h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Please Mr Pirate, tell me a pirate's story.

"there once was a pirate, who wrote a posting"

okay, not much of a story - but it will have to do for now, i'm afraid

in the meantime you could read the posting i referred to (if you havn't already - but then you can read it again):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A579684

I see... But what about boardings? And the plank? And cutting people's ears off? Where's all the funny stuff going on 'round here (I mean blood, treasures and rhum)?

Nice posting anyway. I had read it before, and still enjoyed it .

thanks!

An ancestor?

15 October 1653

The legend of Piaras Feiritéar ends on a hill east of Killarney. No fanfare, no pomp, no sack for the head of a killer bound for the gallows. Pierce Ferriter as his English enemies know him, is a
playboy, a poet, a warrior, a rebel, and a dead man alive on a cold early morning, with the mist wet on his beard.
After a hundred escapes, a thousand tales, the man of myth has just entered his fourth decade. The last leader in Kerry to lay down his arms rocks on his heels, legs apart, easy. The soldiers avoid eye
contact, keep their hands on their swords, and wonder again at the confidence of the man. He is not built like a fighter but like a lord, with rolling shoulders and a generous stomach. Is this the
flashing blade of camp-fire renown?

(from Cole Moreton’s “Hungry for Home” - A Journey from the Edge of Ireland (Blasket Islands))

D’you wanna hear the rest? Not bad as legends goes!

The stoty sounds great! I'd love to hear more!

He is here to die. A crowd has gathered under a distant tree, behind the falling leaves. The rope is around his neck. Horses stamp and blow out steam. The prayers of a minister whose religion
Ferriter does not recognize are spoken without compassion to the empty hill and stolen by the wind. At this moment before death, the poet breathes deeply. The fear he is trying so hard to disguise
forces air from his chest and it sounds like sudden laughter. The padre frowns. Ferriter laughs again, for real.
The block is pulled away. The rope swings. The rope stretches. The rope snaps.
Sheep run at the crack of ot. Fallen on his *rse in the mud, the winded poet wonders if his bones are broken. The soldiers feel the crack of a rope on their own backs as punishment for failure. Not
this one, of all of them, for God’s sake. They pull the poet to his feet as the hangman throws another lenght over the wooden gallows arm.
The hanging of Pierce Ferriter - playboy, poet, warrior, rebel, murderer, hero, thief - begins again. And fails again.

(to be continued )

this sounds familiar. very familiar. i wonder if...

my memory is fading. have to go through my old diaries

Yer. Do check your diaries, Pierce...


It takes a brave man to interrupt the cursing soldiers as they drag the prisoner away from the gallows and argue over his fate, but a brave man is present. He wears the cloth of an alien religion
but knows the executioner’s law. If the rope breaks twice, the man goes free. There can be no argument. It is a matter of decency, without which we are all savages.
Exhalted, enraged, embarrassed the poet does not feel the ropes slide from his wrists, which are raw to the bone. He raises filthy hands to his eyes, and his mouth burns. Under the tongue is a
fragment of the Holy Wafer. It was true, then, what the priest promised: that in the final moments, when escape was gone, the Host would offer God’s just protection. The Jesuit priest had dressed
like a common labourer and had smuggled himself past the guard as morning broke, to whisper a last sacrament for his lord. A remnant, almost dissolved by saliva, remains behind his few black
teeth.

(dose of the day )

So nobody wants to know how it all ends?



(more fun than twiddling thumbs)

Oy yes please ! I just didn't dare to interrupt you. It's easy to end up on a plank when you offend a ...

Here, take a and carry on.

Toy Box

*drinks and carries on*

The poet in Pierce does not hear the arguments, the fighter in him scarcely registers the shove in his back as the soldiers bring him down the hill, still under guard, fate undecided. They will not contradict a holy man: it is the padre’s problem now, his punishment.
Ferriter has been ready for death for years, but he is not ready for this indignity. A red rage swarms behind his eyes, a curse on the minister, a roar at the sky. Whatever is or is not left of the sacrament is swallowed and the bile in his mouth discharged onto the sodden earth.
‘I will never live to become the leavings of a rope.'
They hang him again despite the padre. This time the rope stays true.

Oooh! *shudder*

don't let us hang like this for too long, tartaronne

It is the end of The End!

There is more stuff about Pierce Ferriter, though......

That was a sudden ending!

What more do you know about Pierce Ferriter? Why did people want to hang him? How did he get caught? What was his favourite drink? Did he cuit people's ears off? So many mysteries yet to be unveiled...

i don't know about ferriter, but i am on a strict diet myself: nothing but ethylalcohol and cholesterol...






...luckily for me they come in a vast number of varieties