Poiruts

One thing about living is Bristol is that everybody talks loike poiruts.

It's sometimes difficult to tell who is a pirate and who isn't. Fortunately, pirates have a lot of give-away signs such as wooden legs, parrots, hooks instead of hands, etc.

I decided to write a bit about pirates, to make up for my cartoon misdeeds of the last few days. But my opinion of pirates has changed - they were not nice people.

Take Black Bart, Barti Ddu, from the Welsh village of Casnewydd, Pembs. What I knew about him was that he was the most successful pirate ever. He only got caught in the end because he had so much treasure that his ships couldn't move.


But I'd thought he was a fairly cuddly sort of bloke - ships would surrender to him because they knew he abhorred cruelty and would treat them right.
He also wrote Bart's Articles, a code of behaviour for pirate crews and was the first pirate captain to have an Equal Opportunities policy and create diabled access to all parts of the ship (I'm making a bit of this up).

He loved music and had a classic ensemble on board his ship and a band of African drummers.
He'd get them all to play on deck when he went into battle.
So he was a pretty groovy kind of pirate; he'd go to Womad if he was alive now.


Well, those were his good bits. What I didn't know was that he was very involved in the slave trade and, the worst thing of all, there was an episode when he took hostage some ships full of slaves and demanded money for their release. When one captain wouldn't pay, Black Bart set fire to the ship with all the slaves still chained up on board. What a nasty man.I've gone right off him.

And Blackbeard, another Cymro but, unlike Bart, he was a total psycho.

He used to put fireworks in his huge black beard when he went into battle.
I don't know what it was with pirates, but they felt obliged to put on a bit of a show.

He was very cruel and did lots of bad things, but wasn't much of a success, piratically speaking.

There were also a couple of women pirate captains mentioned on Wikipedia that I hadn't heard of before.

They didn't mention Grace O'Malley (Gronya Wail in phonetic Irish), the Pirate Queen from the West of Ireland. She went to England and met Elizabeth I, but only on condition that she was treated like a visiting head of state, which she was.


Anyway, dear readers, please don't become pirates. It's not worth it and it's not big or clever.