The Pirates! (11 page)

After a game of chess that the Pirate Captain later told the pirates he deliberately let Ahab win because he still felt guilty about Mister Starbuck, they waved the crew of the
Pequod
goodbye. The Captain ordered all the pirates into one of the
Lovely Emma
's spacious meeting rooms, where they sat trying to look studious as he wrote some things down on a blackboard. It wasn't easy, because keeping quiet and sitting still were not traits at which pirates tended to excel. The Pirate Captain wrote down TREASURE HUNTING in capital letters and then he crossed it through. Then he wrote SHOWBUSINESS and he crossed that out too, but with a bit more venom this time so that the chalk snapped off and hit the octagon-faced pirate in the eye. After that he wrote ACTUAL PIRATING and he crossed that out as well. Finally he wrote down WHALING and instead of crossing it out he drew a little tick and a smiley face next to it.

‘I hope that makes everything clear,' said the Pirate Captain.

The crew muttered to each other, and the pirate in red put his hand up.

‘I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, Pirate Captain,' he said. ‘But you haven't really explained how we actually do it. The whaling, that is.'

‘Oh, you know. Track the whale down, and bop him on the head.'

‘Bop him on the head?'

The Pirate Captain mimed bopping the whale on the head. ‘Bop. That's right. Something like that.'

‘But how do we
find
the whale?' persisted the pirate in red, folding his arms and frowning to convey as much surliness as he dared.

The Pirate Captain looked stumped. His experience of this kind of thing was pretty limited. He had won a sizeable goldfish on Brighton Pier once, but that had involved throwing brightly coloured balls at coconuts, and he didn't really think that would do the trick in this case.

‘Aarrr,' he said, drawing a few wavy lines on
the blackboard and trying to sound knowledgeable. ‘It's basically just a question of luring the whale onto your boat.'

‘With magnets?' asked the sassy pirate.

‘No. Not with magnets. I know you lot tend to think everything can be solved with magnets, but that's just not the case.'
²⁵

‘What then?'

‘Bait. We need to put out some whale bait.'

He wrote ‘BAIT' on the blackboard and tapped it with his cutlass.

‘What do we use for whale bait?' said the pirate with a hook for a hand.

‘Whatever it is that whales like to eat.'

‘Ooh! I know this!' said the pirate in green, waving his hand in the air. ‘The answer's plankton. P-L-A-N-K-T-O-N.'

‘You useless lubber!' roared the Pirate Captain. ‘That's what they get to eat all the time.
We need something that whales like
better
than plankton.'

‘Ham?' suggested the pirate with rickets.

The Pirate Captain ran a hand through his luxuriant beard. He couldn't imagine a single creature, marine or otherwise, that wouldn't like ham. But they only had two regular hams left, and he didn't think he could bear to be parted from either of them. And he would sooner cut off his own stentorian nose than dangle his Prize Ham into the sea, only for some sea-beast to slobber all over it.

‘You have to remember that this is no ordinary whale,' he said authoritatively. ‘It's a white whale. And whales aren't normally white, are they? So it makes sense to suppose that it turned white by eating albinos. We'll start off by dangling the albino pirate over the side of the boat for a few days.'

The albino pirate seemed a little nonplussed by this idea. The other pirates cheered and slapped him on the back.

‘I don't know what the rest of you are looking so smug about,' said the Pirate Captain. ‘Just in
case my albino theory is wrong – because believe it or not, I am wrong very occasionally – I want to see you lot swimming behind the boat, disguised as krill. Gigantic, fat, delicious krill.
²⁶
That's sure to whet his appetite.'

The crew let out a collective groan that the Captain cut dead with his best withering look.

‘Pirate Captain?' the pirate in red asked again. ‘Is it really necessary for your plans to always involve us dressing up as something? Because some might say it borders on an unhealthy obsession.'

‘Last time I checked, krill are tiny bioluminescent shrimp-like organisms that don't give backchat,' said the Pirate Captain with a sniff and a glower.

‘Will
you
be dressing up as whale bait, Captain?'

‘Obviously I'd love to,' said the Pirate Captain, rubbing the blackboard clean. ‘But all that briny
water could play havoc with my luxuriant beard. I'd hate to upset our large gay following, specifically those whose term for a hirsute gentleman such as myself is “a bear”. Can't mess with the power of the pink pound! And it would be a shame not to share a nomenclature with such a fine animal.'

Some of the pirates looked unconvinced by the Pirate Captain's logic.

‘There is also a chance we get our pirating powers from my beard, like Samson did in that book. So there's another reason why I can't help.'

‘Try to look more tasty!' the pirate with long legs shouted to the albino pirate.

The albino pirate's head resurfaced and he spat out a mouthful of seawater. ‘I don't think this is really working. I've been nibbled by crabs and licked by a shark, but there's no sign of any whales!'

‘You've only been in there an hour,' said the pirate in green.

‘I can't feel my arms or legs!'

‘How's it going, Number Two?' said the Pirate Captain, relaxing in the
Lovely Emma
's deck-side paddling pool. He was reading a book about whales.

‘We lost another cabin boy,' said the scarf-wearing pirate.

‘Not the funny little one with the old man's face?' said the Pirate Captain, almost dropping his book.

‘I'm afraid so, Pirate Captain. A barracuda ate him.'

‘Good grief! Poor cabin boy. So young!'

‘But with an old man's face,' said the pirate with a scarf wistfully.

‘Yes. That's what gave him such character. Our adventures won't be the same without him.'

‘And we've also lost quite a few krill-pirates to sharks and drowning,' added the pirate with a scarf.

‘A funny thing about that,' said the Pirate Captain, nodding at his book about whales. ‘It turns out that my research might not have been quite up to scratch. Apparently sperm whales
don't eat krill at all. They're actually quite fussy eaters. Around eighty per cent of their diet is squids.'

This caused some grumbling from a few of the bedraggled krill-pirates swimming behind the boat. The Captain waved and shot them a guilty grin.

‘Not to worry, lads. That isn't the only thing I've learnt. This is why I'm always trying to encourage you lot to read more, because you can discover some fascinating things from books. It says here that whales, despite their brutish appearance, are in fact famed for being the most sensitive and romantic creatures in the animal kingdom, not only tending to mate for life but also able to communicate with each other over distances of thousands of miles.'

‘That's sweet, Captain, but I'm not sure I see how it helps us,' said the scarf-wearing pirate.

The Pirate Captain looked serious. ‘It so happens, Number Two, that a love of the theatre has not been the only outlet for the more poetic aspects of my soul. You know all those times I've disappeared into my cabin and not allowed
anybody to disturb me? It will come as a shock for you to learn that I've not really been studying my nautical almanacs as I may have previously led you to believe.'

‘To be honest, Captain,' said the pirate in red, ‘we always suspected that you might have been looking at that book of saucy etchings you keep on the top of your wardrobe.'

‘Well I've not been doing that either, not that I have a clue what you're talking about. The fact is, these past few months I have been writing a
novel
. It's a romance.'

And somewhat sheepishly the Captain produced a manuscript from under his hat.

‘I'm aware that this kind of thing is slightly frowned upon by the pirating fraternity, so obviously I will be using a pen-name, should the frankly narrow-minded publishing industry ever choose to recognise my talents.'

The pirate crew breathed a quiet sigh of relief, because they could imagine what the Pirate King would have to say if he ever got wind of this.

‘So what's the plan, Captain?'

‘We'll simply do that trick of tying a couple of tin cans together with a piece of string,' explained the Pirate Captain, ‘and then dangle one of the cans into the ocean so that the white whale is able to hear me read my novel aloud. Obviously I will do different voices for the various characters. It will be a lot like that business with Theseus and those Sirens – because of his sensitive soul the white whale will find himself drawn irresistibly towards us, and just as he's finding his huge baleen heart touched to the very core by my meditations on love and fate, bang! We harpoon him through the brain.'

The pirates almost all agreed that this sounded like a pretty foolproof plan.

‘I'm very impressed, Captain,' said the pirate with a scarf. ‘I didn't think you had it in you to write an entire novel. It's quite an achievement.'

‘Oh, well, it's only about thirty-one thousand words,' said the Pirate Captain modestly. ‘Bit cheeky to call it a novel really.'

The pirates fixed up the cans and string and then gathered around as the Pirate Captain
made himself comfortable on a barrel. He cricked his neck and cleared his throat.

‘
The Pirate Of My Heart
,' he began to read. ‘Chapter One: “Love Across a Moonlit Sea”.'

‘Emerald was a proud, independent woman, fiery red locks of hair tumbling about her alabaster shoulders. She was free from that arrogant buccaneer, and she knew that fact should bring her only joy. But she could not help but think of his last words to her, those mischievous glittering eyes, and that firm, magnificent beard.

‘“Emerald,” he had said, “you are a treasure! Just like a real emerald! But you are an Irish princess, and I am a Pirate Captain! One day I shall make you mine, but for now I must go, and plunder the Spanish Main …”

‘… Emerald looked under her pillow, and there she found a single white rose, as well as a battered old eye-patch. So perhaps it hadn't been a dream after all.'

The Pirate Captain closed his book and all the pirates clapped. But even though Emerald had made the right decision to follow her feelings and not marry the swarthy Spanish Duke, there was still no sign of the whale.

‘Not to worry, Pirate Captain,' said the pirate in green. ‘It must be that whales are not so clever and sensitive as people make out. Because your story was very good.'

‘Yes,' agreed the pirate with long legs. ‘I especially liked the way Emerald learnt that the best way to get somebody to like you is simply to be yourself. Though of course it helps when yourself is a beautiful princess.'

‘You enjoyed it then?' asked the Pirate Captain. ‘Be honest though, because I really do value your opinions.'

The pirate in red looked as if he was about to say something, but the Captain hadn't quite finished. ‘When I say “honest opinion” I'd like you to bear two things in mind. One – I don't take criticism particularly well at all, even the constructive kind. And two – I'm the Captain of this boat and I have an extremely sharp cutlass.'