by Michael Cox
‘Er, how about fish ’n’ slivers?’ said Captain Codswallop.
Footnote
1NB: Important health and safety note: just in case you don’t know, ‘dob’ means to tap someone lightly, not run them through with a cutlass or chuck them out of the crow’s nest.
A Word from the Author
I wrote this story because, about 50 years ago, I used to be a pirate … but only on Wednesday afternoons.
When our PE teachers were in a good mood, they’d let us play a great game called ‘Pirates’. We’d put out all the big gym apparatus, such as dangly ropes, criss-cross rigging, planks and whatnot so that the whole lot ended up looking like two dirty, great pirate ships and someone would be picked to be the ‘pirate’. They had to try and ‘dob’1 everyone else as they scrambled up and down the rigging and leapt from boat to boat, yelling and bellowing like batty buccaneers. If you fell into the sea (or ‘hall floor’, as boring people called it) or got dobbed, you had to join the pirates and it all carried on until only one person was left undobbed and they were the winner.
I also used to be a highwayman, but I didn’t have a horse, so I had to rely on boy called Darren Dobbs, who would gallop after local stagecoaches (i.e. the bin men’s lorry and the milkman’s horse and cart) with me on his back, but only if I fed him sugar lumps and carrots.
The other reason I wrote the story is because of my interest in history and sillyness. You can’t always trust history books and people always give their own version of a historical event, usually the one that makes them look really good. It occured to me that Sir Francis Drake may well have defeated the Spanish Armada with a bit of help from someone like Captain Codswallop, but preferred to take all the credit himself. After all it is only history (or his story?).
Reprinted 2008
First published 2006 by
A & C Black
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP
www.acblack.com
This electronic edition published in March 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © 2006 Michael Cox
Illustrations copyright © 2006 Kelly Waldek
The rights of Michael Cox and Kelly Waldek to be
identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively
have been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978 1 4081 5337 6
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
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