The Pirates!

[John_Young]

So the other day I was at home and the scruvy Fedex man came and dropped me off a treasure map.

Well this is strange thinks I since I hadn't been at the Bay of E and I don't think me first mate had been chatting with the Amazons lately, so what could it be?

The package had a terrible Roger on it and came from a well known publishing house. It twas addressed to my ship and myself. Interesting... so I tears it open and inside I find...

An interesting bit o pirate humor in the form of a 2 sided book called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists on one side and on the other The Pirates! In and Adventure with Ahab.

So I sat down and read it. Boy did it make this sea dog groan and laugh and shake me head. Pretty funny stuff, some of it even required me to remember my schoolin' as a boy.

In the Adventure with Scientists, the Pirate Captain (that's all they refer to him as) run afoul of Charles Darwin and are caught up in an adventure. I laughed when they named his pet bulldog Huxley (go on mates, Google Huxley and Darwin and you'll see what's funny).

In the Adventure with Ahab, they keep running into the grim feller many times including in Las Vegas when they decide to go into show business.

Ah good stuff indeed.

Now if the book is to believed (and it might not be considering it lists about 100 other books in the series) that it was first published in Mother England a few years back and that the Adventures with Ahab had another title and it was published the year after. So maybe that's true.

I don't know if it's true or not. But I think this Gideon DeFoe feller is funny if not extremely touched in the head. And I thank him or his publishing house for getting my crew's information off either the listing on the NQG website or the magazine. Glad they did.

[Cap'n Pete Straw]

I read the Pirates! adventure with the Scientists last year... I (and others) commented about it somewhere here on the Pub. Excellent funny book.

I will search out the Ahab one -- thanks for the heads up.

[Rumba Rue]

I just got my copy of 'Pirates' by George MacDonald on Saturday. I've heard so much about it, I just had to get it.

[Hester]

I read The Pirates! in an adventure with Whaling sitting in the sun on my deck drinking rum one afternoon this summer. I kept laughing aloud, so I had to read most of it aloud to my husband as well to let him in on the jokes.

I love the fact that Cutlass Liz sold pirate pedaloes [paddle-boats for us Canucks] among her fleet of ships.

Indeed, my current ship is an elderly paddle-boat, which we're constantly having to patch up with our trusty Bondo fibreglass kit. I left it tied to the dock in heavy waves and it got swamped, then it continued to rub against the bottom of the rusted metal dock stantion and wore a hole through the hull. The neighbour's daughters helped me bail and raise it, then my husband "careened" and "caulked" it. Next year, I'm going to christen it the Die Hard and attach a jolly roger. Never mind, it still gets me to the pub (a former marina) and back in [rather eccentric] style!

Cheers, Hester

[Hester]

One of the most charming conceits of Gideon Defoe's series The Pirates! is that none of his pirate characters have names, just descriptions, eg:

The pirate with a scarf

The pirate in red

The pirate with a pegleg

The pirate with asthma

The pirate who thinks he knows a lot about wine,

etc.

So, if you were a character in Defoe's novels, what would your description be? I think I'd be "the pirate with an extensive collection of silk scarves".

Cheers, Hester