Fantasy fiction

Today has, I understand, been designated International Talk like a Pirate Day. One can only fantasise about the origins of such a curious festival.

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"Pretty Polly."

"Aarrrh……..?"

"Pretty Polly."

"Avast ye, landlubber. This be a meeting for pirates only, ...
...gangplank by the time I've drawn my cutlass I'll have ye keel-hauled, or my name's not Cap'n Kidd."

"As it happens, I don't believe your name is Captain Kidd, whatever it says on that ridiculous nametag."

"Aaarrh, Cap'n Kidd my name be."

"So why are you affecting that absurd accent? Kidd, as you really ought to know, is a Scotsman."

"Belay that, ye ... more

Today has, I understand, been designated International Talk like a Pirate Day. One can only fantasise about the origins of such a curious festival.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Pretty Polly."

"Aarrrh……..?"

"Pretty Polly."

"Avast ye, landlubber. This be a meeting for pirates only, not for parrots. If you're not off this gangplank by the time I've drawn my cutlass I'll have ye keel-hauled, or my name's not Cap'n Kidd."

"As it happens, I don't believe your name is Captain Kidd, whatever it says on that ridiculous nametag."

"Aaarrh, Cap'n Kidd my name be."

"So why are you affecting that absurd accent? Kidd, as you really ought to know, is a Scotsman."

"Belay that, ye bilge rat. I'll speak as suits me. And Kidd's my name and no mistake. K - I - D it's spelt, they tells me. Rhymes with hid."

"Rhymes with hunt, if you want my opinion. Now kindly stop playing the fool with this grotesque mimicry and allow me to fly on board."

"But ye be not a pirate in good standin' invited to the gathering. This be the list here… "

"Oh, do stop it. No one says 'This be' nowadays. Let me see that list. There you are. In case you really can't read, it says: 'Long John Silver and his parrot Pretty Polly.' "

"Pretty Polly is it, says you? Well, you got that wrong. Long John Silver's parrot be called Cap'n Flint, and what 'e says when 'e squawks is 'Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight', ne'er none of this Pretty Polly hogswoggle."

"Captain Flint was let go - deshouldered as we parrots call it - years ago 'by mutual consent'. Long John grew weary of his limited vocabulary and lack of verbal versatility. I, on the other hand, am a fully qualified multi-lingual PARROT - Pirate's Avian Role-Reinforcing Obstreperous Talker. Sometimes referred to simply as PA for short."

"But Pretty Polly! That be no name for a pirate's Parrot. Ye should be called Davy Jones, or Black Spot or…."

"If you must know, Pretty Polly is a nickname foisted on me by my employer, and one with which I'm far from happy. You can be sure it will feature in due course in my case for sexual harassment and constructive deshouldering. However, that's the name under which I am here as a delegate, so will you now let me in?"

"Hold fast, me hearty. Ye may be here, but where's your master?"

"That, if I may say so, is none of your goddam business…."

*

As the venue for their conference, the pirates, true to form, had commandeered a vessel. This was a cruise-liner, jarringly modern in design, but they were already making themselves at home in its main reception deck, and rendering it more congenial to their tastes.

A stench of blood, rum and musketry hung in the air, while the lounge echoed to the sound of buckles being swashed (or was it swashes buckled?) and sabres being rattled. A clever trick that, as you will know if you've ever tried to rattle a sabre. Mingling with these sounds was a hubbub of voices, and as she winged her way above the battered three-cornered hats and knotted black bandannas that adorned the heads of the throng, Polly could pick out some of the phrases being exchanged among them: "dancing the hempen jig", "abaft the fo'c's'le", "shiver me timbers", and so forth. If they weren't exactly singing from the same hymn sheet it seemed as if they were all well-versed in the same sea shanties.

The further she flew, though, the more other accents became audible, and even other languages. Little knots of hard-eyed men stood apart from the main throng, and muttered among themselves in a babel of different tongues, spiced with strange patois that she could barely recognise. She found a perch on a massive chandelier, and listened to the cacophony of voices that filled the space beneath.

At the far end of the room, a dais had been raised, and upon it stood a table draped with a vast black skull and crossbones. Six seats waited empty behind the table. To one side a large blackboard rested on an easel, on which some untutored hand had roughly chalked: -

PIE-RATS MEETIN' AND PISS-UP

1. All hands on deck at 8 bells to splice the mainbrace

2. Appointin' o' officers

BREAK FOR GROG

3. Boastin', braggin' and a-challengin' o' each other

4. Ensuin' fights and any other business.

Polly had barely finished perusing this notice when a tall man strode up to the podium. With his staring eyes, tangled black hair and matching beard, his stage presence alone might have riveted the attention of the assembled company but he made sure by firing a flintlock into the bulkhead, and thumping an outsize marlin spike down into the tabletop. Placing a blunderbuss beside it, he began:

"Ahoy, me hearties. Blackbeard I be, and I appoint myself Cap'n, nay, Admiral, of the whole stinkin' crew of ye. Be there any scurvy rapscallion among ye wants to fight me for the priv'lege?"

Only a shuffling of sea-boots disturbed the silence as he paused and trained his gaze like a lighthouse beam across the crowd, fingering the trigger of his weapon all the while.

"Aarrrh, that be decided, then. Thank'ee for your support. Now as to your other officers, here's who ye'll havin' to lead ye. Come up here, messmates, as I call your names. Cap'n Kidd and Cap'n Hook, come and sit aside o' me. Then Cap'n Morgan, Cap'n Pugwash and Cap'n Long John Silver. And the rest of ye scrofulous swabs, give your betters the greetin' they deserve, or I'll have ye flogged afore the mainmast."

Cheers and catcalls echoed from the floor as the first four of the nominated Captains stepped up from the floor to take their seats beside Blackbeard, waving to their supporters and making shaking fists at their adversaries.

Polly waited for them to settle in their seats and for the noise to die down, leaving only a buzz of speculation about the one remaining empty place on the podium, before she fluttered down from the chandelier onto the table-top. A hush fell as attention focussed on her.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," she began.

"Ladies?????" growled Blackbeard. "We be pirates, and pirates be men not ladies."

"On the contrary," retorted Polly. "The most cursory study of piratical history would remind you that many leading pirates were women, although they sometimes had to disguise themselves as men to avoid the sexual discrimination to which our trade is sadly prone. Grace O'Malley and Anne Bonny, for example. Both of them Irish, incidentally, but we'll come back to that point later. I expect they're here somewhere. And there's me, of course. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Polly, and I'm here in place of my employer Captain Long John Silver, who is unavoidably detained elsewhere.

"I won't keep you long, but I know I speak for many here when I say that it's time for a new look at the whole business of piracy. The traditional 'Yo Ho Ho' approach was all very well in its day, but the world has moved on…."

At this point, she flew nimbly upwards to avoid a vicious sideswipe wielded by Blackbeard with the marlin spike, then descended again as Captain Hook took advantage of the moment to grab the blunderbuss and to wrap his hooked arm around Blackbeard's throat. Not a word passed between the two men, but Blackbeard instantly dropped the marlin spike back on the table top and ceased to struggle. Sharp intakes of breath and startled looks were exchanged among the crowd, but no one spoke or moved to intervene.

"Thank you, Captain," Polly proceeded calmly as if nothing had occurred. "Captain Hook, ladies and gentlemen, as you may know, is a man of education and refinement - 'never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding' as Mr Barrie wrote of him. You can imagine how irksome he has found it all these years to have to pretend to be other than his natural self, apart from which he is indebted to friends of mine for the restraint of a certain crocodile.

"But that's by the way. Back to our main business this morning. To help us focus our thoughts, I have prepared an alternative agenda. Captain Morgan, if you please." As Captain Morgan stepped round from behind the table to replace the rough scrawl on the blackboard with a crisply inscribed board, she continued to explain: "Captain Sir Henry Morgan is, of course, a Welshman, with all that that implies for his preferred manner of speech, and a knight of the realm to boot, though if I were you I wouldn't try to boot him. Which brings us to the first item on the agenda…."

She paused to give the crowd time to examine the notice-board, which read as follows:

PIRATES' INTERNATIONAL SELF-HELP SOCIETY (and Union of Privateers)

Extraordinary General Meeting, 19th September
Agenda

1. Language and pronunciation - modernisation and globalisation

2. Brand-name integration: pirates, corsairs, freebooters, buccaneers, privateers, or new unified brand-name?

3. Branding harmonisation: Jolly Roger logo redesign and associated theming; costume and accessory update - replacement of eyepatches, peglegs, hooks with modern prosthetics, etc.

REFRESHMENTS

4. Formation of mutual support groups, and any other business.

"Language and pronunciation, ladies and gentleman. I've listed it first because it goes to the heart of the problem. We really can't expect to be taken seriously in today's world if we go on speaking an anachronistic argot.

"For a start, it comes naturally to very few of us. Hook and Morgan I've already mentioned. Kidd, as I had occasion to remind him earlier, is a Scot, though he seems to have forgotten it. Over there I see the Irishwomen mentioned earlier. Top o' the morning to you, ladies. And there we have Capitaines L'Ollonais and Lafitte, distinguished representatives of the Academie de la Piraterie Française - bonjour messieurs - and Capitano Mundaca from its Spanish counterpart, together with many of his countrymen and fellow Spanish speakers from South America and the Philippines, to whom Buenos Dias. Next we have our friends the Arab and Berber corsairs - the moor the merrier, as I'm sure you'll all agree. And, of course, from the tigerish growth area of world piracy today in South East Asia, we have speakers of Chinese, Thai, Malay and every kind of Indonesian, if you can imagine every kind of Indonesian.

"So why do we all feel obliged to converse in a garbled, cod West Country Nautical? I know that some of you believe it is the only correct way to express pirattitude, but to the world at large it's as out of date as it is laughable. And the only people it really suits are a few old dyed-in-the-wool diehards left over from a former error and long since past it. Like Blackbeard here - by the way, that beard's a dye-job if I ever saw one, not to mention the toupee - and my old boss Long John Silver.

"Talking of whom, I know a few of you may be wondering where Long John is today. The tottering old fool doesn't even know this conference is taking place. Why not? I simply didn't tell him. He spends his days swilling rum with his cronies, dreaming of imaginary former glories and leaving me as his PA to do all the work. So why should I? In the face of all the challenges of the modern world, do you really want to be led by senile old farts like him? I'm jolly well rogered if I do…."

"Ye be jolly well rogered anyhow, ye foul fowl," roared a voice from the back of the room. All eyes swivelled round to see that the double doors had been flung open, revealing none other than Long John Silver himself, flanked by a motley crew of desperados, clad in traditional pirate garb such as doubloons (a cross between doublet and pantaloons), but carrying an assortment of non-traditional and highly efficient-looking weaponry. Assiduous readers of Treasure Island would probably recognise some of the personnel from its pages.

"Ye treacherous squab," he continued as he strode forward, insofar as striding is possible for a one-legged person reliant on a crutch. "So this is the thanks I get for takin' ye on board and trainin' ye. I knew twas no good ye was up to when I spied out ye was exchangin' emails with gentlefolk like Hook and Morgan - fancy fops just playin' at bein' pirates - and ne'er sayin' a word to me about it. Think me an old fool, do ye? Not so foolish as to be fooled by your kind."

Reaching the top table, he turned to face the throng. "Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrhhh, me hearties. Just thought I'd get that out of my system. As many of you know, I can speak as correctly as anyone, as I am now proving, and certainly as correctly as Miss Pollymath here, who, unless I'm very much mistaken, is shortly going to be Miss Pollygon. But I choose not to. Why do I choose not to? Because I value my credibility as a pirate. For all her half-baked management-speak, she has just proved that she knows sweet PA (that's ph*ck-all, in case you're wondering) about branding.

"We have one of the clearest brand images in the world, instantly recognisable in a way that would make most other professions' mouths water. We're known for the way we act, the way we dress and the way we talk. All that needs is reinforcing, not altering. So I propose that we inaugurate today - and every 19th of September henceforth - as International Talk Like a Pirate Day, just to remind people…."

"The motion be seconded, shipmates," roared Blackbeard, now released from the hooked grasp around his throat. "All those o' ye in favour shout 'Aarrh'…."

"AAAAARRRRRHHHHH……"

*

"Ah well," said Polly philosophically, as she, Hook and Morgan were hustled by rough hands and cutlass-prods towards the plank that had been hastily lashed in place, jutting out over the sea athwartships. "Can't win them all."

Peering over the rail they could see the tropical ocean below, seemingly dead calm, its surface only rippled by circling sharks' fins and the snapping jaw of a peculiarly large crocodile. She felt Hook shudder beside her.

"Aaarrrh," said Blackbeard's voice behind them. "Davy Jones himself be waitin' down there in person. Who wants to be the first to meet 'im?"

"I'll go," volunteered Polly. "After all, it was all my idea," she continued as she was thrust out towards the dead end of the short, springy plank. "And I'm the only one here who can fly," she said, as she did so.

© torr 2005
 

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