A Feast Fit For A Pirate

Day 166: Across the table from me, Captain Morgan Corbye impaled the steaming haggis with a skean dhu and allowed the scent of spice to fill the close confines of her cabin. Intensely proud of her Scottish heritage, Capt. Corbye had charged the ship's cook with delivering her St. Patrick's Day feast, and had poor John Peeke presented corned beef and cabbage, he would have been lashed severely. That your historian might have been asked to share in the meal was too distant a possibility to consider. I had already noted that there was but a single plate on the oaken boards. I only hoped that I could keep my stomach from growling while the Captain dined leisurely.

Between bites, the Captain gave into reminiscence and, in a moment of deep reverie, she spoke of her mother's love for the Isle of Skye. "'Twas frae there that me grandfer come," she said, and added under her breath, "Wrong side o' th' blanket, that one." When I assured her that most of us have bastards somewhere in our history, she gave a coarse laugh and intentionally misconstrued my meaning, saying, "Aye, an' there be a bloody lot o' them in th' Corbyes, 'tis no denyin'."

Peeke interrupted us then by placing a large bowl of neeps (turnips) in the center of the spread. Captain Corbye had gone so far a-woolgathering that she passed over the opportunity to reprimand him for the late serving. As if from the instinct of some half-remembered social convention, she pushed the vegetable across to me with the point of her knife. The moment gave me pause to wonder: who might Morgan Corbye have become had she not turned to piracy those years ago when she enlisted with Edgar Service?