THREE: WIT AND CHARM          1. Music as a lucky charm, something listened to to fortify oneself, as an incitement to courage.          2 . The graceful confidence of a natural charmer. The victories of intelligence.          3 . Pirate communities as information networks. A redefinition of the pirate: seducer not rapist, a smuggler not a bloody thief.          4 . Mini societies living consciously and determinedly outside the law.          5 . Remote hideaways: ships watered and provisioned.          6 . "fantastical mindscapes of what it felt to be feral and free"          7 . Elizabeth 1: Cabal (advanced thinkers, aristocrats, adepts) for map making, exploration, colonisation.          8 . Alchemy. Chaos. Disorder. Man uncorrupted by Government.          9. Social bandits: enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map.          One of the most attractive qualities of pirates was their arrogance and gall. In an age when many men believed in the Divine Right of Kings, it is refreshing to see Sockwell proclaim himself "king of Lundy" or to hear Easton demanding why he should accept a royal pardon when he was king in his own domain. BLACKBEARD. The Fiercest Pirate of All. Norman C. Pendered         Eager to prove himself as a pirate leader and arrogantly confident of his ability, Teach mounted 40 guns aboard the newly-captured French Guineaman and renamed her the QUEEN ANNE'S REVENGE. In those days pirates were wont to re-christen captured vessels with new names often involving the word REVENGE. There was even one pirate ship called the REVENGE'S REVENGE. BLACKBEARD: The Fiercest Pirate of All. Norman C. Pendered          Pirates are recruited in the open at some kind of low bar doused with soul stirring music. A pirate's recruitment is indiscreet, drunken, a contract full of rich lies and outrageous promises, but honest in its own little way, and very fair. The Chief Privateer had become philosophical with me, sensing that ideas are the things that set my blood on fire. You have that rare quality, he told me, complete alienation held in perfect equilibrium with passionate involvement. What a prize you are! What a star you'll be!          I was never fooled, and I was never more than mildly curious, but I wanted to win, with all my heart, whatever the game it was that was being played at that broken down resort hotel in Sukhumi. Follow your little black heart, I was told when I won that game, which wasn't really a game at all but a test. Always follow your little black heart. Follow your heart to hell if you have to. The Chief Privateer recited a partial list of the qualities that contribute to the recruitment of a Dread Pirate of the Black Sea: a rebellious disregard for authority matched with the burning desire of a scholar to know. To know what? Oh, everything, only everything, he replied. Rat cunning and innocence. Showing a butter hearted exuberance without ever showing one's hand. You're a gem, the Chief Privateer told me, so suspicious and so serenely macabre. I purred with pride.          The pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to hire on bands for entire voyages. Alcohol performed an important social function in the work culture of sea-faring. For it is a crime of a very special sort, requiring of its followers much more than boldness, cunning or skill in the use of arms.          Charles Ellms in THE PIRATE'S OWN BOOK (1837) says, with admirable understatement: "The pirate is truly fond of women and wine." Of the two, wine, or more often hard liquor, was the greater weakness, perhaps because there was more opportunity to indulge in it. Some seamen believed alcohol was healthful, especially in certain parts of the world, but for most drink offered a brief respite from the rigours of a hard life; it also served an important social function in the work culture of seafaring. As Johnson says, 'sobriety brought a man under suspicion of being in a plot against the Commonwealth and in that sense he was looked upon to be a villain that would not be drunk.' But, behind it all, this heavy drinking probably took the place of something that was missing or lost, as drinking often does, and beneath the comradeship and the swagger, the oaths and the bowls of punch, was pathos and a sense of tragedy. The dream of the return home, for those who cherished it, grew dimmer with each voyage and each new day. (Source unknown)          Within the always small community in the Hotel Rustavelli, smaller in winter than at other times, Galllifrey, by the length of her unbroken stay, became family merely by being there. She had a spartan routine, leaving the hotel every day only to go to the BookStore. Every day was a version of the same day, delineated only by the most imperceptible of nuances. Though it seemed as if her existence should be one of immense boredom, Gallifrey found complete fascination in her daily routine of breakfast in the courtyard, a stroll to the BookStore, a sandwich in her room, High Tea in the lobby and then reading in the evening in her room, while the sound of the house band from The Blues In Orbit drifted across Rats Alley.          You might think of the Hotel Rustavelli as an octopus, its principal tentacles being the fancy restaurant Lucky Pierre's on Border Street, the BookStore on Royal Avenue, the apothecary on the Avenue of Georgia, and the Delicatessen at the market by the Long Thin River. But nothing was as important as The Blues In Orbit, which extended its reach all over the Bravo District. Its front entrance faced the front entrance of the Hotel Rustavelli, across Rats Alley. The Blues In Orbit could properly be considered the heart that pumped life into the entire Bravo District.          The debauched and exuberant pleasures of the pirate have lost their lustre for me. The abandon of wild good times is no longer an innocent pleasure, being always pressed into the service of a mission. Canny socialising, loosening of tongues with drink and giddy instant camaraderie are my treasure finding tools. Best not to blunt them. Once in these establishments I'm nothing but a treasure hunter and I'd steal and sell anyone's soul for the right kind of price. The Chief Privateer never gives me missions back to back. It's your fragile conscience that makes you such an asset, and we must allow. it time to heal, he told me after my first mission left my nerves bruised and my eyes filling frequently with tears. You have to be prepared to lose everything in order to gain everything. And so I am. Or so I think I am.          Gallifrey had taken the performance of the house band at The Blues In Orbit to heart. She was aware of its nuances and rhythms as if they were the rhythms of her own breathing. She studied the band surreptitiously in the musical guides to the Bravo District in the BookStore on Royal Avenue and observed the six band members carrying their trumpets and trombones and saxophones from Lucky Pierre's, where they have an early dinner each evening, around the corner and into the side door at The Blues In Orbit. She listened to their two sets each night, the sound up close and pure from across the alley, coming into The Albatross Suite at the Hotel Rustavelli. Our music looks like what Dante said, the bandleader Dear Old Jack told the writer of one of the Musical Guides to the Bravo District. The songs all divide up into hell and purgatory and paradise. It sure does shake out the demons he said, and he drew a line on the ground with his toe. This is the line on the landscape where humour and tragedy merge, and our music is that line. In the Bravo District anyone who talked about The Blues In Orbit always seemed to say that that music was stronger than any of the liquor that Exapno Mapcase sold. The music had sunk into her blood, but Gallifrey could not bring herself to go to The Blues In Orbit.          Jazz Magazine, quoting a Mingus announcement "I'm going to play something slow and quiet, quiet like an atom bomb."          Lightended - you couldn't be sure - by a clarinet or a muted trumpet, scored high. Ellington loved to baffle the critics. Some of them have studied the unearthly opening ensemble chorus of his 1931 recording of "The Mystery Song" for sixty years without figuring out the instrumentation.. (Source unknown)          The ballad in jazz has a distinct meaning, separate from any definitions found in the dictionary. There is no standard form or structure. Unlike a blues or a thirty-two bar pop song, the jazz ballad is defined solely by intent. The soloist slows the tempo down and tries to connect with the listener, packing as much feeling as possible into every note. It's a way for the musician to express the emotional side of his playing. Liner Notes: Miles Davis, Ballads          One day during her fourth week in Tbilisi, perhaps her third, impossible to tell since it was the same day she was living over and over, it appeared to Gallifrey that her monastic routine was drawing too much attention to herself and that she must venture out and assume a veneer of sociability or risk drawing entirely too much of the wrong sort of scrutiny. Dino Bravo was outside the front door of the Hotel Rustavelli, whistling the tune that the house band has no idea is her lullabye, when she came back from the BookStore with piles of books. He took a swing with his golf club and lobbed an imaginary ball into the window of The Blues In Orbit, nodded at it and then winked at her and frowned at her books.          I go there all the time, said Au importantly, well not exactly all the time. Exapno Mapcase has a bad habit of chasing me out. He says I'm too young. I, of course, am always being told I'm exceedingly mature for my age and have had curiously adult tastes since my earliest memory. It's the place where all of the pirates went once, not now of course, pirates now are evil cutthroats with machine guns, in the seas somewhere off Singapore I believe.          Au was wearing an important expression and speaking in his most important voice, taking long breaths between all of the longest words. Exapno Mapcase found some documents upstairs, battle maps he thinks, from when El Ned led the pirates in the victory of the Battle of the Long Thin River. I believe, and Au paused dramatically here, that they're drawn in blood! Gallifrey smiled gracefully, bringing surprise to the surface of her profoundly inscrutable face, lifting her eyes and widening them momentarily.          You burn so brightly in the shadows, that we're beginning to think that you must harbour the darkest of secrets, Winsome told Gallifrey.          I've been so wretchedly tired even my thoughts exhaust me, replied Gallifrey.          Perhaps we should move you to a more peaceful room, there's no denying that the music from The Blues In Orbit fills up The Albatross Suite.          Oh no, said Gallifrey, genuinely panicked, I'm so very fond. of that music, I would miss it so.          Well then, we must take you to The Blues In Orbit. Miss Charlotte at the apothecary says that band has healing powers, and that they've been known to raise the dead. There's no denying Winsome anything, when she looks at you you'd do anything she asked. She seduced with her eyes, cast a spell in a glance. She'd fix her eyes sweet y upon someone and they'd faint dead away. Her hand was cool and sweet on Gallifrey's arm, her liquid eyes were as deep as a well. All about Winsome's manner had the quality of a command.          The importance attached to music is suggested by one unique reference to musical diversions aboard a pirate ship. Captain Stephenson, who was 'daunceinge on boarde the Phillip Bonaventure in Mamora harbour', commanded Baptista Ingle, a member of another pirate crew, to 'winde his whistle'. Ingle accordingly played a tune for the dancing captain, who was so delighted with his playing that he refused to let him leave the ship. Pirates spent a great deal of time drinking. Prolonged drinking bouts were an almost mandatory way of celebrating a successful cruise - yet they seem to have reserved their riotous behaviour and debauchery for when they came ashore and neither drink nor drugs appear to have been detrimental to their effectiveness at sea. (Source unknown)          If sailor tales to sailor tunes,                   Storm and adventure, heat and cold,          If schooners, islands and maroons,                   And Buccaneers and buried gold,          And all the old romance, retold                   Exactly in the ancient way,          Can please, as me they pleased of old,                   The wiser youngsters of today:                            Treasure Islan& Robert Louis Stevenson          The clothes that Gallifrey wears when she's on a pirate mission are bold clothes that are a costume, clothes that can carry a swashbuckling demeanour. When she's between missions she has a box of suits she thinks of as undertakers weeds. She thinks of a description of black clothing that she read in a magazine, formless black bunches of shredded fabric, the look of wet ashes, sick crow's feathers, of charred rags. That evening she dressed as if for a funeral and timed her arrival carefully at The Blues In Orbit to coincide with what is always the most frantic part of the set, when the house band is playing Over In The Glory Land, something that sounds to Gallifrey as if it might have been a battle hymn during the Battle of the Long Thin River. She has the suspicion that the exuberance will cancel out her reticence, but her feet moved so slowly across Rats Alley, and the door to The Blues In Orbit seemed so heavy to her, that time ran away and she walked inside during the middle of the sentimental ballad Saturday Night Function. This is the finest place on earth, she thought to herself before terror struck her numb.          It's perpetually midnight at The Blues In Orbit. Old ivory paint flakes from the walls and the misted mirror behind the bar held the reflections of people who haven't been there in thirty years. The mathematicians waved Gallifrey over to their table next to the stage and she sat down between Bloodnok and Eccles. Her terror crumbled in the light of their lunatic abandon, and she joined them in writing formulae on the linen tablecloths as stiff as cardboard.          Bloodnok smoothly interrogated Gallifrey. What do you know of the singularity in a black hole where the laws of physics no longer apply?          I know that yet a sheep is not a sheep, replied Gallifrey. It is a temporary aggregation of subatomic particles in constant motion - particles which were once scattered across an interstellar cloud, and each of which remains within the process that is the sheep for only a brief period of time.          Quite true, quite true, crooned Bloodnok in his artificially lowered and polished voice.          Hey, get me some toast, please, Bluebottle barked at a passing waiter.          The electric toaster is bust, said the waiter.          Well try ironing the toast then, suggested Bluebottle.          If you remember his hair we should have known there'd be an oil crisis, Bloodnok whispered to Gallifrey as the waiter moved away.          My god that band's brilliant, said Eccles, and he held up his glass and gave a long operatic howl as the band played the final note of The Savoy Blues, and every fork in the place shattered while Eccles puzzled over the fact that the glass remained intact.          Fermat's Last Theorem. By James Gleick          As the words wash over you, you can almost feel that the mathematicians are speaking English; if you could only get your mind to stop wandering for a second, you might be able to follow the boiled down explanation provided by Kenneth A. Ribet, a mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley who with a remarkable piece of work seven years ago provided the launching pad for Wiles's proof. "You use Hilbert irreducibility and the Cebotarev density theorem (in some way that hasn't yet sunk in)" you can say that again - "to produce a non-cuspidal ration point of X over which the covering remains irreducible." Oh, yes! The covering ... just remind me? It's slightly heartwarming to discover that your normal everyday mathematician also has trouble following this. New York Times.          The Blues In Orbit was filled with anyone who has money to spend, tales to tell, secrets to hide, and lies to announce. Exapno Mapcase's dense jazz atmosphere was a costume drama of thugs and rebels, riverboat gamblers and elegant foreign beauties in nostalgic long sweeping skirts and entire chandeliers of jewellery. Gangsters clung to the walls and bounty hunters and oddballs of all stripes blinked conspicuously while drinking the dark and fiery Georgian liquor and fooled themselves that they're hiding. Exapno Mapcase remembered all of their faces and none of their names, and since some of them had been coming there for 20 years it was now too late for him to admit he didn't know their names. He had given everyone a designation, a code. There's the florist, he said to himself, and smiled and waved.          Exapno Mapcase stood by what is undoubtedly the Oldest Wall of Fish in the Bravo District. People had dropped things in there over the last hundred years, as if it were a wishing well: layers of coins, watches, forks, old rusted handguns and a few flick knives. Some of the jewellery had fallen around the necks of some of the fish who are the size of house cats and as mean as hell, surly, floating on the top of the water on their backs, blowing bubbles. Exapno Mapcase watched a man in the business suit standing on a chair and putting his arm into the Wall of Fish. One of the fish sauntered to the surface, sneered, and bit the man.          Exapno Mapcase is the perfect owner of a bar for outlaws, seemingly very amused that people have secrets and enjoying keeping those secrets and providing the shadows, music and sounds that offer disguises and allow people to review their secrets without being caught. He is one of those characters who is cast in the role of both a hero and rascal, inspirational to some, appearing undisciplined to others, the object of extreme interest and extreme professional jealousy. He has a splendid smile. There is a sentimental quality to his mischievousness. He steers The Blues In Orbit through the course of each night like the masterful captain of a ship in a raging storm.          The crocodile was set at the centre of a square that was settled on a broad stretch of beach. All about was a pirate town composed of the ravaged hulks of old ships. Ribs and struts stuck out everywhere like the bones of a dinosaur's ribcage. Gilt rails lined worn, sagging decks. From masts swayed signs offering services of all sorts in colourful language. DR CHOP - LIMBS FITTED WHILE YOU WAIT. WENCHES AND WINE SERVED AT YOUR TABLE. ROOMS - BUNK YOUR JUNK. Shops and living quarters jumbled together in a mix of old wood and garish paint, like ragged cats in a litter, like a junkyard's discarded remains.          And there were pirates at every turn. They swaggered down boardwalks. They hung from doors and windows, calling out boldly. They clung to buxom women and hoisted glasses. They clung to each other. They carried pistols and swords, daggers and cutlasses. They wore tricorne hats and bandannas about their long hair, rings from their ears and on their fingers and through their noses, sashes of fine silk and boots of tough leather, greatcoats and striped shirts and pants as baggy as laundry sacks. The movie, HOOK          At the sign of the Spy Glass: When I had done breakfasting the squire gave me a note addressed to John Silver, at the sign of the "Spy Glass," and told me I should easily find the place by following the line of the docks, and keeping a bright look-out for a little tavern with a large brass telescope for sign ... As I was waiting, a man came out of a side room, and, at a glance, I was sure he must be Long John. His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham - plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests.                   Treasure Island: Robert Louis Stevenson          In antiquity the Georgian oral tradition was very strong. Ballads, songs, legends, and proverbs abounded. Folk poetry flourished after the advent of writing. 20th century innovations in literature came with the symbolist movement embraced by the blue horns. In 1916 this group began publishing a magazine of the same name. Radical experimentation thrived between 1918 and 1921. The Georgian Republic. Roger Rosen          There are many skills associated with piracy: the athletic skills of swordsmanship and general brawling, the mental acumen necessary in navigation and map-making, but no skill is more prized than that of wit and charm. It's not the violence attributed to piracy that's the measure of its success as a profession for swashbuckling is essentially a mental and verbal pursuit, only incidentally physical. Piracy is almost completely an act of seduction: we must make people fall in love with us to part them smoothly from their treasure. If our victims are possessed of a considerable depth of faith then the pirate's wit and charm is something amusing to them. If people are of shallow faith then the pirate's wit and charm shines a spotlight on everything they feel they're lacking in their lives bravado, adventure, exoticism - and they're humiliated and resent us mightily.          I have chosen to interpret piracy broadly, seeing a pirate as a character with the inner fire and simple courage of a young hero in a children's novel, a fine raconteur telling tall tales. It’s a highly romantic picture I have of the pirate.          Contrary to popular thought, swashbuckling is not real risk. Creating miracles is free and going after the impossible is easy. Treasure is an outlandish concept, so completely out-of-reach, that when we carry out our missions and return home with the spoils it all seems plucked from the realm of the fantastic. The stakes are so high that no one imagines that they are attainable and they are thunderstruck when we achieve a big win, and can respond only with dumb awe. It is much more difficult to live a simple and honest life. You might say that a pirate is both worldly and swashbuckling while being equally gullible and defenceless. I no longer have a grip on what it means to be decent and act with integrity. My friendships are bizarre and shadowy which is how I want them, but bizarre and shadowy with integrity I would hope.          Although we know nothing of the Lafittes previous to their arrival in New Orleans, Jean told many conflicting stories about himself. He was a good raconteur and we are inclined to believe he regaled his friends with tall tales to entertain them. To believe the stories he told of himself regarding his past before he landed here, we would have to overlook the fact that he could not have crammed it all into a youthful 24 years. Frankly, we think Jean never intended people to believe. It was his way of diverting them from the truth, whatever it was. The Land of Lafitte the Pirate.          The town itself was nothing more than a cluster of miserable huts and disreputable shacks many of which were made from discarded sails. Filthy, noisy, wild, and full of violence, Turneffe lived up to its name as a popular pirate resort in the New World. Rum, whiskey, and grog flowed freely in all the huts and shacks. Since there was no place at sea to spend their ill-gotten loot, the pirates were determined to enjoy life fully whenever ashore. Turneffe provided them the opportunity they sought. Wine, women and song were the order of the day and night revelling - so long as the pirate gold lasted! In their greed for drinking and gambling and in their lust for women, the men saw not the squalour nor the riotous, violent, sinful living; instead they saw in Turneffe a pirate's paradise - a heaven on earth.                   BLACKBEARD: The Fiercest Pirate of All. Norman C. Pendered          I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:          "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest -                   Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.          "This is a handy cove" says he, at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?"                   Treasure Island: Robert Louis Stevenson          One day at sea when no prey was in sight and being a little full with drink, Blackbeard said to his crew, "Come, let us make a Hell of our own, and try how long we can bear it". Then he and several others went below into the ship's hold. After closing up all the hatches, they filled several pots with brimstone and other combustible matter and set them on fire. The hold rapidly filled with sulphurous fumes and soon the men were coughing, choking, spitting, and gasping for air. All of the men, save Teach, quickly sprang for the ladder and tumbled up to the fresh air on the deck. When Blackbeard finally left the hold and arrived topsides, he swore vehemently, "Damn ye, " he exclaimed, "ye yellow ------ ----- ----- !!! " Spatting on the deck and shaking his fist at them he snarled, "I'm a better man than all ye milksops put together. "                   BLACKBEARD: The Fiercest Pirate of All. Norman C. Pendered          Gallifrey so completely relaxed into the general level of hilarity at the mathematicians table and her mood was so altered to become crazily and subtly exuberant and in such sharp contrast to the solemnity she exhibited at the Hotel Rustavelli, that it was as if the sun had shone for the first time in a town that had previously known only darkness.          With the sharp social skills of a pirate Gallifrey charmed all who came to the mathematicians table, surreptitiously entering pieces of conversation in her exo-brain, to be used later, to be assimilated into the brief, perhaps, for her new mission. Her heart raced, and she lost all notion of time. The man with a band-aid the size of a sandwich over his ear offered her his country house in England. As she amassed an evening's worth of ideas and concepts to relate and tie to one another her heart soared, and she bought expensive drinks for the mathematicians, and only tea for the man with the band-aid over his ear, because he no longer drank hard liquor. While her quest for treasure made her sharper, more cunning, wily with a passion, it also made her more tolerant and generous of others, even the background characters, and she spoke at length with the people no-one ever speaks to. No-one ever has their names straight. They ramble around in a sub-plot at the edges of the action, tall, and pale and theadbare and decaying. Dust tumbles out of their mouths when they speak and stirs clouds around their feet as they walk.          This is the most evil establishment I've ever been in, Gallffrey told Exapno Mapcase when he came to the table. Exapno Mapcase smiled back, a little dazed. He looked at Gallifrey with his one good eye and smiled at her with such brilliant force that she couldn't return his smile, and bowed her head. FOUR: THE TREASURE MAP