The Pirates! by Gideon Defoe

Author:Gideon Defoe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2005-11-10T22:00:00+00:00

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.

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