Dead Man's Chest

[Dark One]

As Pirates of the Caribbean 2 will be released soon, i thought i'd post a few pirate facts relating to the film:

1: Talk Pirate (lexicon)

• Avast: sailing term derived from “Houd Fast”, the Dutch for “Hold Fast”. Later appropriated by eye-rolling panto pirates.
  
  
• Barker: slang term for a pistol.
  
  
• Bilge Rat: popular term of abuse. The bilge was the lowest part of the ship, awash with foul, stinky water.
  
  
• Bumboo: no, not a 17th century term for mooning, but West Indian booze made with watered rum flavoured with sugar and nutmeg.
  
  
• Cackle Fruit: chicken eggs.
  
  
• Dance the Hempen Jig: tasteful euphemism for hanging. Doubtlessly from the nearest yardarm.
  
  
• Daddle: a hand. “tip us yer daddle” was an invitation to handshake, but will now get your face slapped in a bar.
  
  
• Dead Men: empty bottles (the spirits have left them…)
  
  
• Drivelswigger: slang for a swotty swashbuckler who reads far too much about nautical terminology.
  
  
• Futtock Shrouds: Oh behave! These were pieces that joined the rigging of the lower and top mast.
  
  
• Grog: a seadog-soothing mix of rum and water (the rum was used to mask the fact that the water had spoiled on the voyage). The French Navy gave out wine. Figures.
  
  
• Hearties: colleagues and comrades, forever prefaced with the word “me”. And the occasional “Aaaahhrr”.
  
  
• Hornswaggle: to cheat, bamboozle or otherwise defraud.
  
  
• Jolly Roger: infamous, breeches-filling flag, riffing on Old Rodger, and archaic name for the Devil.
  
  
• Landlubber: Sneery term for sea-snubbing prole, derived from lubber, the old English word for doofus.
  
  
• Powder Monkey: affectionate term for a gunner’s assistant.
  
  
• Proud Beauty: babe, fox, top totty, sweet mama.
  
  
• Sawbones: the ship’s surgeon, named for his practice approach to limb threatening situations.
  
  
• Swab: term of abuse, taken from the name of a dirty rag used for cleaning filthy corners of the ship.
  
  
• Shiver Me Timbers: Another immortal panto pirate fave, from the noise a ship makes when running aground or struck by cannonfire. Possibly never uttered by any living being between 1602 and 1799.
  

[Dark One]

2: Who was Davy Jones?

• The first recorded reference to this briny bogeyman came in 1751’s The Adventures of Peregrin Pickle by Tobias Smollett. He’s described as “the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep”.
  
  
• Far from Bull Nighy’s squid-faced incarnation, the traditional Davy is said to have saucer eyes, three rows of teeth, horns, a tail and blue smoke pouring from his nostrils. Quite the ladies’ man...
  
  
• Davy Jones’s Locker is sailor’s slang for the deepest part of the ocean, the place to which all sailors that die at sea are taken.
  
  
• Who was the real Davy? One theory pegs him as David Jones, a shady London publican said to drug unwary boozers and sell them on to unscrupulous mariners looking for a crew.
  
  
• Another theory claims that he was “Duffer” Jones, a Magoo-styled myopic sailor who often found himself toppling overboard. Still another theory holds that he was David Jones, a much-feared pirate prowling the Indian Ocean in the 1630s.
  
  
• Some etymologists believe that the name is a corruption of Jonah, the prophet who found himself inside a whale, coupled with duppy (corrupted to duffy), a soul-snatching spirit in West Indian mythology.
  

[Dark One]

The Flying Dutchman (Myths and Legends…)

• Davy Jones commands the fabled phantom vessel in Dead Man’s Chest, but the legendary captain of the spook ship was Captain Hendrik van der Decken, a stubborn 17th century mariner who encountered a violent storm off the coast of Africa. Ignoring the pleas of his passengers and crew, he cursed God and the elements, vowing he would round the Cape of Good Hope if it took him till doomsday. When all aboard perished, he got his wish…
  
  
• Any ship that encounters the Dutchman is said to be instantly doomed.
  
  
• The legend was said to be inspired by the Dutch Captain Bernerd Fokke, whose voyages were so speedy that people suspected he was in league with the Devil.
  
  
• The British Admiralty filed countless sightings of the ghost ship between 1823 and 1942. The most famous witness was King George V, then a navel cadet. His diary for 11 July 1881 reads: “At four am, the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows… a strange red light, as of a phantom ship, all aglow…” Hitler’s commander-in-chief of U-boats also saw it, and claimed his crews would rather face the “combined strength of Allied warships in the North Atlantic than know the terror a second time of being confronted by a phantom vessel”.
  
  
• As recently as October 1959 the crew of the freighter Straat Magelhaen reported a near-collision with the cursed ship.
  

[Dark One]

Kraken Up!

• The earliest detailed description of the humungous sea-beastie came in 1752 in a natural history of Norway by Erik Pontopiddan, bishop of Bergen (clearly not a man to hallucinate giant squid after a session on the sauce). He said it was “the size of a floating island”. Centuries before, Pliny the Elder also witnessed an oversized octopus.
  
  
• French mollusc expert Pierre Denys de Montford labelled the beast a “kraken octopus”, and blamed it for the disappearance of ten British warships one night in 1782. When the British Navy refuted this, Montford’s career ended and he later died penniless in Paris.
  
  
• The true danger to shipping was said to be the whirlpool created by the kraken when it slunk back to the ocean depths.
  
  
• The name kraken is derived from krake, meaning unhealthy animal or something twisted (it’s where we get the English word crook).
  
  
• Tennyson added the superfluous “The” in his 1830 poem “The Kraken”. It inspired Jules Verne to lob a giant squid into Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and probably influenced the ancient tentacular evil of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.
  
  
• The biggest squid known to science (so far!) grows to 46 feet, but in 1997 strange ultra-low frequency underwater sounds were detected off the coast of South America. They indicated a truly vast – and still unknown – creature…
  

[Cookie Lover]

Hmm, wouldn't mind that last idea. Kraken Kalimari, sounds good to me! Even better, Cookie Lovers Craken Calimari!