YARR! Tuesday be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye scurvy scallawags! (File photo)

By Donna Beth Weilenman
Martinez News Gazette
Special to the Herald

Ahoy, ye salty sea rogues and land-locked lubbers! Tuesday be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a date in which it becomes perfectly acceptable to sound like actor Robert Newton, whose portrayal of the dread Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” set the standard for Hollywood pirates.
It was Newton’s decision to amplify his West Country Dorset accent for the role in Walt Disney’s 1950 version of the literary classic that created the stereotype way of talking like a pirate.
And it was a badly-played game of racquetball June 6, 1995, at the Mid-Willamette Valley YMCA that led to International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
John Baur and Mark Summers of Oregon were on the court, flailing away, as they described the game, and calling out “friendly encouragements” to each other as they repeatedly failed to return any shots.
“On this day, for reasons we still don’t quite understand, we started giving our encouragement in pirate slang,” Baur has described the day’s origin. “Anyway, whoever let out the first ‘Arrr’ started something. One thing led to another.”
And as the game went on, the “encouragements” got pore pirate, with shots renamed cannonades, and shot-callings announced “a broadside straight into your yardarm!”
When their time on the court had ended, they decided that the piratical shouts had made the game more enjoyable.
“We decided then and there that what the world really needed was a new national holiday, Talk Like a Pirate Day,” Baur said.
But plundering the date of World War II’s D-Day would be too bold for modern-day pirates. So Summers proposed Sept. 19, his ex-wife’s birthday.
Eventually, the pair took on pirate identities. Baur became “Old Chumbucket” and Summers is C”Cap’n Slappy.” Then they emailed award-winning Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry, suggesting he become the holiday’s spokesperson and write a column about talking like a pirate. To their surprise, he responded.
And in Sept. 8, 2002, Barry wrote the first “Talk Like a Pirate Day” column, translating everyday chatter, even business conversations, into Long John Silver’s dialect and verbiage.
“As you can see, talking like a pirate will infuse your everyday conversations with romance and danger,” Barry wrote.
“So join the movement! On Sept. 19, do not answer the phone with ‘hello.’ Answer the phone with ‘Ahoy me hearty!’ If the caller objects that he is not a hearty, inform him that he is a scurvy dog (or if the caller is female, a scurvy female dog) who will be walking the plank off the poop deck and winding up in Davy Jones’ locker…,” he wrote.
“Let’s make this into a grass-roots movement that sweeps the nation, like campaign finance reform, or Krispy Kreme doughnuts,” Barry wrote.
And that’s where the fun began. It quickly spread to Australia, Irelands and elsewhere, and the most recent map of Talk Like a Pirate Day celebrations Now the movement has a website, http://talklikeapirate.com/wordpress/, an occasional newsletter, books and songs. It’s listed on multiple internet calendars, and it has its own Facebook page.
Even eateries have gotten into the spirit. Long John Silver’s restaurants, named after Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” scoundrel, is offering one free fried Twinkie to any seasoned sea dogs and callow cabin boys who can muster up their request in pirate lingo.
Krispy Kreme, the doughnut company mentioned in Barry’s column, has ended its longtime association with Talk Like a Pirate Day, causing some who had enjoyed free doughnuts in the past to say they will boycott the chain. Others have said they’ll dress in pirate garb and buy doughnuts to show appreciation for the chain’s endorsements in the past.
An employee of the Concord Krispy Kreme store at 1991 Diamond Blvd., said the corporation decided to pursue other promotions, such as its recent Doughnut Day and pumpkin spice giveaway, and will celebrate National Coffee Day Sept. 29.
While other parts of the United States is rich in pirate history – plagued by such fearful brigands as Blackbeard, Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts, “Calico Jack” Rackham and his companions, Anne Bonny and Mary Read – California’s own were few and far between. But they are notable historic and literary figures.
The English captain Sir Francis Drake was considered a pirate by the Spanish. During a three-year voyage around the world, he and his ship, the Golden Hind, made a 36-day stop to repair his vessel in 1579, likely to what is now Drake’s Bay that is skirted by Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. _
Hippolyte Bouchard, a Frenchman who fought as an Argentine corsair, attacked Spanish colonies along mid and southern California coastlines in 1818 and 1819. He retired in Peru, where he was killed by a servant in 1837, and he’s still considered a hero in Argentina.
In more contemporary times, the Southern Pacific Railroad provoked a different type of pirate.
The railroad brought better-tasting oysters from the east and set them in private tidal beds in the San Francisco Bay, creating a monopoly out of what once was a working-class fisherman’s industry.
The oysters would grow until they were harvested and sold at railroad-set prices – that is, until oyster pirates would plunder the shellfish at night and sell them at fish markets at dawn at cutthroat prices.
Among the oyster pirates was Jack London, the future author who at 15 was as known for partying hard in Benicia as he was for being a daring oyster pirate. At one time, he was called “Prince of the Oyster Pirates.”
Crashing his sloop, the Razzle-Dazzle, ended his pirate career. So London switched sides and joined the California Fish Patrol to hunt down oyster pirates as law-breakers.
London wrote a collection of stories published in 1905 as “Tales of the Fish Patrol,” describing the activities along the Carquinez Strait, including a chase that went past Martinez and ended in gunfire in Antioch.
But it was the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and his “Treasure Island” that provided the roots of the comical holiday. He, too, had ties to California.
Stevenson married Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne and honeymooned in Northern California, and returned to California before leaving the United States a final time to travel in the South Pacific.
He arrived in 1879 in Monterey to spend time with Fanny’s family, including her sister and two children from a previous marriage. The curious Stevenson decided to see if California forest moss would catch fire. It did, causing a forest fire for which Stevenson once said he should have been “hung out of hand to the nearest tree.”
Instead, he moved to San Francisco. A sickly man, he often was ordered to bed to do no work at all. That gave him time to write.
After marrying in 1880, Stevenson and his wife spent their honeymoon in Napa Valley. He chronicled their Northern California travels in “The Silverado Squatters.”
He described Vallejo as “a long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human face or voice.”
He used a telephone for the first time at Calistoga, one of the settings for his characters Pinkerton and Mamie in “The Wrecker.” The couple first stayed at the Springs Hotel, then went to the old, abandoned mining camp, Silverado, where Fanny and her son became ill, forcing the family back to the Springs Hotel until their health returned and they could go back to a three-room cabin in Silverado.
The cabin is long gone, but Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, seven miles north of Calistoga on California Highway 29, marks the site of the family’s visit.
In St. Helena, the author of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” is memorialized in a museum that opened in 1969 as a realized vision of Norman Strouse, the former chairperson of the board of J. Walter Thompson Company, who became a Stevenson collector after reading “The Silverado Squatters.”
He and his wife, Charlotte, created a foundation to underwrite the museum devoted to the life and works of Stevenson. They donated their personal collection, including part of Stevenson’s own library and other items, to the resulting museum.
In 1979, the museum moved to a permanent home, a wing of the St. Helena Public Library Center.
Also in the museum is the collection from Margaret “Angel” Bailey, who was the caretaker of Isobel Field, Stevenson’s stepdaughter. Along with her son, Austin Strong, Field inherited much of the Stevenson family possessions, including Stevenson’s writing desk, after Fanny died in 1914.
Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” originally published as a boys’ magazine serial between 1881 and 1882, began as a tale the author wove for his stepson Lloyd, based on a map of an imaginary island Stevenson drew for the boy on a rainy day after the family returned to Scotland from California.
His California adventures and the state’s scenery, especially in Napa, inspired parts of the novel, some writers have said. Stevenson called the tale “a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone.”
He based his pirate cook, Silver, on a friend, had the friend been stripped of his positive qualities. The beginning of the story went quickly – he wrote 15 chapters in 15 days.
During a stay in London, Stevenson’s father contributed ideas, including the apple barrel scene and the name “Walrus” for Captain Flint’s ship. “Young Folks Magazine” published the novel as “The Sea Cook” in 17 installments. Later, the installments were combined and renamed “Treasure Island.”
Just as Newton’s interpretation of Silver created lasting stereotypes that have been carried forward to such recent characters as Captain Hector Barbossa of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise, “Treasure Island” itself established such essential pirate elements as treasure maps, an X marking the spot where treasure is buried, the dreaded “Black Spot,” and talking parrots riding on the shoulders of one-legged rogues.
Stevenson mentions several actual pirates in his work – Captain William Kidd, Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Edward England and Roberts.
Few pirates buried their treasure – they spent it instead. But Kidd did bury his plunder on Gardiners Island. It was found and taken by island authorities instead of being recovered by Kidd himself.

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