Pirates of the Caribbean...

[fajrdrako]

No, I haven't found Captain Jack Sparrow and his men. Not yet. And really, this is just about the Pirates of George Town, on Grand Cayman Island.

I took photos of eight different pirates, which I encountered just wandering around the town. I'm pretty sure there are more of them. I got a kick out of them, and started taking their photo whenever I saw one.

My pirate collection:



The first was near the port, on a verandah. While I was trying to get a good angle on him, two women, obviously tourists, came up the stairs behind me. One of them started to laugh, and pointed to me and the pirate. "I thought this lady was taking a picture of her husband," she said. "I thought he was posing."





The next pirate brought to mind the dictum I learned in Antigua, St Lucia, and Barbados: that wherever you find a church in the islands, you will find a rum shop nearby. No one mentioned this to me in George Town, but this pirate bears out the pattern: next door to the Church of God, he was in front of a place selling duty-free and rum cakes. Rum cakes are delicious.





I liked this one's parrot, and his lantern. And the hat. And the scowl.



My seventh pirate was Big Black Dick, whose history was on a placard beside him:

It is believed that Big Black dick was born of 'Royal' African parentage before being kidnapped by French slavers who gave him the name of "Richard Le Noir". Unable to subdue his efforts to regain his freedom, his French captors, tossed Richard overboard near a Caribbean island, which may have been Grand cayman Island.

Miraculously reaching land, he served for several years laboring in a sugar cane field where he learned the secrets of how to turn the sugar cane into the Caribbean's finest rum. Dick also learned to cultivate the tobacco plants and hand craft the richest flavored cigars. His kindly Caymanian master recognized his hard work and honestly rewarded him his freedom in the early 1700's.

A free man and a skilled seaman, Dick tosses away his French name and became known as Big Black Dick. He soon earned the rank of captain of a three-masted square rigger named "Caymanus". She was a ship carrying 20 cannons with a crew of hear 200 men that were known as the best in the Caribbean.

History tells us that "Big Black Dick" was a dashing and handsome figure of a man, wearing a bright purple velvet coat and four pistols in his red sash. Those who knew him most intimately, knowhow much of a man he, indeed, was... possessing certain physical attributes unequaled by more 'all' other men of his gender.

After a successful career, Big Black Dick retired to a more peaceful venture of making the best original pirate rum and the finest hand made cigars in the Caribbean.

Though it's a different statue, it's obviously the same pirate as this one: