Peace reigned again on Smuggler’s Bay. Well, for the time being, at least.
Chapter 1
What’s in a Name?
Several years and a few new magistrates later, Little Jane was long past the point of believing her father had once metamorphisized into a tree. She was twelve now and fairly content with most things in her world. Fairly content with most things, that is, except her name.
From her earliest days, Little Jane Silver knew the power a mere name could command. Of her parents it was said that the stoutest hearts in King George’s navy trembled at the names Long John Silver and Bonnie Mary Bright; the ruddiest complexioned sailor’s cheek paled upon hearing the tales of their brazen acts of piracy; even the mightiest of warships sat uneasy in her moorings at the slightest rumour of the return of the Pieces of Eight.
But Little Jane? Feh! How she’d grown to detest that name! Well, the “Little” part of it, anyway.
For Jane Irene Amelia Silver, it felt like a curse, one she’d been trying to shake for years. She was certain she’d had precisely a million and one conversations with her parents over the matter, yet nothing changed.
“Why must everyone call me that?” Little Jane would start with her parents.
“Call you what?” her mother would reply, spitting her quid over the railing.
“Little Jane. Why does everybody have to call me little?”
“Well, you are the smallest one aboard,” her father would point out helpfully and Little Jane would make a very frustrated sound in the back of her throat and say, “I’m not little anymore. I’m nearly as tall as Ishiro! Can’t you command them to call me something else?”
“What? Like Turnip?” her father innocently inquired.
“Colin the Cornish Dachshund?” asked her mother with equal aplomb.
“You’re not taking this seriously at all!” Little Jane would snap at them.
“Hmmm … Did I ever tell you the story of what happened to the little village of Cheesestink-on-the-Thames when its mayor decided to change its name to Happy Cottage-on-the-Wold to attract more visitors?”
“NO!” Little Jane would shout before stomping off to their quarters.
Whenever she brought the subject up, even if her father did not by some miracle have another unlikely story about the bad luck of changing one’s name to tell her, there always seemed to be some work or disaster that needed immediate tending to. “I’m sorry, love, the parrot’s thrown up on me coat again,” her mother would say, or “what are you doing yammering around here when that spanker sail is loose and like to go overboard if no one tends to it,” or “Oh my! I think we’re being fired on by the Dutch Navy!” and any other manner of silly things which Little Jane saw as blatant excuses for them to avoid the subject.
Then some annoyingly precise person might point out that Little Jane wasn’t the only one onboard with a nickname. There was “Sharpeye” Sharpova and “Lobster” Duncan and, of course, Long John and Bonnie Mary themselves.
However, Little Jane knew for a fact that Lobster Duncan had been a real lobster fisherman before taking up piracy. Sharpeye Sharpova was the lookout, which explained his moniker. As for Long John and Bonnie Mary’s nicknames, they were misnomers anyway.
She knew the name “Long John” had really been her grandfather’s name to begin with. Her own father wasn’t particularly long or tall. He had taken the name because of the notorious enemy-scaring reputation that came with it. Her mother simply called him “Jim,” which Little Jane supposed was his real name.
As for Bonnie Mary, stopping a scimitar’s stroke with her face fifteen years ago had not endowed her with the sort of conventional good looks one saw among the fashionable ladies of London, but as a youth she had indeed been quite a “bonny” or beautiful young woman, and charmed many a dashing young sailor, Little Jane’s father included.
Little Jane, on the other hand, really was little: little in size, little in years, little in experience, but worst of all, little in the respect and estimation of the crew. She was twelve years old now, but still no one treated her like much of a real pirate. If only someone would give her a chance to prove herself, she thought, she’d show them what a true buccaneer she was! Too bad her parents were unreasonably disinclined to give her a taste of anything even remotely fun or dangerous. Whenever it even looked like they might come under attack, it was always “Down below, Little Jane, and don’t let the door hit you in the bum on the way in!”
Despite her frustration with their too-cautious nature, she knew enough about her parents to realize that they had a few solid reasons for their hesitation. Her mother Bonnie Mary had not been young when she’d had her only daughter. Such was the capricious nature of life at sea that Little Jane was the only one of all Bonnie Mary’s pregnancies to survive the womb. To her parents, Little Jane’s survival was considered a precious miracle. She was a precious gift to be treasured and protected. It was just her misfortune that in their line of work, there was such a lot to protect her from.
It is well-known that the environment an individual grows up in is what he or she will simply assume to be the norm until the rest of the world proves otherwise. Even if, for example, you were raised in a flying soup tureen by a gaggle of performing geese, it might take years for the realization to dawn that you might have been raised in a highly unusual fashion indeed. In fact, you would probably assume such a life was yawningly ordinary, at least until you were older and had tasted a little of world outside.
By the same token, knowing little of life outside the Pieces, it was quite some time before Little Jane came to realize how truly singular her upbringing had been.
In Little Jane’s world, work and play followed the passage of the seasons, with the temperate and unhurried nature of much of life in the Caribbean. Her family spent the warm, sunny months pirating and smuggling, and the cold, rainy season on Smuggler’s Bay refitting the ship.
Upon their return, the captains of the Pieces of Eight would only ever bring a small part of their loot back to Smuggler’s Bay. They didn’t need much to live on in the chilly months of squall, and they were smart enough to know that any surplus of gold they brought with them to town would most likely end up squandered on trifles. In common with many pirates, Bright and Silver had an embarrassing weakness for shiny objects.
As they held no truck with banks (they had robbed the ships of such institutions enough over the years to learn that much), they preferred to secret away the year’s ill-gotten gains in a carefully hidden spot before heading back to Smuggler’s Bay for the rainy season. Thus, all the loot that could be spared, all items that would not run, rot, fade, or fly away, were secured in a cave upon a tiny island with no name, some eighty-eight leagues distant from Jamaica.
Something must now be written about a certain location that shall feature prominently in this tale, mainly because, while there are thousands of books on the history of Habana, thousands more on how to play the fiddle in ten easy steps and nearly thirty-three volumes written on edible lichen, the book you now hold in your hands is the only book in the world that can tell you anything about the “Nameless Isle.”
There are many perfectly good reasons for this dearth of information. First of all, the Nameless Isle appears on no recognized naval charts. What’s more, the island bears no trace of even the most ancient human habitation. As far as anyone can tell, no person had ever set foot on it until the Pieces of Eight ran aground upon its shores in the midst of a tempest back in the days of Old Captain Thomas Bright, Bonnie Mary’s father.
The island was so completely desolate that its only native animal was the Peculiar Orange Bird, a species of fowl of most unique appearance, possessing stubby wings and lurid plumes of orange