A Pirate's Life - Celia Rees

For the past couple of years, I've visited King Edward VI School, Handsworth, on or around World Book Day. The whole of Year 8 dress up as pirates, along with members of staff, and we have a jolly day of workshops in music, dance, drama, art and creative writing, all  based on my book Pirates! Lots of piratical fun.

I didn't write Pirates! as a dressing up option for World Book Day but I like to think I've made a contribution. A pirate outfit is easy to put together and ticks most of the boxes described by  Caroline Lawrence in her excellent History Girl post on 9th March, Dressing Your Hero.  

When Caroline asked fellow History Girls for World Book Day dressing up suggestions based on characters in our books, I naturally volunteered Pirates!  The pirate outfit is iconic and  instantly recognisable and there is a reason for every part of it. 

The skull and crossed bones is a universally recognised symbol of death. Its use stretches back to the Middle Ages and it still signifies poisonous materials. It was routinely used in the margins of ships' logs to make a death on board. This is probably where the pirates took it from. The black or red flag marked with the skull and cross bones was a potent warning to ships to heave to and surrender. 

Although the skull and cross bones was the generic flag,  pirates liked to personalise so that ships would know, not just that they were being attacked by pirates, but specifically  by Blackbeard or Black Bart Roberts, or some other notorious pirate. 

Pirate Flags

The dart pointing at a red heart on Blackbeard's flag, top left, meant no quarter. If there was any resistance, everybody on board would be killed.  Back Bart had two flags, the first (just below the centre), shows him drinking with death, the flag beneath shows him balancing on skulls representing Barbados and Martinique. He had a particular dislike for these islands and any ship hailing from either could expect no mercy. 

What about the rest of their clothes? Pirates liked dressing up. The flamboyance often associated with pirate captains came from their habit, when plundering a ship, of taking the richest clothes, velvets and silks, for themselves. 

Black Bart Roberts

Black Bart Roberts is described as wearing 'a rich crimson Damask Waistcoat and Breeches, a red feather in his Hat, a Gold Chain round his Neck with a Diamond Cross hanging to it...' (A General History of the Pyrates, Captain Charles Johnson). Pirates could also be extremely vain. Edward Teach (Blackbeard) is described as accustomed to twisting his signature beard 'with Ribbons, in small Tails.' (A General History of the Pyrates, Captain Charles Johnson).

Edward Teach - Blackbeard

It is not hard to see where Johnny Depp's look came from in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Johnny Depp - Captain Jack Sparrow

We owe the sartorial detail to this work: 

  

The author, one Captain Johnson, was really Daniel Defoe. He based his History on contemporary sources, interviews and letters. The History proved wildly popular and ran to several editions. It is still the best source book on pirates. Nearly everything in later books can be found between its pages and, because it was written by Daniel Defoe, it is as exciting to read as any novel. 

Daniel Defoe was the first to detail the adventures of these two most notorious pirates:

Ann Bonny and Mary Read

 'Most notorious' because they are women. This is a particularly telling image. They are depicted with their shirts open. We can clearly see they are women by their breasts. This is not an 18th Century version of page 3; it has a far more serious purpose. They have to be shown in this fashion because in every other way they are dressed like men. They are wearing the short jacket, loose trowsers, soft hat, and latched shoes of the sailors of the time.  Their breasts show them to be women; their weaponry - short, curved swords for fighting on board ship; several pistols for quick firing: axes for cutting ropes when boarding - shows them to be pirates. 

Original cover rough for Pirates!

I didn't have to go much further than Defoe's General History to find the descriptions I needed for my pirates, or for the reasons they dressed they way they did. Everything about their appearance tells us something. They dressed like sailors, because that is what they were before they became pirates and they would still be wearing the distinctive, practical clothing needed for life on board ship. The  major difference in appearance between a pirate and a sailor would be the weaponry the pirate had slung about him (or her). 

Even the most popular images of pirates tell us something about pirate life.  Take  Treasure Island's Long John Silver. His peg leg and parrot have become popular cliches but there are good reasons for both. 

Jim, Long John Silver and his Parrot, N.C. Wyeth

Parrots were routinely brought back by sailors from tropical parts, as pets or to sell. A broken leg was a common injury, sustained when falling from the rigging. The limb was often smashed so badly that it had to be amputated. For an ordinary sailor, this could mean the end of a life at sea and he might well be put off at the next port. A one legged sailor was of little use on board ship but pirates looked after their own. An injured pirate would be given compensation and kept on in some capacity, probably as cook. Similarly the iconic eye patch. Eye injuries were common from flying ropes'  ends but, again, a pirate blinded in this way could expect to be protected. 

'A short life but a merry one' was a pirates' saying and it was certainly a great deal better than life on board naval or merchant ship. Aside from the primitive health insurance, pirates could expect a fair share from any prize taken and it is no wonder many answered the call, who will go? The spoils could be enormous, pirates could live (and dress) like princes, but that has to be set along side the risk. Any pirate caught and sentenced could expect to share the fate of Captain Kidd.  

Captain Kidd gibbeted over the Thames at Tilbury Point

A short life but a merry one, indeed.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Road Goes Ever On... Celia Rees

So begins The Walking Song, composed by Bilbo Baggins and sung in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and sometimes in the Lord of the Rings. They do a lot of walking in both, so a walking song must have come in handy. Both books are quests and quests often involve a lot of journeying, often on foot, sometimes on horseback. Quests never seem slow moving, although the characters might move slowly. That is because being on the move allows things to happen. Journeying allows the characters to have new experiences; to learn more about the world and about themselves. 

Quests and journeying are most often associated with fantasy but they are the mainstay of all kinds of fiction. If you want things to happen, send your main character on a journey, voluntarily, or not. If they don't want to go, have them kidnapped.

I often take my characters on journeys. It gets them out of the house, out of their comfort zone, puts them on their mettle, presents them with new challenges, new places to see and new characters with whom they can fight or fall in love. In Witch Child, Mary goes to America and then off into the wilderness in Sorceress,. In Pirates! Nancy leaves Bristol for the West Indies and in the company of her friend Minerva, she sails the seven seas. In Sovay, the eponymous heroine journeys first to London and then to Paris.  In The Fool's Girl, Violetta travels from Illyria to London. I don't write about stay at home kind of girls.

Sending your heroines (or heroes) on journeys demands a certain kind of research: modes of travel (beyond shanks's pony), travel times - how long to x from y using z transport, where to stop on the way.  This, in turn, leads the writer to a certain kind of writing, in particular travel journals. It is always best to read a contemporary account of the kind of journey that you want your character to make if said account is available, particularly if it is written by an excellent writer, as these accounts often are. Daniel Defoe's  A Tour Thro' The Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies , for example, or Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes

Memorial to Celia Fiennes

Even if the intrepid traveler is not an exact contemporary of your fictional character, I always reason that, until quite recently, travel didn't change markedly for quite long periods of time. Fifty years here or there doesn't make a whole lot of difference. The detail and insights such writers provide are far more important than a slavish adherence to dates.

Research has introduced me to a whole new area of literature and one I have come to thoroughly enjoy, especially since I don't have to stir from chair or study to have the most fantastic adventures, visit places, landscapes, cityscapes, even countries that are not there any more. Books like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her account of her travels in Yogoslavia before the Second World War, or Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water where he describes his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, allow us to time travel, which is what the writer of historical fiction wants to do most of all.

 Books like these, or Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways make me want to pack an old knapsack like Bilbo Baggins and be on my way, off to find my own adventures, but if that's not possible,  and it rarely is, then reading about someone else doing it is the next best thing. The other best thing is writing about it: taking the journey in your own head, with someone like Patrick Leigh Fermor or Celia Fiennes guiding your every step.

Does anyone else have favourite travelling companions of a literary kind?



Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

But Is It True? - Celia Rees

I'm  surprised, and a little dismayed, by how many readers want to know if something I have written is true. It is as though readers want some, if not all, of what they are reading to be true, even if it is clearly not. 

Does this happen to anyone else?

Is it a growing trend?

As a writer of fiction, I find this hunger for the actual puzzling. Since Witch Child was first published, I've received a steady stream of letters and e mails asking if the story contained within the pages is true. Witch Child takes the form of a diary or, more accurately, pieces of a diary, written by a girl in the 17th Century and hidden inside a quilt. The quilt is discovered, conservators find the diary, it is collated and published as The Mary Papers. Neat idea, I thought. I was quite unprepared for readers searching fruitlessly online for more information - all roads lead to me - and then taking me to task for lying, duping the reader, making things up. Should I laugh or cry? Making things up is what I do! 

Witch Child is a book within a book. It is a story about a story. It uses the literary device of the 'found document', a tradition as old as the novel itself with a respectable literary history that stretches from Daniel Defoe to Margaret Atwood.

The 'found' diary in Witch Child couldn't possibly be a real diary  (I tell readers) because:

• Real diaries are usually full of trivial, mundane details of everyday life. Which is because they are diaries. Once you begin tinkering about, editing out this or that, adding things in to make something more exciting, you are actually beginning to write fiction.

• There ARE no existent journals or diaries written by young women at the time I've set Witch Child, which is a bit of a point in itself. 

• Even if there were, they would be almost unreadable by the modern reader because of the style and language, especially my readers who are 12+. 

So the answer to the Is It True question has to be:

No. I am a writer of fiction. Of course it's not true!

Or, to be more accurate:

No, well, not in the way you're thinking. It is made up, patched together out of many different truths. 

But really:

What is truth, anyway?

It is very difficult to have any entirely truthful account of anything. Everyone knows that eye witness accounts of the same incident can vary enormously. One person will notice one thing, someone else another. Even when an incident is forensically examined over and over again, as in the Madeleine McCann case, new versions of the same event keep being uncovered. Which is true? Perhaps all of them are, to some extent. Or none. Perhaps nobody saw, nobody knew for sure. Enter the omniscient narrator. Fiction can take all these inexact, fragmented view points and fashion them into a whole. When we are reading, we seek these patterns. Fiction can get to the essence of the thing, create a different truth. 

www.celiarees.com