The Pirates! (18 page)

The Pirates! In An Adventure With the IRS

The Pirates! In An Adventure With that Man On Beta

The Pirates! In An Adventure With the Bronze Girls Of the Shaolin

The Pirates! In A Big Top Adventure

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Jazzy Jeff

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Boggle

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Richard Dawkins

The Pirates! Together In Electric Dreams

You've Got To Fight For Your Right To Pirate

The Pirates! In An Adventure With the Cartesian Theatre

Leave It To Pirates

The Pirates! And The Mystery Of The Stuttering Parrot

The Pirates! And The Secret Of Phantom Lake

The Pirates! In An Adventure In Idaho

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Mormons

Oy Vey, Pirate Captain!

A Very Peculiar Pirate

The Pirates! Did Not Mean To Say That Out Loud

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Zombies

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Cowboys

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Richard Nixon

Don't Stop Now, Pirate Captain!

The Pirates and the Phenomenological Garden

The Pirates! In An Adventure Down The Anchor

The Pirates! Are Overdoing It A Bit

1
Clouds that look like things tend to be fair-weather cumulus clouds, which have a lifetime of just 5–40 minutes.

2
In 1718 the Governor of Virginia offered a reward of £100 for the capture of the notorious Blackbeard. That's about £10,769 in nowadays money, so it probably wouldn't have been worth the bother.

3
The ship's wheel first replaced the tiller in 1705.

4
The most expensive ham in the world is
pata negra iberico
ham, which costs around £13 per 100 grams. Each pig spends its brief life feasting on 8kg per day of the sweet, oily holm oak acorns found in the Mediterranean woodlands where they are raised.

5
In the early nineteenth century Nantucket was the whaling capital of the world. Whaling voyages would set out from port in search of ‘greasy luck', which apparently the whalers could say without laughing.

6
The piratical tri-corn hat evolved from the ‘cocked hat' worn in the English Civil War, where one side of a wide-brimmed hat was tipped up to allow firing of a musket from the shoulder.

7
The cement exuded by barnacles is an extremely tough protein polymer. It is twice as strong as the epoxy glue used on the space shuttle. Also, the barnacle penis is ten times as long as the rest of its body.

8
Legend has it that in 1788 Caymanians rescued the crews of a Jamaican merchant ship convoy which had struck a reef at Gun Bay and that they were rewarded with King George III's promise never again to impose any tax.

9
If you are a fan of ridiculous oversized currency made out of big rolls of feathers and the like, then the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a great place to visit. Whilst you're there be sure to check out the shrunken heads that you will find downstairs in a display case next to some old violins.

10
The albatross can live for up to eighty years, and it has the largest wingspan of any bird, often exceeding eleven and a half feet.

11
Kidney stones are a conglomeration of crystals (called calculi) in the kidney and bladder, which are exacerbated by high levels of uric acid. Meat, rhubarb, spinach, cocoa, pepper, nuts and tea have been linked with stone formation, as well as insufficient intake of fluids.

12
A letter like this would probably have been known as a ‘booty call'.

13
During the early nineteenth century, up to forty per cent of champagne bottles exploded before even leaving the vineyard.

14
In 1829 Santa Fe merchant Antonio Armijo led a party on the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. When they discovered an abundance of artesian water in a valley, they named it ‘Las Vegas', Spanish for ‘the Fertile Valley'.

15
Blackbeard is said to have invented a game he called ‘Pirate Roulette'. When he was very bored he would lock himself in the hold with his crew and let off a volley of random shots with his pistol. Then he would count how many dead pirates there were.

16
Barracudas, sometimes known as ‘Tigers of the Sea', are also a lot like magpies, as they are attracted to shiny reflective things, which has led to a number of attacks on necklace-wearers.

17
The tallest man ever was Robert Wadlow, standing 8
'
11
”
in his stockinged feet. He was medically a giant – a condition caused by an excess of growth hormone. Tall stature is accompanied by broad, spade-like fingers, over-developed jaw and cheekbones and a disproportionately large skull.

18
Deckchairs can be quite dangerous – the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar suffered a fatal heart attack after getting himself entangled in a deckchair.

19
This is as a result of the embarrassment of the situation, not because the Pirate Captain is too bright and shiny for the albino pirate's sensitive eyes.

20
Early sailors used actual crows to help with navigation, which were kept in cages at the top of the main mast. A released crow would inevitably head for land, allowing the ship's navigator to plot a course. If it didn't find land, the crow presumably just fell into the sea and died.

21
When he wasn't inventing games, Blackbeard used to have hemp wicks coated with saltpetre attached to his hat, which when lit would envelop his face in a cloud of smoke to make himself look demonic. He was also famed for belching loudly to intimidate his victims.

22
There are two forms of leprosy, tuberculoid (dry) and lepromatous (wet). The former is characterised by death of nerves and is less contagious. In advanced cases, the latter can result in leontiasis which makes the victim's face look like a lion.

23
Cannons of the time required round iron cannonballs. It was important to store the cannonballs so that they could be of instant use when needed, yet not roll around the gun deck. The solution was to stack them up in a square-based pyramid next to the cannon. The top level of the stack had one ball, the next level down had four, the next had nine, the next had sixteen, and so on. The only real problem was how to keep the bottom level from sliding out from under the weight of the higher levels. To do this, they devised a small brass plate (‘brass monkey') with one rounded indentation for each cannonball in the bottom layer. Brass was used because the cannonballs wouldn't rust to it as they would to an iron one. When temperature falls, brass contracts in size faster than iron. So as it got cold on the gun decks, the indentations in the brass monkey would get smaller than the iron cannonballs they were holding. If the temperature got cold enough, the bottom layer would pop out of the indentations, spilling the entire pyramid over the deck. Hence the expression ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey'.

24
Pirates were not entirely amoral. The otherwise bloodthirsty Bartholemew Roberts couldn't bring himself to kill a priest, even when he refused to become the pirate's chaplain. So he let the man go, but only after stealing two prayer books and a corkscrew from him.

25
In fact, it is suspected that whales use the magnetic field of the Earth for navigation during their long migrations across the oceans. Many mass whale beachings occur at places where there is an anomaly in the Earth's magnetic field.

26
Meganyctiphanes norvegica
form the base of many food chains around the world. Krill migrate daily, spending the daylight hours in deep waters and coming to the surface to feed and lay eggs at night.

27
Larded beef (or any meat) has been artificially marbled with fat. Strips of suet or pork fat are run through the lean meat with a ‘larding needle' to add extra moisture and flavour.

28
Gentlemen opening doors for Victorian ladies was not just a matter of manners. The big skirts and dresses of the day meant that a lady would be unable to get in and out of carriages and rooms unles
s
someone held the door open in advance.

29
Sponges are amongst the simplest multicellular animals – loose collections of specialised cells combined to produce a more efficient feeding mechanism. They range from inconspicuous prickly layers growing on rocks to large, complex and beautiful structures such as Venus's flower-basket. None is capable of attacking a ship.

30
Keel-hauling was actually a practice used more by the Royal Navy than pirates, and it was an attempt to escape this kind of barbarity that probably drove many sailors into piracy in the first place.

31
Different types of whales adopt different reproductive strategies. Male humpback whales sometimes blow a thick curtain of bubbles to try and block their intended mate from the view of other competing males. Whilst uninterested females have been observed to hide under boats and wait there until the males have all gone away. Smart creatures, male whales have never been observed trying to impress lady whales by writing books about pirates.

GIDEON DEFOE
was born in 1975 and lives in London. He is also the author of
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists
, and
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Napoleon.
You could be forgiven for thinking he is a bit of a one-trick pony.

It is 1837, and for the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain and his rag-tag pirate crew, life on the high seas has gotten a little dull. With nothing to do but twiddle their hooks and lounge aimlessly on tropical beaches, the Captain decides it's time they had an adventure.

A surprisingly successful boat raid leads them to the young Charles Darwin, in desperate need of their help. And so the pirates set forth for London in a bid to save the scientist from the evil machinations of a diabolical Bishop. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, the Elephant Man – and have an exciting trip to the zoo.

*

‘Gideon Defoe definitively puts the “Ho ho!” –
and, indeed, the “Yo!” – into pirating'
CAITLIN MORAN

*

‘Very funny, very silly and highly original'
ESQUIRE

*

‘This book has cult smash tattoed all over it'
THE LIST

He's conquered the seven seas, hunted Moby Dick and rescued Charles Darwin; now the Pirate Captain and his crew are off on another adventure. Their mission this time: to sail to London, buy a new suit for the Pirate Captain and maybe have some sort of adventure in a barnyard.

But nothing is ever straight forward for the hapless pirates. In no time at all, the Pirate Captain is incarcerated at Scotland Yard in a case of mistaken identity. Discovering that his doppelganger is none other than Karl Marx, the Captain and his crew are unwittingly caught up in a sinister plot involving communists, enormous beards, and a quest to discover whether ham might really be the opium of the people.

*

‘Silly, charming, unique and hilarious all at once'
CHRIS ADDISON

*

‘Funny and entertaining'
INDEPENDENT

*

‘A timber-shivering adventure that speaks to the pirate in all of us'
BEN SCHOTT

The Pirate Captain has finally had enough. Still reeling from the crushing disappointment at the Pirate of the Year Awards, he decides it's time to hang up his hat and ditch his cutlass. Begrudgingly followed by his sceptical but loyal crew, the Captain fixes his sights on a quiet life on the island of St Helena.

But his retirement plan is rudely disrupted by the arrival of another visitor to the island – the recently deposed Napoleon Bonaparte. Has the Pirate Captain finally met his match? Is the island's twenty-eight mile circumference big enough to contain two of history's greatest egos? And will the Pirates be able to settle the biggest question of all:
who has the best hat?

*

‘Little slabs of super-concentrated funny'
ANDY RILEY

*

‘It's supreme silliness is its charm'
DAILY TELEGRAPH

*

‘Deliriously Funny'
ARDAL O'HANLON

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Weidenfeld &
Nicholson as
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Gideon Defoe 2005
Map copyright © Dave Senior 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

ISBN 978 1 4088 2885 4

www.bloomsbury.com/gideondefoe

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