Hi my name is Red Legs Greaves, captain of the Bermuda Sloop "Wind Chaser". She's not a big ships, only has 8 4Ibs cannons, but she's fast and for me that makes a huge difference for my line of work. The date January 2nd 1665, a great time full of activaty and a perfect place for any captain to be. So what is my line of work, well i am like a merchant accept in stead of purchasing my own goods to sell at a profit i take them for nothing and sell at a profit because i don't need to worry about their original buying prices.
Some would call me a pirate i guess, but i like to think of myself as a salesman who takes from the weak and sells for the profit, i sometimes take ships but they are a pain to get back to port so i tend to leave them most of the time with or without a crew. Depends if anyone was brave enough to accept defeat and surrender. So to start with here is a nice picture of my small but agile ship the "Wind Chaser".
So as i leave Bermuda to see if their is anything of interest near the French and English ports i find a little battle going on, now i don't care for other pir. I mean salesmen, i will happily lighten their loads if they get in my way. But it just so happened that on this day i stumbled across a salemen trying to take the cargo off a Spanish merchant.
I had no intentions of getting invloved at first because i was more interested in the riches the Caribbean has to bring else where, but the stupid pir, sorry i mean salesmen opened fire on my ship, now that was uncalled for. I hadn't even loaded my guns, but after that those guns was soon primed and ready for action. No one fires at my ship and gets away with it, so as you can see i had no alternative but to get involed.
Normally i will pull along side another ship and that will be that, i have never fired a single cannon so my aiming skills are some what bad. And its obvious to all that i couldn't hit a barn door if i was right next to it, so what chance have i got firing from a ship thats moving and is rocking from side to side with the ship i am attacking doing the exact same thing.
Needless to say with such poor aiming i had to accept the best plan of action was to wait, so i rigged the sails and waited. Watching as the two ships tried to be the one with the weather gage as their advantage, the problem with that is salesmen tend to have ships that are good at sailing with and against the wind, and from the looks of it that Merchant Brig was pritty nifty sailing into the wind. So any advantages the Spanish would have had with the Hanna was gone. After a while the salemen got close enough to board and won, now it was our turn. We hadn't enough crew to fight both ships anyway so waiting was the better of the options. Now we have a good chance to come out of this with our heads held high.
We boarded the Merchant Brig who never got a single shot off, to find it had only a few crew left. We lost some crew but nothing like i had expected to loose. The captain was very weak, he seemed to be more interested in defending than attacking. He didn't surrender which was a shame as he could have gone for a swim along side the Bermuda Sloop we sank after taking the Merchant Brig as our new ship. Well she is faster, more agile and does have a few more guns to fire. And lets face it i do need more the practise so the more guns the bettwe. At least i might manage to actually hit something next time.
Another day another salemen decides to attack me, only this time i have a better chance to fight both ships. So i engage them both, firing a few volley's of knipple shots as to damage their sails so i have a little more of a speed advantage, because the Shnyava is a very agil ship and the last thing i need is her getting a good position on me.
Woohoo, time to crack open a bottle of the finest and celebrat, we actually hit something. Or was that from the Dutch ship, who cares it looks good and i claim it as my shot that started that fire, oops no it can't have been us, we are firing grapeshots. Damn, oh well it was still nice to see. The problem is they are not affraid of us and continue to come at us firing as they approach, this one looks like it will be decided on the decks, good i say i like a little sword fighting before going to bed for the night anyway.
This doesn't look to good. Locked in a battle for a couple of hours and this is all they have to offer me. The captain had better offer something better, or the cargohold.
The salesmen him self, i wounder who told him to become a salesmen and why, because he sure to hell doesn't scare me. And to make things worse, he was poor at sword fighting. I would say practise makes perfect but i don't think that will be much use to him now that he's dead.
Wow, this guy was poor, and i thourght i had it hard. No wounder he attacked a ship that out classed him and could out moneuver him. Either that or his lack of experience was so bad that he thourght he could take on the world. Oh my bad, he thourght he could take me on so his lack of experience was bad as was his jugement in people and ships to attack.
That was one poor merchant, i must have found the two poorest captains in the whole of the caribbean. The Shnyava wasn't as agil as i thourght she was. She was slower than my ship and could turn as quickly. Oh well, at least they did give something back to the caribbean. Fresh meat for the fishes to eat, the sharks around here are pritty damn big. You don't realise exactly how big they are till your in a small ship and one comes right up next to you, its a sight that you will never forget.
Current location:
Heading back to Bermuda for repairs and to sell what little goods i found aboard those ships.
