in this noble endeavor.

My crew took a little gathering; it’s been a while since they were roused to action, but we manned our positions, set fire to the port to avoid any unnecessary red tape and sailed serenely to the X on the map my old friend had provided. The spot it marked was all that he said, and more.

The walls of the temple, once we burrowed into it, were solid ivory, seven feet tall and twenty feet long. Rather than waste time in idle speculation on what sort of behemoth had sacrificed its teeth to some unknown deity–and why said behemoth hadn’t done something more in keeping, like stomping on Tokyo–we contented ourselves with peeling away all the silver inlays on those ivory walls.

The floors were paved with the leathery chocolate-opal skins of enormous, presumably prehistoric, reptiles. From the regularity of the skins, I could only deduce snakes had shed these skins, snakes the size of city busses.

The antiquity was thick around us as we pried and carried, our men hauling and cutting with style and grace. What fearful rites had once taken place within these walls, what blood had been spilt and what deity had sat in judgment over the ceremony, waiting to declare the proceedings satisfactory or wanting? What have we lost, by no longer oiling the gears of creation with blood?

There was little time to speculate; the silver and gold and snakehide and petrified wood were a week’s labor to feed into our ships, all the while keeping one eye and then the other over one shoulder, and then the other, for anyone who might wonder what the hell we thought we were doing.

But our ships, low in the water, at last sailed from the cramped bay, almost a fjord, and so laden were we that we had to move very carefully up only a short distance of coast, to stash the majority of the haul in the sacristy of an abandoned Spanish iglesia. There, I found a cask of fine brandy and gladly took it aboard. It would be a centerpiece of the revelry that would take place later…

But that, as they say, is another story.