pirates

Occasionally I feel like I should add a disclaimer to my book blurb.

Disclaimer: If you are looking for "ahoy matey", peg-legged, eye-patched, hook-handed, swinging-from-ropes-with-a cutlass-between-their-teeth, daily-battles-and-plunder kind of pirates, you will not find much of that here.

When people think of pirates, they think of what Hollywood has made them out to be. It makes writing about them hard because people expect excitement and shiver-me-timbers 24/7. It wasn't like that for most pirates.

First off, being a pirate was a way of life, not an occupation. It was about being free and equal, living aboard, taking care, and loving a ship that was home. It was about honour and democracy. It was also about screwing the system... yes. But it largely wasn't done in epic gun-battles, plunder, and pillage.  Pirating usually entailed transporting contraband/stolen goods for crooked merchants and steering clear of the navy. Mostly it meant long bouts of little activity punctuated by high-risk jobs that paid fat wallets.

When they came across merchant vessels, yes they boarded and raided... but it was done with surprisingly little bloodshed. Pirates lived mostly on reputation; they adopted scary names and wore strange clothing to make themselves seem crazy and vicious. The end-result was that folks surrendered to them quickly. Look at Blackbeard and his habit of lighting little wicks in his beard and hair before a battle - he looked like a living demon. Why waste cannon balls if you can simply scare your victims into quickly emptying their holds?

Some pirates were more successful than others - Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, for instance, reportedly sacked hundreds of ships over a three year period.  Your average pirate ship? Maybe ten a year.

Life at sea could be dangerous - cannons bursting loose from moorings, bad storms, dumb luck from falling from the shrouds. There were a lot of injuries, and amputations were fairly common. However, not as common as movies make them out to be. Folks often simply died from their injuries... even minor ones. They didn't live in the most sanitary of conditions.

The fact of the matter is that "pirating" was often just a small part of being on board a pirate ship. There was a lot of down time for the men and women who became pirates, lots of time to build camaraderie and culture. It's that quiet time—life surrounded by sun and sea and your fellow pirates, pledged to loyalty and respect—that I set out to capture in Caged.