A Feast Fit For A Pirate

 

Across the table from me, Captain Morgan Corbye impaled the steaming haggis with a skean dhu and allowed the scent of spice to fill the close confines of her cabin. Intensely proud of her Scottish heritage, Capt. Corbye had charged the ship's cook with delivering her St. Patrick's Day feast, and had poor John Peeke presented corned beef and cabbage, he would have been lashed severely. That your historian might have been asked to share in the meal was too distant a possibility to consider. I had already noted that there was but a single plate on the oaken boards. I only hoped that I could keep my stomach from growling while the Captain dined leisurely.

Between bites, the Captain gave into reminiscence and, in a moment of deep reverie, she spoke of her mother's love for the Isle of Skye. "'Twas frae there that me grandfer come," she said, and added under her breath, "Wrong side o' th' blanket, that one." When I assured her that most of us have bastards somewhere in our history, she gave a coarse laugh and intentionally misconstrued my meaning, saying, "Aye, an' there be a bloody lot o' them in th' Corbyes, 'tis no denyin'."

Peeke interrupted us then by placing a large bowl of neeps (turnips) in the center of the spread. Captain Corbye had gone so far a-woolgathering that she passed over the opportunity to reprimand him for the late serving. As if from the instinct of some half-remembered social convention, she pushed the vegetable across to me with the point of her knife. The moment gave me pause to wonder: who might Morgan Corbye have become had she not turned to piracy those years ago when she enlisted with Edgar Service?

The Harbourmaster's Error

The Harbourmaster gave Capt. Corbye a rude shove which sent her tumbling into the Winged Adventure's jollyboat and out of sight of the gathering crowd who had witnessed his escort of the saucy pirate from the pub. Their line of travel had been far from straight and between lurches port and starboard, the voice of authority could be heard informing the good captain that certain fees had not been paid, nor would her presence in the village be excused for any amount of gold and particularly not in her present state of inebriation. Coming partly to her knees, Corbye groped for her tricorn, not seeing where it had come to rest on the dock as it flew from her head during her fall. "I'll no' be departin' wi'out me bloody 'at!" she objected vehemently, only to have the Harbourmaster offer a kick toward her hand which missed and left a muddy imprint on the tricorn's upturned brim, noticeable when it came to rest on the thwart. Had he seen the spark kindle in her eye at that moment, the official would have found no comfort in his sudden disillusionment. Morgan Corbye was not drunk as he supposed, though to all events and purposes she seemed to be quite intoxicated as she fumbled to free the boat's painter from the cleat.

To say that Captain Corbye and Harbourmaster Beale were on less than friendly terms would be to put it mildly. Long had the captain known that the exorbitant tithes on incoming and outgoing goods were but in part governmental greed, and that only marginally more than half the docking levy ever reached the village coffers. Though Morgan Corbye was a pirate of the high seas, the worse villain was Beale, dry-shod landlubber he, with his permits and taxes and penalties slipped in substantial part into his own pockets. The very inn from which Captain Corbye had been ushered with such incivility was in fact foundering under Harbourmaster Beale's own avaricious and self-serving piracies.

A few days earlier, Captain Corbye had learned that a shipment of rum had been brought into port, a shipment on which Beale intended to capitalize. Initiating a surcharge of twenty percent above the official liquor tax, the government agent placed the goods marginally beyond the innkeeper's financial reach; thus the desperate proprietor, his cellar nearly empty, sought a loan from one of the village's more wealthy inhabitants. Harbourmaster Beale's wife's brother, no less mercenary than the Harbourmaster, set extortionate terms in regard to interest, terms which the innkeeper found so unreasonable that he was forced to turn down the contract and return to his place of business to make shift as best he could. When the pirate captain subsequently offered good gold for an evening's libations, the barman was compelled to inform her that no rum was to be had until Beale's greed was satisfied. Ever the champion of the downtrodden, Morgan Corbye listened raptly to his tale, her mind racing. In the next few hours, her plans to settle old scores with Harbourmaster Beale had been formed.

Thus it came about that upon the next evening while feigning insobriety, she allowed herself to be pushed and shoved and verbally abused as the bait she knew Beale could not resist. At the same time, her crew was hard at work to offload cases of liquor further down the docks, delivering them to the back door of the pub, untaxed save for an honorarium of bottles with which to supply the Winged Adventure's galley. Beale, however, had committed another insult against her in the kick he delivered to her hat, an offense which could not be let stand unavenged. Returning with her crew that same night, the pirate assisted the proprietor with relabelling his fresh stores as ale, and a crudely penned note was found upon the stoop of the local constabulary the following morning, informing representatives of civil law in the matter of the Harbourmaster's black-market trade in liquor. With an outbuilding on his property filled with empty rum cases, the evidence against Beale was singularly damning. Their tongues firmly in cheek, Captain Corbye and her crew pledged his good health in a toast of excellent rum as the Winged Adventure sailed out of port.