With his one good eye he surveyed the line of trees about twenty yards away while his parrot, Peggy, who was perched upon his shoulder pecked at the cord which held the patch over his other eye. With the hook on his hand Mc. Phee pushed Peggy away, so she took instead to biting his earring. But why did we think all pirate crews had an old sea cook with a wooden leg, a captain with a parrot and at least one hook and two eye- patches elsewhere in the crew? We might dismiss tales of buried treasure and comedy . The most important source for our fictional pirates having parrots is of course Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, where we are introduced to Captain Flint, Long John Silver's companion. The impact which Stevenson's creations have had on our conception of pirates is well illustrated, and further enhanced, by the characters of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and subsequent books. That Uncle Jim has a parrot and a cannon only confirm the children's suspicions that he is a retired pirate. The link with Treasure Island is further shown when the Blacketts and Walkers give Uncle Jim the nickname . Stevenson's Captain Flint shrieks . In Treasure Island Long John Silver offers his parrot to young Jim Hawkins, fearing that a prison would be no place for a wild bird, and in Swallows and Amazons Uncle Jim gives Polly to Able Seaman Titty saying it would be much better for a parrot to be around young people than with a retired pirate like himself. Exotic pets were certainly popular amongst sailors, if for no other reason than the high price they could command in the European markets, and parrots were especially popular, perhaps because they could be taught to talk. Several probate inventories of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries list parrots or parrot cages amongst the possessions of seamen, but most importantly perhaps is the description of parrots to be found in William Dampier's journal of his circumnavigation in which he describes the parrots of Campeachy Bay as . Since that time the pirates of popular culture have often been depicted as one legged, one eyed, or missing a hand (the film Cutthroat Island for example features characters missing each of those appendages), and the clunk of a wooden leg on a deck is a sound indelibly associated with pirates. Barrie we tend to forget that such primitive prosthetics as a wooden leg or hook might be found on any law abiding citizen as well. Wooden legs are perhaps the most interesting of these prosthetics, for their origin in myth is more obscure than their true history. Contrary to popular belief Long John Silver did not have a wooden leg, he hobbled along on one leg and a crutch, the idea of a false leg perhaps came from that other great fictional seafarer Captain Ahab of Melville's Moby Dick. However, the use of wooden legs by historical pirates is well documented. The sixteenth century French buccaneer Francois le Clerc was nicknamed . Buried treasure is probably the most common and enduring theme for books and films about pirates since Robert Louis Stevenson put pen to paper and drew the first map of Treasure Island in 1. Welcome to NSM - Right Music Portal. Here you can download old and new albums of bands playing RAC, NSHC, NSBM and other music styles. A dramatization of Steve Jobs visiting Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 and noticing the idea of the WYSIWYG, the mouse-driven graphical user. Buy a wide selection of Ultimate Quality adult Halloween costumes and styles for sale online. Get info and prices on Ultimate Quality costumes and ideas for 2013. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. To The World Punk Rock Pioneer. Bellamy the Hyena is the former captain of the Bellamy Pirates, and a former member of the. AOL has the latest sports news and breaking sporting headlines from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NASCAR, MLS, World Cup Soccer and more! In Swallows and Amazons more parallels with Treasure Island emerge when Roger and Titty go hunting for treasure on Cormorant Island, this time the heavy sea chest which burglars have hidden after stealing it from Uncle Jim's houseboat. In Peter Duck, the sequel to Swallows and Amazons the Walkers, Blacketts and Uncle Jim search for buried pirate treasure in the Caribbean. Several versions of Treasure Island have been made of course, including the 1. Robert Newton and the 1. Charlton Heston. Cutthroat Island starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine is a tale of a race to find buried treasure in an uncharted island and recover it before the villain of the piece, Dog Adams (played by Frank Langella). Most recently Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean concerns a treasure hidden in caves on yet another uncharted island. Unless there is a very good reason for keeping treasure hidden it is a waste , not only of time but also of the treasure itself, to bury it. Very few pirates ever amassed such a fortune that it needed to be buried when it could be far better employed in the taverns and brothels of the Caribbean or America. In addition it should be remembered that most pirate booty did not consist of gold and silver bars, but saleable goods such as silks and other fabrics, tobacco, spices, and slaves. The cargoes which the pirates stole were generally of little value until they could be taken into a port and sold. Occasionally pirates and privateers might capture a large quantity of gold or silver, but such successes were rare. In 1. 57. 3 the greatest of all the Elizabethan sea rovers, Francis Drake carried out a legendary attack on the mule trains carrying silver from the Spanish mines of South America across the Isthmus of Panama to the Caribbean from where it would be transported to Europe. The mule trains were carrying somewhere in the region of 1. Drake's men could not hope to carry such a weight back to their ships. They loaded as much as they could, buried the rest and set out for the coast to rejoin their vessels, which had unfortunately been forced out to sea by the arrival of powerful Spanish ships. Drake and his men buried the rest of their treasure and made a raft on which they put to sea to rejoin their ships. The same night the English ships returned to the shore and recovered the buried treasure. Kidd knew he was a wanted man and was fully expecting to be arrested, but was sailing to New York to visit his friend and supporter Governor Bellomont, with whose help he hoped to get away with his piracy. Kidd was not a clever man but he was sensible enough to know that if he needed to negotiate with Bellomont then his treasure would be a valuable bargaining counter. It was therefore important that his treasure did not fall into Bellomont's hands if he was arrested, so he made efforts to hide his loot on the islands at the mouth of New York harbour. When Kidd met Bellomont he gave him a detailed list of the treasure he had brought with him and told him where some of it was buried, but at their second meeting Kidd was arrested and eventually sent for trial in England. Bellomont recovered the treasure which Kidd had told him about, but this proved to be worth only . Long Island and Gardiner's Island were scoured but no more treasure was found. In England Kidd refused to reveal the whereabouts of any more of the treasure and when he was hanged in May 1. In the time since Kidd's execution treasure hunters have continued to search the islands for Kidd's lost treasure, but to no avail. It is of course possible that one or more of Kidd's friends, such as the Gardiners of Gardiner's Island knew the location of the treasure and quietly recovered it themselves. Equally possible is that there is no more buried treasure to be found: it would have been in Kidd's interest to exaggerate the amount of treasure available to Bellomont so if he promised . The following day the boy came back full of expectations of buried treasure and armed with a shovel, but discovered nothing more than a pit too deep for him to fully excavate. For more than two hundred years others have tried to reach the bottom of the so called . There are theories a- plenty about the origin of the money pit; some suggest that the remains of Kidd's loot lies at the bottom, or that the treasure from a mid- seventeenth century Spanish shipwreck, recovered by the English in the 1. Less sensible speculations include theories that the money pit was dug by aliens or that the treasure of the Knights Templar (possibly including the Holy Grail itself) is to be found there. The enormity of the project suggests work lasted several months at least, probably several years, which makes it unfeasible that it might be Kidd's treasure. We are left then with fewer and fewer possibilities, and must ask ourselves why anyone would undertake an engineering project lasting such a long time to bury some sort of treasure which might easily be hidden in a hole dug in a day. The truth about the Oak Island money pit is that there is no real evidence to show that anything at all is buried at the bottom, let alone pirate treasure, and indeed some serious investigators doubt the existence of the shaft at all. We will probably never know who dug the pit or why, the only certain thing about Oak Island is that credulous treasure seekers will continue to bankrupt themselves trying to find an treasure hoard which probably isn't there. Walking the Plank The origins of walking the plank are lost in the mists of time, but it is fair to say that for the last century or so at least it has been as popular pirate motif as buried treasure. By 1. 93. 0 when Ransome wrote Swallows and Amazons it was firmly enough established as the favourite pirate method of execution that the Blacketts and younger Walkers thought it was the logical conclusion to their capture of Uncle Jim's houseboat. In almost every film from Cutthroat Island to Carry On Jack somebody has been made to edge their way along a narrow plank before falling into the deep below them. Pirates sometimes employed a torture known as . More cruel perhaps were the pirate crew who in 1. Victims of the pirates who refused to reveal the whereabouts of their possessions or treasure if they had any could expect to be tortured until they told the pirates of its whereabouts. Placing lighted tapers between a victim's fingers was a torture used by a number of pirates including the sixteenth century Stephen Heynes and the eighteenth century Edward Low, Heynes in fact was so cruel that on one occasion his crew of battle- hardened cutthroats begged him to stop torturing his victims as they themselves could stand to watch no more. Women were not exempt from pirate cruelty either, for when Avery captured the Gang I Sawai his men repeatedly raped all the women on board, even the elderly.
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