Avast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation founded on piracy (the privateer Sir Francis Drake swelled the exchequer by raiding the Spanish, who were in no doubt that he was a pirate), it is appropriate that Britain should give the international archetype of the pirate his language.
The language of the Victoria & Albert’s exhibition A Pirate’s Life for Me at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is a banquet of humour and doggerel. Whether you arrive a slipperslopper sea-cook, reeking of Havanas, or pushing treasures in a pram, you will stare at walls, speak in tongues and smile.
These master (and mistress) mariners of yore have their grappling hooks deep in the psyche of maritime nations. In their infancies, modern states needed pirates. The Barbarossa brothers scourged the Mediterranean from a base on the North African littoral. Their regency of Algiers became the first corsair state until Suleiman the Magnificent made Khidr Barbarossa grand admiral of the Ottoman fleet.
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