A Pyrate Tale: Fifty Years In Port Royale

By Marty Price

Length: about 18,000 words. Many years ago, under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson, someone wrote a largely true tale of the Golden Age of Piracy. The pirates have since taken form in countless retellings of Johnson’s tales.
My rendition is fiction, and should not be mistaken for either history or legend. I’ve bent the characters and reshaped events and even geography to suit my ends. Those of you who glance at a history book or two will know that Port Royal was destroyed by a tidal wave before the end of the seventeenth century. My narrator spends almost the first half of the eighteenth century in a fictionalized Port Royale, where he listens as a succession of pirates tell their own tales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359789498

Book preview

A Pyrate Tale: Fifty Years In Port Royale

A Pyrate Tale: Fifty Years In Port Royale

By Marty Price

Copyright © 2019 by Marty Price

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2019

ISBN #: 978-0-359-78949-8

Windword Press

106 Dunbrook Drive

Starkville, MS 39759

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Dedication

To Rob,

who thinks I should have been a Pyrate

Preface

Many years ago, under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson, someone wrote a largely true tale of the Golden Age of Pyracy. In that General History of the Pyrates Daniel Defoe, for some scholars suggest the writer was Defoe, described the pyrates as anarchists and robbers. He did not suggest that the pyrates had any real political concerns. Some scholars say otherwise, linking at least a few pyrates to the cause of never crowned James III of England. The Old Pretender’s son was Bonny Prince Charlie, who attempted to gain at least the Scottish part of his throne in the Highlands Revolt. Both pyrates and Bonny Prince Charlie have provided fodder for more than a little Romance. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction to the modern strains of the Outlander saga, writers have given life to the chill, damp world of kilted warriors who joined Bonny Prince Charlie’s cause. As for pirates, they’ve taken form in countless retellings of Johnson’s tales and in more splendiferous apparel in Stevenson’s Treasure Island and every children’s tale or pirate yarn in any fashion based on Stevenson’s imagination or Johnson’s accounts.

My rendition is fiction, and should not be mistaken for history. I’ve bent the characters and reshaped events and even geography to suit my ends. Those of you who glance at a history book or two will know that Port Royal was destroyed by a tidal wave before the end of the seventeenth century and not all that long after Henry Morgan’s fancy funeral in Jamaica. That my narrator spends almost the first half of the eighteenth century in a fictionalized Port Royale is only the most extreme of my deviations from fact. Believe me, there are many.

My Edward Teach, Anne Bonney, Bart Roberts, and the rest are based on the historical figures, but I’ve deviated liberally from both history and legend. My narrator, Adrian, is purely fictional.

Fifty Years in Port Royale

This manuscript, dated 1929, was found in a book shop in Greenwich Village. Experts have verified its age. Of the author, Adrian, nothing is known.

Ch. 1: Port Royale

There is much to be seen in walking about this wide world. Humanity sprawling its trails and anthills over the land and even uses maps to mark trails across the seas. It may be asked if any portion of humanity were more insistently wandering, more committed to marking ephemeral boundaries on the surface of the earth and recording them on maps, than Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish claimed the Western Hemisphere, based on a few lost ships landing on a few subtropical islands. The English sent out their mariners, then settled people to the north: Raleigh’s Roanoke, Virginia above it, and Bradford’s New England north of that. Actual Spanish settlements extended north through Florida to a fort they called La Sabana. It ended with the trailing edges of the Appalachians, which also bounded the English colonies on their west. The Spanish claimed the continent’s coast as far north as the Grande River, and inland named their northern capital Cludad en Mexico. Between Mexico and Florida, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the French established New Orleans. Except for a few French settlements along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and the city of New Orleans, the rest of the continent remained – for a time -- in the hands of its older owners, a range of peoples the Europeans lumped together under the name ‘Indians.’

The French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese each made their own Caribbean claims, and all managed some little enclaves of violence among those first appropriated islands. None, perhaps, matched England’s Jamaica, where distilled cane rum mingled with stolen Spanish gold and slavers bearing human cargo – together the trade goods of hell. The capital of that little island, at least the one where Henry Morgan held sway, was Port Royale – for nearly a hundred years it vied to prove itself the wickedest city on the face of the earth. I visited it and found it wicked enough – yet through all my conversations, through every story I heard, I found human beings. I did not find a single imp or demon among them, though more than a few of the seafarers tried mightily to be such, and even the best intended were intimate with one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins.

But what sort of judge am I? I merely went from being one who walks up and down to one who lingers in the shadows of that single city. I met humans I felt for, others I disliked, and even some who seemed struggling to like themselves. When I first set foot in the ‘wicked city’ of Port Royale, Henry Morgan governed Jamaica from his plantation at the edge of the city and James II ruled England and its budding empire. 

A few months later James II was unseated