The Pirates!

by Gideon Defoe

  ‘No, hear me out,’ said the Pirate Captain, catching his look. ‘Do you remember the story of Jonah?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘Well, the gist of the thing is that back in biblical times a man goes to live inside a whale for a bit. I forget the exact reason, probably to avoid having to make boat repayments. Not much of a story, but that’s the Bible for you.’

  ‘Are you going anywhere with this, Captain?’

  ‘All it needs is for one of us pirates to hide inside the belly of the whale. That way if old Ahab raises any doubts about the veracity of our catch, the swallowed pirate can loudly proclaim how he’s the very same whale that ate his leg off. To the outside world it will seem that it’s the whale doing the talking, especially if we devise some kind of apparatus to move the whale’s mouth up and down while the pirate speaks. Lip-synching the thing will be the key. If you can call it lip-synching, seeing as I don’t think whales can be described as having any lips to speak of.’

  There was a bit of an argument between the pirates as to whether whales had lips per se, with the conclusion being that whilst they had definite edges to their mouths, they were more like gums than lips. A couple of the pirates started work on building the lip/gum-synching apparatus, whilst the Captain lined up the rest of the crew beside the creature.

  ‘Right, me beauties. I’ll be needing a volunteer to slither down the whale’s fishy throat. You know me – normally I’d be first to step forward, but it’ll look pretty suspicious if I’m not there to hand him over, won’t it? So – who’s it going to be?’

  The pirates did their usual trick of staring at the horizon and pretending not to hear.

  ‘Sometimes I think I’d be better off crewing the ship with lobsters,’ said the Pirate Captain, with a sorry shake of his head. ‘Well then. We’ll decide this like pirates. You in the green … you can start.’ He nodded at the pirate in green.

  ‘I went to the shops and I bought a cutlass,’ said the pirate in green.

  ‘I went to the shops,’ said the sassy pirate, ‘and I bought a cutlass and some brass buckles.’

  ‘I went to the shops,’ said the albino pirate, ‘and I bought a cutlass, some brass buckles and some transfers …’

  It wasn’t the fastest way to reach a decision and in the past it had proved costly in battle situations, but the Pirate Captain was a stickler for pirate traditions. Technically it was the pirate with a squint who made the first mistake, but the Pirate Captain decided to send the pirate in red inside the whale, because he was sick of his surly backchat.

  ‘Can I take a magazine to read?’ said the pirate in red, clambering into the whale’s gaping maw.

  ‘Sorry, lad. No light in there, is there? You’ll ruin your eyes,’ said the Pirate Captain cheerily. ‘Mind your head on the epiglottis!’ he added, giving the pirate in red an encouraging shove.

  An eerie keening sound washed across the deck as the pirate in red headed for the gloom of the whale’s innards.

  ‘What in the blue blazes is that racket?’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘I think it’s whale song!’ said Jennifer.

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ said the pirate in green, entranced.

  ‘We can’t just give him to Ahab to chop up! Not a noble creature like this, capable of such magnificent music!’ said the pirate with a poetic bent.

  ‘It’s just moaning,’ said the Pirate Captain, snorting and pulling an unimpressed face.

  ‘Couldn’t we get him to apologise to Ahab as well?’ said Jennifer. ‘He could say “Sorry about the leg, Ahab. Accidents happen. No hard feelings, eh?” and then Ahab might let him off.’

  The Pirate Captain rolled his eyes, because if there was one thing guaranteed to make his crew go gooey, it was creatures. The pirates had once spent an entire adventure pestering the Captain to buy them a parrot, only for him to find it two weeks later being used as a fuse on one of the boat’s cannons. But by this point in his piratical career he had learnt that there wasn’t much point arguing with the lads once they had their hearts set on something.

  ‘Fine. If it really makes you feel better,’ said the Pirate Captain, rubbing his temples wearily. ‘Just so long as we convince Ahab he’s the real deal. He can do the Gettysburg Address for all I care.’

  Thirteen

  Cannibal Coral Crawls to Kill!

  The Nantucket town clock struck a quarter to midnight as the last few bits of ground-up pirate bone ran through Cutlass Liz’s egg-timer.

  ‘Put your backs into it, boys!’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘You’re doing a great job. Obviously I’d love to help you drag the whale onto the docks, but its oily hide could do lasting damage to my magnificent beard. And us pirates without my beard would be like the Tower of London without those big crows – we’d most likely just collapse in a heap.’

  The crew let out a collective grunt and with a final heave pushed the whale over the side of the Lovely Emma and onto the dock’s slippery cobblestones. Mindful that good pirating is all about the spectacle, the Pirate Captain had covered the creature with a big white sheet, so that he could unveil their prize with a flourish.

  There was quite a crowd waiting for them. Ahab and his whalers were there, stony-faced as ever. Cutlass Liz was there, tapping her watch and looking cross. And there were a few assorted hangers-on who had just turned up to see what all the fuss was about.

  ‘I hope you’ve got me here for a good reason,’ said Ahab, looking moody in pyjamas and nightcap.

  ‘Where’s my money?’ said Cutlass Liz, pointedly sharpening a big knife on a leather strap. ‘And what have you got under that sheet?’

  ‘The answer to all our problems!’ said the Pirate Captain triumphantly, and with a theatrical jerk of his wrist he pulled the billowing sheet aside. There was a bit of a stunned silence.

  ‘That’s not six thousand doubloons,’ said Cutlass Liz.

  ‘It’s a whale!’ said the albino pirate helpfully.

  ‘And not just any whale!’ said the Pirate Captain, pointing at Ahab. ‘But the brute who ate your leg off!’

  Ahab looked the creature up and down. He circled round it a couple of times. He got out a little pair of half-moon spectacles and peered at it closely.

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ he muttered.

  The Pirate Captain shrugged. ‘I thought you might say that, but I can prove it.’ He gave the sassy pirate a wink to get him ready with the lip-synching device. ‘Because this whale will confess to the crime himself!’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Ahab.

  ‘Isn’t that so, whale? You’ve got something to say? Hmmm?’ said the Pirate Captain, playing to the crowd a little as the sassy pirate started to work the ingenious system of pulleys and gears and bits of rope that made the whale’s jaw jerk up and down.

  ‘I have, Pirate Captain!’ said the whale in what to the onlookers seemed a surprisingly reedy voice for such a huge beast.

  ‘He’s not as good at doing voices as me,’ the Pirate Captain whispered to the scarf-wearing pirate. ‘Though to be fair, it’s difficult to sound genuinely oceanic.’

  ‘First,’ said the whale/pirate, ‘I’d like to say how under-rated the pirate in red is. In my whale’s opinion I would say he is the best pirate in the whole crew.’

  The Pirate Captain scowled, because this wasn’t exactly the way they’d rehearsed it.

  ‘One of the reasons he’s so good is that he bothers to learn the proper nautical terms for things, and can tell the difference between the galley and the steering wheel. Can you do that, Pirate Captain?’

  ‘Aarrrr,’ said the Pirate Captain defensively. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I mean to say, you wouldn’t have any problem telling the mizzenmast from the foremast? And you’d never be heard referring to the hull as “that bit which stops all the water getting in”?’

  The Pirate Captain started to finger his cutlass in what he hoped was a menacing fashion, but then he remembered that just because the pirate was inside the whal
e it didn’t mean he could see what the whale could see, so using a subtle visual threat was probably useless.

  ‘And another reason the pirate in red is so good is because he has an imperious nose. Not, you notice, a “stentorian” nose because stentorian is a tone of voice.’

  ‘Well, whale, I’m sure we all agree with you about how fantastic the pirate in red is,’ said the Pirate Captain, through gritted gold teeth. ‘It would certainly be a shame if anything terrible happened to him. Like, oh I don’t know, spending the rest of our next adventure getting keel-hauled.30 Or fed to sea cucumbers. Now, I think you have a message for Mister Ahab, don’t you?’

  ‘All right, I was getting to it,’ said the whale/ pirate testily. ‘Ahab – I just wanted to say how sorry I am about the business when I ate your leg. I’d got a bit bored that day of plankton or squid or whatever it is I usually eat. I hope there’s no hard feelings.’

  The sassy pirate surreptitiously used the lip-synching apparatus to make the whale do a winning and apologetic grin. There was an expectant hush.

  ‘Well,’ said Ahab, scratching his scar, ‘I suppose this must be the beast. Though he seems to have shrunk since I saw him last.’

  ‘That’s seawater for you,’ said the Pirate Captain, thinking fast. ‘I once dropped my favourite blousy shirt into a rock pool, and by the time I fished the thing out it wouldn’t have fitted a baby.’

  Ahab still looked slightly unconvinced.

  The Pirate Captain hurriedly looked at his pocket watch. ‘So then. It appears that just for once we’ve finished with a bit of time to spare. All that’s left is for you’ – he grinned as hopefully as he could at Ahab – ‘to give us our reward, so that I can pay you’ – he grinned as sexily as he could at Cutlass Liz – ‘and then I can spend the rest of the adventure just messing about with my belly.’

  But before the Pirate Captain could even begin to play about with his belly button, the whole dock started to shake, and there was a sound like a thousand cannonballs being dropped into a bucket. A wall of water rose up from the sea and crashed across the docks. Out from the churning swell came the tip of something white, and it kept on coming until there, rearing up on its tail, was the biggest whale any of the pirates had ever seen. If the pirates had been alive a hundred and fifty years later and had happened to be drawing the diagrams in biology textbooks, they would have said the whale was as tall as three double-decker buses stacked on top of each other, or about a half of one St Paul’s Cathedral. But they weren’t, so they just thought that the whale was really very big indeed.

  The monster roared, lunged and came crashing down right on top of the Lovely Emma. All the onlookers scattered about, and most of the pirates tried to hide behind barrels.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Pirate Captain.

  ‘Goodness me,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  The whale rose up again, and with another resounding thump belly-flopped onto the boat.

  ‘This is a bit of bad luck, isn’t it, Captain?’ said the pirate with gout.

  ‘I hate to say I told you so,’ said the fake whale/pirate in red, ‘but if you will go about the place killing albatrosses, you have to expect this kind of thing.’

  Just for once the Pirate Captain found himself agreeing with the mutinous swab. It did seem like a spectacular piece of cosmic bad luck for the white whale to turn up out of the blue like this, apparently for no better reason than to make his life a misery. He stared sadly at the Lovely Emma. Then he stared at the whale. A huge excited whale eye winked back at him. The Pirate Captain stared at the Lovely Emma again. And suddenly everything clicked into place in his piratical brain.

  Figure 1

  Gigantic tail

  Colossal flipper

  Flirtatious mouth

  Spray from the blowhole

  The gentle echo of whale song

  Figure 2

  The banner from the Las Vegas show

  The Captain’s duvet put out to air

  Dead eel wrapped around the bow

  Burst waterpipe

  A moaning leper

  ‘The beast thinks our boat is a lady whale!’ he cried.

  There was a terrible creaking noise, and the Lovely Emma lurched this way and that.

  ‘I don’t think the boat is enjoying it all that much,’ said the pirate with a scarf.

  ‘But why would the man whale want to squash a lady whale like that?’ asked the albino pirate. The Pirate Captain didn’t think now was the moment to explain, because a horrifying thought suddenly flashed into his magnificent head: the Prize Ham was still nailed to the Lovely Emma’s mast.

  ‘My ham! My beautiful ham!’ roared the Pirate Captain. And before he had really thought things through, he found himself charging towards the Lovely Emma in a panic.

  ‘What on earth is the fellow doing?’ said Ahab, as the Captain streaked towards the boat.

  ‘He’s decided to show that whale who’s boss!’ exclaimed Jennifer. ‘Yay! Go Pirate Captain!’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be doing that too, Mister Ahab?’ said the pirate with long legs. ‘Because of all of the cold-revenge-soothing-the-soul business?’

  Ahab looked at the terrible gaping maw of the whale, and at its appalling chomping teeth. ‘For some reason,’ he said, ‘upon seeing the beast, I do not find myself so inclined.’

  ‘Is your Captain always like this?’ asked Cutlass Liz, shaking her head in disbelief.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the pirate in green confidently. ‘He’s very brave. He once took on the entire Royal Navy single-handed, whilst we were all asleep. They boarded us in the dead of night and stole our last few bottles of grog, and then the Pirate Captain fought them off but he was too late to save the grog. We didn’t even know a thing about it until the next morning when we realised the grog was gone and he explained what had happened to us over breakfast. The whole fight had given him a terrible headache.’

  About fifteen feet from the jetty, the Pirate Captain began to appreciate just how massive the white whale was. He himself was rightly famed across the Seven Seas for being able to fit an entire pork chop in his mouth, but the beast in whose shadow all the pirates now cowered looked as if it could fit an entire field of cows in its mouth all in one go, and maybe still have room to spare. Wondering just how wise it would be to interrupt something so gigantic right in the middle of it getting busy31 – even for a cause as noble as saving his ham – the Pirate Captain reconsidered and did his best to try skidding to a halt, but the cobblestones were even more slippery now, and instead of stopping, the Captain simply went sliding right off the side of the dock and into the cold sea with a plaintive ‘plop’.

  ‘Oh no,’ said the pirate with a scarf, looking on distraught. ‘I can’t bear to look.’

  The monstrous whale went on bouncing up and down on the boat. The onlookers gazed apprehensively at the churning sea, but there was no sign of the Captain.

  ‘Arrrr,’ muttered Ahab broodingly into the middle distance. ‘That was a brave way to go. The good Captain must have known his was a path that could end only with the hangman’s noose, or the murky depths of the ocean. Yet he paid it no mind! To risk everything in the pursuit of liberty and pleasure without constraint. Isn’t that the very reason why he chose the life of a pirate?’

  ‘Not really,’ said the albino pirate, fighting back the tears. ‘I think it was more just something to do.’

  The water in the harbour was very dark. Not for the first time it occurred to the Pirate Captain that, given his line of work, he really should have learnt to swim by now. At one point he had actually spent entire adventures wearing armbands just in case this kind of situation cropped up, but somehow it never really struck the right bloodthirsty note. He flapped his arms uselessly for a while and then started to sink like a brick. A piece of seaweed got tangled up in his beard, and a little shoal of fish bobbed past his face. He was trying to decide if he would prefer ‘A man like no other’ or ‘He was a true original’ as the inscription on
his gravestone, when he felt himself rush up through the water, break the surface, and fly through the air in a burst of spray. The white whale had waggled its great tail and flipped the Pirate Captain as if he were nothing more than a soggy pinball. He described a perfect piratical arc before coming thumping down onto the deck of the Lovely Emma. The Captain sat there for a moment, shook the kelp from his beard and looked about him in a daze.

  ‘He’s back!’ cheered the pirate in green.

  ‘And he’s not even hurrying,’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand. ‘I’d like to see Black Bellamy stay that nonchalant when his boat was being attacked by the biggest whale in the world.’

  As the Pirate Captain’s vision cleared, he saw that he had landed right next to the mast where his Prize Ham was still nailed. He staggered to his feet, pulled out the nail, grabbed the ham in both arms and gave it a big hug. ‘I’ll never leave you alone again,’ he promised in a hoarse whisper. The whale chose this touching moment to do a particularly energetic belly-flop onto the Lovely Emma’s aft, which sent her lurching sharply. The Pirate Captain hooked one arm around the mast and wondered what to do. He considered punching the whale on the nose, because he recalled something about that being their weak spot. But then he remembered how that might be sharks rather than whales. And also that it was probably apocryphal anyway. And of course whales don’t really have noses.

  The whale went on writhing about, half on the ship and half off. Its great twisted mouth was clashing and biting alarmingly close to the Pirate Captain now, and he swore he caught a glimpse of the remains of Ahab’s leg trapped in one of the sharp molars. The creature snapped its jaws shut barely inches from where he was standing, and the Pirate Captain let out a terrified shriek and leapt into the air. He landed with a squelch on the whale’s eyelid and clung on for dear life.

  ‘Did you hear that high-pitched roar of defiance as he jumped onto its face?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘That,’ said Ahab, ‘is the most courageous man I ever saw.’