John Malam gives children a history lesson on pirates they'll never forget in You Wouldn't Want to Be a Pirate's Prisoner!
Imagine yourself as captain of a Spanish treasure ship. Your galleon is loaded with treasure and you’re sailing home to Spain. You sail in a group of several other ships, but your luck has finally failed. Your ship is so weighed down with loot that it falls behind the fleet. You are the perfect target for pirates.
That far away ship that has been following you picks up speed. Bearing muskets, flintlock pistols, cutlasses, and boarding axes, the pirates overtake your ship.
After the pirates have taken all the loot from your ship, the pirate captain demands that you give him the course that the other Spanish treasure ships are taking. He wants more treasure.
Will you give in to his demands and turn your back on your fellow seamen? No, you’d rather face torture than be a traitor.
And so it begins. You are thrown into the ship’s hold. Days and nights pass. You lose track of time. The air is fowl and stale. The rats are your only company.
Finally, you are brought up on deck. Are you ready to talk? No? You are put in the bilboes, heavy leg irons. Fastened to the deck, you face the elements for seven days. Someone offers you salt water to drink but you smartly refuse. To survive, “you lick the rainwater off your skin and suck it from your clothes.”
You are sunburned, blistered, starving, dehydrated, and covered in bug bites. Are you ready to tell the pirate captain the course the other treasure ships are taking? No? Then it’s time for a good flogging.
The quartermaster prepares the cat-o’-nine-tails. He puts three knots in each tail for extra sting. Sometimes he ties a fishhook at the end of each tail. It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that this is going to hurt.
After forty, fifty, or sixty lashes no one would blame you for giving up your fellow seamen. However, you may just be the most stubborn person on Earth. The pirates throw you back into the ship’s hold and wait until your wounds heal.
Now the pirate captain has had enough playing around and he’s ready to get down to serious business. He has his pirate crew pass a rope under the ship and you are tied to the ends of the rope. You are pulled overboard and begin your watery journey under the ship’s keel.
After being keelhauled, your back is ripped to shreds. You almost didn’t survive. Are you ready to give up the information the pirate captain wants? No?
You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner by John Malam (Scholastic Inc.) is an incredibly interesting book. Children, and adults, are fascinated by the cruelty of the pirate culture in the 1700s. They want to learn all there is to know about actual pirates, what they did, and how they lived on their ships. Mr. Malam fills a niche by recreating what it would be like to be a pirate’s prisoner.
For home schooling parents and educators, You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Pirate’s Prisoner makes an exciting addition to a history unit on pirates. It shows first hand that pirates weren’t nice people. They weren’t gallant or forgiving, and they certainly weren’t the Robin Hoods of the ocean.
