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| Captain Vane "Black Sails" |
Many say well-written fiction
arises from non-fiction, especially well-researched historical topics. Though I write Dark Fantasy, I agree a little
research goes a long way in the definition of weapons, clothing, dialect, and architectural
design at the time, just to name a few descriptive points.
The first, brief example I’ll
use is the non-fiction book of the Countess of Carnarvon, the Lady Almina who
is Cora in “Downton Abbey.” The real
life character, an heir to a Rothschild fortune, lived a truly outstanding life
of luxury and travel, with tragedy of the loss of her husband after the opening
of the tomb of King Tutankhamen.
The main example for this
article is the lives of pirates. When I
started watching the Starz series “Black Sails” in a tweet I wondered when
Captain Vane would take a shower. (Yes,
actor Zach McGowan clearly works out).
As I thought past my snarky tweet, well, they do look pretty rough and it’s
not like that had ceramic tile bathrooms back then. Pirates spent a lot of time aboard ships, so
hygiene wasn’t so easy to come by.
As I continue to explore the
world of pirates, from series to books to classics, a topic mostly unknown to
me, I picked up the book “Pirates of Savannah” by Tarrin P. Lupo. He opens the story with life in 1700s London;
a miserable debtor’s prison, then life aboard a pirate ship sparing no details
of the goings-on beneath the deck or the punishments on deck. The freedom on
the seas was a hard life of filth, starvation, disease, while the challenge of
being Captain was questioned every moment, so the role required great physical
and psychological strength, regardless of the surroundings.
As he takes the reader
ashore, life gets only a little
easier. The southeast coastal region of the frontier North America was still
wild with dangers from insect carrying disease, more starvation, and
competition with land dwellers for life in a dangerous world where truly only
the strong survive and the very few prosper. Lupo spares little details about
people going years without a bath, and even more rare to have a warm bath with
soap. Food was never plentiful and every
friendship had a degree of condition in such a limited world where every man
and woman made decisions every day to try to live another day.
As I finish “Pirates of
Savannah” the book continues to take aboard more adventures, which I’m looking
forward to. Writers teach we readers and
the lives of the characters remain with us with every great story.
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