Free The Pirates! by Gideon Defoe Page A

clear,’ said the Pirate Captain.
    The crew muttered to each other, and the pirate in red put his hand up.
    â€˜I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea, Pirate Captain,’ he said. ‘But you haven’t really explained how we actually do it. The whaling, that is.’
    â€˜Oh, you know. Track the whale down, and bop him on the head.’
    â€˜Bop him on the head?’
    The Pirate Captain mimed bopping the whale on the head. ‘Bop. That’s right. Something like that.’
    â€˜But how do we
find
the whale?’ persisted the pirate in red, folding his arms and frowning to convey as much surliness as he dared.
    The Pirate Captain looked stumped. His experience of this kind of thing was pretty limited. He had won a sizeable goldfish on Brighton Pier once, but that had involved throwing brightly coloured balls at coconuts, and he didn’t really think that would do the trick in this case.
    â€˜Aarrr,’ he said, drawing a few wavy lines onthe blackboard and trying to sound knowledgeable. ‘It’s basically just a question of luring the whale onto your boat.’
    â€˜With magnets?’ asked the sassy pirate.
    â€˜No. Not with magnets. I know you lot tend to think everything can be solved with magnets, but that’s just not the case.’ 25
    â€˜What then?’
    â€˜Bait. We need to put out some whale bait.’
    He wrote ‘BAIT’ on the blackboard and tapped it with his cutlass.
    â€˜What do we use for whale bait?’ said the pirate with a hook for a hand.
    â€˜Whatever it is that whales like to eat.’
    â€˜Ooh! I know this!’ said the pirate in green, waving his hand in the air. ‘The answer’s plankton. P-L-A-N-K-T-O-N.’
    â€˜You useless lubber!’ roared the Pirate Captain. ‘That’s what they get to eat all the time.We need something that whales like
better
than plankton.’
    â€˜Ham?’ suggested the pirate with rickets.
    The Pirate Captain ran a hand through his luxuriant beard. He couldn’t imagine a single creature, marine or otherwise, that wouldn’t like ham. But they only had two regular hams left, and he didn’t think he could bear to be parted from either of them. And he would sooner cut off his own stentorian nose than dangle his Prize Ham into the sea, only for some sea-beast to slobber all over it.
    â€˜You have to remember that this is no ordinary whale,’ he said authoritatively. ‘It’s a white whale. And whales aren’t normally white, are they? So it makes sense to suppose that it turned white by eating albinos. We’ll start off by dangling the albino pirate over the side of the boat for a few days.’
    The albino pirate seemed a little nonplussed by this idea. The other pirates cheered and slapped him on the back.
    â€˜I don’t know what the rest of you are looking so smug about,’ said the Pirate Captain. ‘Just incase my albino theory is wrong – because believe it or not, I am wrong very occasionally – I want to see you lot swimming behind the boat, disguised as krill. Gigantic, fat, delicious krill. 26 That’s sure to whet his appetite.’
    The crew let out a collective groan that the Captain cut dead with his best withering look.
    â€˜Pirate Captain?’ the pirate in red asked again. ‘Is it really necessary for your plans to always involve us dressing up as something? Because some might say it borders on an unhealthy obsession.’
    â€˜Last time I checked, krill are tiny bioluminescent shrimp-like organisms that don’t give backchat,’ said the Pirate Captain with a sniff and a glower.
    â€˜Will
you
be dressing up as whale bait, Captain?’
    â€˜Obviously I’d love to,’ said the Pirate Captain, rubbing the blackboard clean. ‘But all that brinywater could play havoc with my luxuriant beard. I’d hate to upset our large gay following, specifically those whose term