I signed up to be a pirate. There aren’t too many options for jobs in the late 1600s–it’s either be a farmer, a merchant, a pirate, or a noble. The best choice is obviously noble. They live a good life.
The secret about being a noble is that you don’t actually have to work. Your nobility gets you out of that. All you have to do is wear a powdered wig and sneer a lot at the people working.
That was my first plan, to be a noble. But it turns out you have to be born into that. An ordinary person like me can’t expect to be noble. It’s just not something you can practice. So scum like me have to find other means to make a living.
And that’s how I settled on becoming a pirate. I figured hey, if I’m not going to be noble, I may as well go to the opposite side of the spectrum and be a menace. And nobody is more menacing than a pirate.
I showed up to the docks and tried to find some pirates. A good way to find a pirate is to look for the guys at a tavern with bad teeth. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone in the taverns has bad teeth. We don’t really care about things like oral hygiene in the 1600s. Too many other things to worry about, like where can I get my hands on some more of that mead.
Another good way to find pirates is eyepatches. There’s something about pirates that makes them lose their eyes. Probably all those parrots they hang around with. Those things can peck.
So I walked around a tavern until I found a group of guys with eyepatches. I asked if they were pirates.
“No, we just fought some pirates,” they told me. “Never lead with the eyes in a fight. Especially a sword fight.”
It was solid advice. They told me there might be some pirates at the tavern next door. Sure enough, there were men with eyepatches and peg legs. I asked them how to go about being a pirate and they said just ask the captain. The captain had this big hat.
You can tell a lot about a man by his hat in the 1600s. If they have a hat with a feather in it they’re a dandy. If they have no hat they’re poor. And if they have a spinny propeller hat they’re a funny person from the future.
The captain had a hat with a skull-and-crossbones on it, which meant he’d turn you into a skeleton if you crossed him. Pirates have some great iconography.
I asked the captain to join his crew and he agreed. He said he could always use more cannon fathers. I didn’t know what kind of job that was and he told me he said cannon fodder, not father. I didn’t know what fodder was supposed to mean either, but I was just happy to be a pirate.
The next few months were a blur, mostly because I was starving and thirsting to death and drunk for most of it. And I kept getting scurvy. You get a lot of scurvy as a pirate, so you better just get used to it. Like they say, it’s better than malaria. I got malaria a bunch too.
The best days of pirating were when we pillaged a town. Nobody tells you this, but if you have enough cannons and swords and scary men you can take anything you want from anywhere. And if you want to let out some rage, you can destroy just about anything you want too. We’d pillage and burn and take all sorts of treasure.
The only downside was the captain. He made some questionable decisions. I think it’s because he was always drunk. Sure, the crew was too, but we were fun drunks. The sea shanty-singing kind of drunks. Not fire-the-only-fair-maiden-on-the-ship-out-of-a-cannon drunks like the captain.
And whenever we’d amassed a lot of treasure, the captain would always make us go to a desert island and bury it.
“We’ll come back for it later,” he’d tell us. Well why don’t we just use it now? Why don’t we use all that treasure to buy some food and water? “We can do that later. It’s better to bury it for now.”
Eventually, the crew started talking about having a mutiny. To be honest, I wasn’t a fan of this idea. It seemed like a lot of paperwork. But then they explained there isn’t any paperwork and I was all in.
We waited until the captain was passed out and drug him out to the deck. Then we poked him with our swords until he woke up.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Mutiny,” we all said, and we forced him to walk the plank.
After that, we didn’t have a captain for a few weeks. I thought it would be nice, but it was actually kind of tricky. Without the threat of being fired out of a cannon, it’s hard to convince a group of criminals to do anything productive. We stopped pillaging almost entirely, and we kept crashing the ship.
Finally, we decided it was time for a change and we needed a new captain. But after what happened to the last guy, nobody wanted to step up. Because everyone knew we were a mutinous bunch.
That’s when we remembered there was all that buried treasure. The captain had been right. That stuff came in handy. We dug it all up and headed to the nearest town.
And since then, I’ve quit being a pirate and am living it up in luxury off that treasure. It’s a pretty good life. Not too far from that of a noble if you ask me.
