The Pirates!

by Gideon Defoe

  The Pirate Captain trailed off. Ahab still hadn’t said anything, but he seemed ready to explode. An angry-looking nerve had started to twitch in the corner of his eye. The Pirate Captain looked at his shoes. ‘Sorry about running through, erm …’

  ‘Mister Starbuck,’ said Ahab icily.

  ‘Yes. Sorry about running Mister Starbuck through. Do you think he’ll be okay?’

  ‘You’ve cleaved him clean in two.’

  ‘I sort of have, haven’t I? I bet I couldn’t manage that again if I tried a thousand times! I – uh – hope that cannonball didn’t do too much damage.’

  ‘It wasn’t a cannonball. It was a lime.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Sorry anyway.’

  ‘I have citric acid in my eye.’

  ‘Oh. That must sting.’

  ‘It does.’

  The Pirate Captain awkwardly put away his cutlass, and waved for his pirate crew to stop their pirating. It was always nice to run into old acquaintances again, but this did pretty much scupper the whole operation. After all, there was a certain set of piratical ethics to be adhered to, and not stealing from a man who had offered you grog was just about at the top of the list.24

  To try and make amends, the Pirate Captain invited Ahab and his crew to a meal on board the Lovely Emma. Usually the Pirate Captain wasn’t much for having people to dinner, because it just meant less food for the pirates, but it seemed the least he could do, and he was actually quite pleased he had a guest to show off the new boat to.

  ‘I like your Pequod,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘Especially what you’ve done with all that whalebone about the place. I’m afraid that I’m not as creative as yourself, so all the fittings on board the Lovely Emma are just solid silver. I think the sails are made from chinchilla skin. And the ropes are all woven from the hair of only the best-looking women actresses.’

  ‘She seems a sturdy vessel, Pirate Captain,’ agreed Ahab grudgingly.

  ‘We even have a dance studio. I only found that yesterday. Does the Pequod have a dance studio on board?’

  ‘No, Pirate Captain, it does not. I do not approve of dance.’

  ‘That’s a pity. How about cup holders? Does the Pequod have any cup holders? Because the Lovely Emma has them all over the shop. No need to ever spill a drop of grog.’

  ‘I do not approve of grog on board ship, Pirate Captain.’

  ‘Aaarrrr,’ said the Pirate Captain, who was beginning to think that Ahab wasn’t turning out to be the best dinner guest in the world. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything against chops?’ he added, as a big pile of chops was carried to the table by a couple of the pirate crew. The pirates and the whalers started to eat in awkward silence.

  ‘So, Ahab,’ said the Pirate Captain, trying to get the conversation going. ‘Any luck finding that whale?’

  Ahab’s stony face seemed to set even harder.

  ‘No, Pirate Captain. The beast has continued to evade me these past few days. Just last night I thought I’d finally cornered him, but it turned out to be a big bit of kelp.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s an easy mistake to make,’ said the Pirate Captain sympathetically. ‘It sounds a lot like the time I got into all that confusion with a mermaid.’

  ‘A mermaid?’ repeated Ahab, actually raising an eyebrow, though the rest of his face remained as impassive as ever.

  ‘Oh yes. I went out with this charming mermaid for … oooh, how long would you say it was, Number Two?’

  ‘About three months, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf, looking a little pained.

  ‘Yes, about three months. It took that long for the lads to convince me that it wasn’t really a mermaid at all. It was just a regular fish.’

  ‘Surely,’ said Ahab, ‘it is an easy enough distinction to make?’

  ‘You would have thought that,’ agreed the Captain, ‘but what you have to appreciate is that the top half of that fish was just really very attractive. Normally I prefer the top halves of ladies to have arms and hair and all that, but this girl – or marlin, as I later came to realise – really carried it off. And she was a fantastic kisser.’

  Ahab looked unimpressed. The Pirate Captain wondered if he should bring up the time they had sailed through an electrical storm and he had become magnetised, but somehow he felt Ahab wouldn’t approve of that either.

  ‘So, tell us all about whales then, Ahab,’ said Jennifer eagerly.

  ‘They’re disgusting creatures,’ said Ahab. ‘Entirely without redeeming qualities.’

  ‘But valuable, eh? You must make a packet from hunting them?’

  ‘No, young lady. They’re worthless. The “vermin of the sea”. That’s what I call them. And the white whale is the worst of the lot.’

  ‘So why do you bother with them?’

  ‘I hate them. I hate their small eyes, and I hate their wide mouths,’ said Ahab, getting so annoyed his knuckles began to turn white.

  ‘I’m a lot like that with mimes,’ said the Captain with a nod. ‘Can’t bear them. All that pretending to get out of invisible boxes. Nonsense.’

  ‘Whales are worse,’ snarled Ahab. He viciously speared a piece of meat and chewed it with grim determination.

  The other pirates were doing their best to make conversation with the whaler crew, but they were a strange bunch, and most of their stories placed a lot more emphasis on icebergs and interminable months spent at sea rather than feasts and fighting. Also, just as one of the whalers would actually seem to be getting to the point of an anecdote, they were liable to wander off suddenly on long and rather dull tangents about whale anatomy or things like that. The pirate in red was more than a little relieved when his conversation with a funny-looking whaler with one tooth and a lot of tattoos was interrupted by the booming voice of the Captain.

  ‘Oho! What’s this?’ said the Pirate Captain, fighting back a grin. ‘I do believe … Oh my! Why if I’m not mistaken … it’s the WHITE WHALE ITSELF!’

  Ahab started out of his chair. Several of the whalers reached for their harpoons. Then through the door to the kitchen came the pirate with a scarf and the pirate with gout, carrying a huge plate on which there sat a great pile of mashed potato. The mashed potato had been moulded roughly into the shape of a whale. It had radishes for eyes. The whalers put down their harpoons and settled grumblingly back into their seats.

  ‘Are you mocking me, sir?’ asked Ahab with a steely stare.

  ‘Goodness! No! Not at all,’ said the Pirate Captain defensively. ‘It’s just – look, it’s made from mashed potato.’ He spooned a dollop of potato from the whale’s flank. ‘See? We thought it would be a nice surprise,’ he added sadly.

  Ahab exhaled. ‘I apologise. The truth is I’m tired, Pirate Captain. Tired of the ocean, and of this chase. In fact, we were heading back to Nantucket when you attacked.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘You mean to say you’ve given up? You’re just going to let that whale mess about in the sea, splashing around and biting bits off of people?’

  Ahab stood up and tapped the table with his whalebone foot until he had everybody’s attention. His baleful eyes swept the room and seemed to look deep into the souls of every man there.

  ‘Hold!’ he shouted. ‘Before you stands Ahab, a man. For the past age I have abandoned my humanity in pursuit of the demon that ate my leg. I have stared at raging seas, through storm and rain, until moss grew upon my clothes and icicles hung from my ears and nose. Aye! I have not relented. The bulldog which grips on until death – that has been Ahab. The sun which beats on the desert without reprieve – that has been Ahab. The stubborn stain which soap will not shift – that has been Ahab. The Vale of Death holds no horrors for me, for I seek only vengeance, which I shall pursue even after I lie beneath the mould of the grave.’

  The Pirate Captain was about to suggest that perhaps Ahab might want to think about developing some other hobbies outside whaling, but the old whaler had not quite finished.

  ‘My destiny is fixed
– I shall be avenged. But of late I have grown weary and my stomach queasy when we hit choppy waters. Also, this is my last spare whalebone leg and if he snaps this one, Ahab is stuffed. So!’ Ahab paused and did his looking-into-souls-with-his-eyes trick again. ‘I have decided to put a price on the whale’s accursed head and return to Nantucket.’

  The whalers gasped and not a few of them looked absolutely delighted. Ahab produced a sheaf of leaflets which he handed to the Pirate Captain.

  ‘Take one and pass them on, Captain. And read it – read it well. For I offer a reward of six thousand doubloons to the man who brings me the white whale.’

  The pirates looked at the leaflets, which showed the details of the reward above a picture of a whale chomping on a leg.

  ‘SIX THOUSAND DOUBLOONS!’ shouted Ahab, to emphasise the point. Then he sat down and tucked into his fruit medley.

  ‘That’s a big reward,’ remarked the Pirate Captain, ‘for catching a fish.’

  Ahab shrugged. ‘I told you. I really, really don’t get on with him.’

  Nine

  I Ride with the Bandit King!

  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.’