The Pirates! by Gideon Defoe

got wind of this.
    â€˜So what’s the plan, Captain?’
    â€˜We’ll simply do that trick of tying a couple of tin cans together with a piece of string,’ explained the Pirate Captain, ‘and then dangle one of the cans into the ocean so that the white whale is able to hear me read my novel aloud. Obviously I will do different voices for the various characters. It will be a lot like that business with Theseus and those Sirens – because of his sensitive soul the white whale will find himself drawn irresistibly towards us, and just as he’s finding his huge baleen heart touched to the very core by my meditations on love and fate, bang! We harpoon him through the brain.’
    The pirates almost all agreed that this sounded like a pretty foolproof plan.
    â€˜I’m very impressed, Captain,’ said the pirate with a scarf. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you to write an entire novel. It’s quite an achievement.’
    â€˜Oh, well, it’s only about thirty-one thousand words,’ said the Pirate Captain modestly. ‘Bit cheeky to call it a novel really.’
    The pirates fixed up the cans and string and then gathered around as the Pirate Captainmade himself comfortable on a barrel. He cricked his neck and cleared his throat.
    â€˜
The Pirate Of My Heart
,’ he began to read. ‘Chapter One: “Love Across a Moonlit Sea”.’
    â€˜Emerald was a proud, independent woman, fiery red locks of hair tumbling about her alabaster shoulders. She was free from that arrogant buccaneer, and she knew that fact should bring her only joy. But she could not help but think of his last words to her, those mischievous glittering eyes, and that firm, magnificent beard.
    â€˜â€œEmerald,” he had said, “you are a treasure! Just like a real emerald! But you are an Irish princess, and I am a Pirate Captain! One day I shall make you mine, but for now I must go, and plunder the Spanish Main …”

    â€˜â€¦ Emerald looked under her pillow, and there she found a single white rose, as well as a battered old eye-patch. So perhaps it hadn’t been a dream after all.’
    The Pirate Captain closed his book and all the pirates clapped. But even though Emerald had made the right decision to follow her feelings and not marry the swarthy Spanish Duke, there was still no sign of the whale.
    â€˜Not to worry, Pirate Captain,’ said the pirate in green. ‘It must be that whales are not so clever and sensitive as people make out. Because your story was very good.’
    â€˜Yes,’ agreed the pirate with long legs. ‘I especially liked the way Emerald learnt that the best way to get somebody to like you is simply to be yourself. Though of course it helps when yourself is a beautiful princess.’
    â€˜You enjoyed it then?’ asked the Pirate Captain. ‘Be honest though, because I really do value your opinions.’
    The pirate in red looked as if he was about to say something, but the Captain hadn’t quite finished. ‘When I say “honest opinion” I’d like you to bear two things in mind. One – I don’t take criticism particularly well at all, even the constructive kind. And two – I’m the Captain of this boat and I have an extremely sharp cutlass.’

    The pirates’ next plan was slightly less sensitive. ‘I once saw a man doing this in the Thames,’ explained the Pirate Captain with a wink to his second-in-command, as a couple of the pirates rolled a barrel of gunpowder off the side of the boat into the sea.
    There was a muffled explosion, and then a few dead fish floated up to the surface. The Pirate Captain looked a little put out. ‘But seeing as this is the ocean, which is a little bigger than the Thames, we might need a bit more gunpowder. Fetch us another couple of barrels, Number Two.’
    A plume of water splashed across the deck and a shower of fish and lobsters