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The 1,000’mile journey back to the Gold Coast was a nightmarish one for Captain Ogle and his men. It rained incessantly and the ships were buffeted continuously by typhoons which swirled out of nowhere and turned the sea into a seething cauldron, before disappearing just as suddenly. And the pirates were by no means resigned to their fate. Many were ‘impudently merry’, wrote Johnson, taking refuge in black humour. Still naked, and displaying a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, they complained that Ogle’s men ‘had not left them a halfpenny to give old Charon, to ferry them over Styx’. Eyeing their meagre rations, they joked that they would not be heavy enough to hang once they got to Cape Coast Castle.
My favorite bit from If a Pirate I Must Be…: The True Story of Black Bart, King of the Caribbean Pirates, which was a gift from my pal Katy (as noted on my Kindle shared-stuff page).
