Several centuries later, as New World riches turned Spanish galleons into slow-moving treasure troves, it was the Caribbean that inspired similar tales of breathless horror and futile prayers. Islands such as Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Tortuga became treacherous enclaves for runaway slaves, French deserters, British privateers, Norwegian sailors, and escaped convicts of every nationality, creed, and color, all of whom banded together to form the highly skilled, thoroughly debauched, undoubtedly pitiless, and, consequently, most famous pirate crews the world had yet known. But, while cities and ports throughout the Caribbean staked their economy, and sometimes their sovereignty, on the brutality and excess of high-seas outlaws, not one was tagged with the "Barbary Coast" epithet; that dubious honor was preserved for a small, fog-enshrouded town on the Pacific coast.
"The Barbary Coast," wrote Benjamin Estelle Lloyd in his 1878 chronicle, Lights and Shades of San Francisco, "is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where bleary-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs, and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also."
The Barbary Coast of Lloyd's observation curled along the edges of one of the finest natural deep-water harbors in the world, but that was not its allure. There was gold in them thar hills. San Francisco was a sudden city raised by adventurers, crooks, misfits, and outcasts, a community comprised entirely of coarse men seeking easy money and coarse women of easy virtue. It was a pirate town -- if not in practice, in spirit -- so the "Barbary Coast" epithet took and the renegade ideology seeped into the stone.
My first contact with the Pyrate Punx took place in 1999 on the shores of Lake Lagoda. "Thar be pirates!" read the nearly indecipherable map to Libertatia. And there were pirates indeed: Dressed in faded hues of tattered black, with bandannas tied around their heads, silver hoops thrust through their ears, and bluish tattoos etched across their suntanned skin, they stood in the lake fully clothed, up to their knees, cradling a bottle of rum and singing "Drunken Sailor" at the top of their wind-cracked voices. I was duly intimidated and inevitably beguiled.
The Pyrate Punx were formally, but loosely, established in 1997 by Cap'n Blackdawg -- a San Francisco native -- and his punk-rock compatriots, Calaveras Grande and Crocked Mouth, for the purpose of staging unsanctioned, free concerts throughout the Bay Area. Over the years, they've pulled off hundreds of illegal "engagements." Punk rock, heavy metal, and sea chanteys are the common tender, and antiestablishment counterculture is the creed.
The annual campout to which I was willingly subjected is a weeklong music festival and Pyrate Punx utopia inspired by the principles set forth in A True History and Account of the Pirate Captain Mission (His Crew and Their Colony of Libertatia Founded on People's Rights and Liberty on the Island of Madagascar), an oral history recounted by one Larry Law. There, as at all Pyrate Punx events, denizens are afforded equal vote in all matters of the common good; booty (usually in the form of castoffs from The Man) is seized and shared equally, even while theft from their own is forcefully discouraged; and music is held in highest esteem, eclipsing even the pyrates' love of strong liquor and cheap beer. (So devoted are the Pyrate Punx to the dream of Libertatia that when federal land for the event was unavailable last year, they camped out on an industrial beach in San Francisco, plying the authorities with hotdogs and ribald tales when they deigned to investigate the somewhat toxic site.)
For a long while, it seemed the Pyrate Punx flew the only pirate flag in town. There were rare occasions when the Jolly Roger fluttered proudly over Islais Creek, where the captains of Cyclone Warehouse sometimes offered barge rides and pirate-led sing-alongs, but year-round picarooning was the bastion of a more rugged breed, and almost anyone wearing the "Articles of Agreement" on a T-shirt was sure to be from the Pyrate Punx camp. Then things began to change. I started to notice an incursion of skull-and-crossbones T-shirts, fliers, and patches; pirate flags appeared mysteriously in apartment windows around my neighborhood; there was a mounting interest in sea songs, a propensity for co-workers to slip "Aarrgh!" into casual conversation, and a growing acceptance of short pants and pantaloons.
In 2001, my childhood friend Jessica Louise Thompson, an occasional tattoo model and superb clothing designer, married Broadway Jungle Records C.E.O. Max Ginnis aboard the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney Land. She wore red; he wore stripes; both mothers were in attendance. A year later, Captain Toast, a San Francisco architect, and the Dread Pirate Jillian, a designer and sometime photographer for SF Weekly, organized their nuptials around a citywide treasure hunt, for which pirate attire was mandatory. Upon arriving, guests received clues and "letters of marque" from the King and Queen of Spain, which led them on a somewhat larcenous adventure that ended on Baker Beach, where Toast and Jillian were wed by a man dressed as Neptune amid dismembered limbs, hammocks, pirate flags, skeletons, treasure, and stacks of cannonballs.
This was how I learned about the pirate store on Valencia, which sells peg legs, eye patches, and lard. (It would be some time before I discovered this was a front for Dave Eggers' community writing program.) In the same year, Geoff Ellsworth of the Towne Dandies staged an ingenious one-man pirate musical called That's What Pirates Gotta Do, which played the Odeon more than a half-dozen times. A short time later, Bryan Rhodes wrote and staged The True History of Anne Bonney and Mary Reade, which required 10 actors and an original score of four sea songs. Suddenly, I was seeing evidence of freebooters on every street corner, and every fashion hound in town was proudly displaying a Jolly Roger.
"Shhhh! Pirates are the new monkeys!" wrote Rhodes in an e-mail, referring to the simian trend upon which designer Paul Frank has so ruthlessly capitalized. I was drawn up short.
It's true. Pirates are slowly, but surely, replacing monkeys in the pop culture rumpus room. And this is not the first time I've heard it mentioned.
"I told Rhodes pirates are the new monkeys," clarifies Walter Askew, singer for Salty Walt and the Rattlin' Ratlines, a group that performs sea chanteys at the Edinburgh Castle on the last Sunday of every month. "I read it in a comic book, but the question is not, "Why pirates?' but, "Why monkeys?'"
As a sometime maritime museum guide with an English Lit degree that focused on folklore, Askew has plenty of theories as to the legitimate reasons the pirate aesthetic might resonate with present-day San Franciscans.
"We all have that image from the 1950s of everyone playing cowboys and Indians, but during the Depression, kids were absolutely mad for Treasure Island," explains Askew. "In a depressed economy, when our society is growing simultaneously more prone to, and more afraid of, violence, pirates offer a release valve, an inoculation if you will. It's a way to engage in fantasies of exploitation, exploration, and violence at a safe distance."
David Ponkey, a professional storyteller who works as a counselor for severely abused children, agrees. "How many cool things die is the rubric by which most kids judge a story," says Ponkey. "But pirate stories also play with gray areas that appeal to adults. A pirate is at once a hero and a villain, a rugged individualist who strikes out on his own and a thieving cutthroat. To the English, Sir Francis Drake was a national hero, but to the Spanish, he was the most notorious pirate ever encountered. In a time when a lot of those ambiguities exist, pirates are sure to become very attractive."
"Pirates are the thinking man's monkey," states Ryan Yount, author of the essay "Pirates Are the New Monkeys," which is included in the first issue of Scurvy Dogs, a comic book which he and video game producer Andrew Boyd wrote early this year, just in time, they say, to exploit the brewing pirate zeitgeist.
"I mean, sure, monkeys will always be funny," says Yount, stretching out on a stylish couch in Isotope: The Comic Book Lounge, where he works part time, "by virtue of the fact they are, well, monkeys. But pirates. Pirates have a whole world to draw from.
"Think about it: A monkey puts on clothes, and it's funny. A monkey gives you the finger, pulls out a gun, eats his own shit, it's funny. Pirates can do all that, and more. Pirates are very easy to adapt to humor."
The evidence is Scurvy Dogs, an account of the side-splitting misadventures of Blackbeard and his crew while they are marooned in present-day San Francisco.
While it may not be easy to maintain pirate cred in the face of modern maritime law, the digital economy, and Internet dating, in the cartoon, the Scurvy Dogs gang gives it a good shot, depending on historically accurate facts that, in a modern setting, appear far more ridiculous than fiction. For example, Blackbeard had a habit of lighting gunners' matches in his beard to intimidate his foe -- which, in this case, might be his corporate boss.
"It's all about juxtaposition," says Yount, "but, really, pirate jokes just write themselves. STDs might not be funny anymore because, well, we all have them, but scurvy, that's always funny."
"Yargh! Give me a citrus wedge with that drink. Me gums are bleeding," says Boyd, taking a sip of his cocktail. The young men chuckle, casually riffing off one another. By the end of our hour-long conversation, they've generated no fewer than four story lines to add to the seven Scurvy Dogs issues they'd already plotted. All the concepts are funny, and not just because of the pirate voice.
"Hopefully, we'll get a couple years of good pirate humor before Long John Silver's decides it's time to expand."
"The pirates of our fantasies have a devil-may-care attitude that is really appealing," says Rhodes as he counts the third pirate-flag T-shirt to pass by in the space of 30 short minutes.
"That one was a Calico Jack," he offers as an aside, before continuing: "But pirates were the founding fathers of the world's first democracies, a mix of races and nationalities fighting against governments and corporations, whom they saw as the greater pirates ... [E]ach man vowed to a strict code of business and conduct. This was in addition to any Articles of Piracy drafted as a constitution, or agreement, between a ship's captain and his crew.
"Theirs was a society that was defined by itself, not by one church or one flag. They explored and assimilated world cultures, taking what they liked and leaving the rest. Just look at the music."
It was typical for most pirate articles of agreement to include a declaration that shipboard musicians were allowed one full day of rest. It was a necessary assurance. Sea chanteys were the work songs used on square-rigged ships during the Golden Age of Sail -- their rhythms coordinated the efforts of sailors hauling lines or raising anchor, which could take hours -- but the pirate's love of song was unparalleled, even among seamen. Apparently, it still is.
Taking a seat on the bare planks below deck on the 1895 schooner C.A. Thayer, I watch as would-be pirates begin to arrive for the "Chantey Sing," which the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park has hosted every month since 1981. The sea music community is informal and cozy, but its participants are devoted. With couples like Thad Binkley and Phyllis Jardine having returned every month for over 20 years, and people like Jerry and Bev Paver coming from as far as Cambria to join in the chorus, it's not surprising that more than a few children have grown up on the Thayer. As is customary, the families arrive first, with their children wrapped in sleeping bags, to stake out floor space and set up camp. Meanwhile, in the galley, park volunteer Alice Watts prepares hot mulled cider, tea, coffee, and cocoa. As the berth fills with sailors' caps and snow-white beards, chantey leader Peter Kasin begins to sing; by the second chorus, everyone has picked up the tune. The first three hours of the sing are devoted exclusively to chanteys, a cappella sing-alongs with numerous repetitive choruses, and everyone is invited to lead at least once, regardless of his or her current state of memory or voice. After 11 p.m., when the families have gone home to tuck their children, the sing becomes more casual, allowing room for x-rated chanteys and fourbitters, the ballads sailors sing in their off hours. While a number of regulars come armed with fresh songs and lyric books, it's the relative newcomers who steal the evening: 34-year-old Carleen Duncan, with her achingly beautiful treatment of "Nancy of Yarmouth," and 22-year-old Joni (who wouldn't give a last name) with her sex- and sweat-laden "Friggin' in the Riggin'" and her utterly rousing rendition of "Run Come See Jerusalem."
Joni, a onetime drummer for several Michigan punk bands and a salty wench through and through, is no stranger to the sings, or to the Pyrate Punx, but L.J. Quinn's Lighthouse in Oakland is where she belongs.
Quinn's is a small, crowded bar perched over the Oakland estuary where whiskey flows like water and peanut shells cover the floor. It is also home to a loose confederacy of five folk singers who have heard the call of the sea and turned feral. Calling themselves Starboard Watch, these silver-haired rapscallions dress in black, drink like demons, and growl and hoot through classics like "We'll Rant and We'll Roar." All told, the players have been together between 10 and 20 years, performing for fans who show their devotion by hurling peanut shells and contributing thundering baritones, and they are nothing short of amazing.
Skip Henderson, the blurry-eyed captain of the schooner parked at the dock below, is Starboard's principal singer. Jim Nelson, the banjo-playing devil with the fresh sailor tattoo, has a voice worth gold. Together, they're good enough to keep a ghost ship hopping. But by 10 o'clock at Quinn's, most of crowd and much of the band is three sheets to the wind, so the quintet packs up and divides the love offerings gathered in their tip jar. (Henderson recently sold his song, "Billy Bones" to the upcoming Johnny Depp feature, Pirates of the Caribbean, but, looking at the take, pirate songs don't generally feed the kitty.) They tip their hats and smile.
Looking for a ride to BART, I follow behind Bill Jansen, a longtime Starboard Watch fan who comes up from San Jose every week with his best friend, Al Magness, and his two grandchildren -- 2-year-old Ethan and 5-year old Mason -- just to sing along.
"In warm weather, we all just sleep on the boat and have breakfast at Quinn's in the morning," says Jansen as we walk down the dock.
We climb aboard a small sailboat called the Stray Cat and make room for John Blakemore, who also needs a ride home. Exhausted by the night's revelry, the children curl up in their life jackets and pass out with their cheeks pressed on the cool cabin walls. The men begin to sing "Black Velvet Band," their euphonic tones drifting into the night as we slice through the inky water. In the distance, city lights shimmer like mermaid scales and the stars quiver. The men pass around flasks and talk among themselves about the ship they are building and the commission they have to sail a friend's boat up the coast; contented exclamations of "aargh!" roll off their lips at every opportunity. They point out the pearls of Orion's Belt and sing another song as we glide through the lanes of Blakemore's quiet houseboat neighborhood. They serenade one of their friends recently returned from Quinn's, but, having a lady friend aboard, he does not join in the chorus. Saying farewell to Blakemore, we ease back into open water, and I begin to feel the pirate in my veins.
"What's a pirate's favorite letter?" asks Jansen.
"Aaaar!" we respond with gusto.
