The Ships of Black Beard the Pirate

A little over of a week ago I made a post on my review of Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides. I mentioned that On Stranger Tides was the inspiration for Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Disney’s On Stranger Tides makes use of the Powers use of magic, and although there are a few other similarities the Disney film diverges its own course.

The pirate, Black Beard figures prominently in both stories. In Power’s On Stranger Tides Black Beard is in command of Adventurer, toward the end of the story and his life. Having taken over the body of another human being he in effect is reincarnated.

Black Beards Queen Anne's Revenge

In Disney’s On Stranger Tides Black Beard is in command of the Queen Anne’s Revenge. The ship in which Jack Sparrow finds himself after being shanghaied.

Screenshots from Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides

This book was the inspiration for the Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. With a host of cut-throat pirates with the likes of Blackbeard, hordes of the undead, ghosts, the Fountain of Youth, and magic spells, On Stranger Tides was a great read. It was one of those swash-bucklers that was hard to put down.

On Stranger Tides the Epilogue

I faded on the crowing cock.
Some say that ever `gainst that season comes,
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome;
Then no plants strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

William Shakespeare

The Preambles of On Stranger Tides

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Book 1  

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…And unmoored souls may drift on stranger tides
Than those men know of, and be overthrown
By winds that would not even stir a hair…

William Ashbless (On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers)

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Book 2

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Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by that land we find,
Where the brightest have gone before us,
And the dullest are most behind-
Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!
`T is all we have left to prize:
One cup to the dead already-
Hurrah for the next that dies!

Excerpt from East India, by Bartholomew Dowling

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Book 3

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“Whats o’ clock?”
It wants to quarter to twelve,
And to-marrow’s doomsday.

-T.L. Beddoes

On Stranger Tides

“And then all at once they were no longer alone-in fact, the clearing was crowded now with human-shaped forms that were nearly transparent to the torchlight, though the light was dimmed if a number of them overlapped in front of it, and all of these insubstantial things were crowded in toward he blood pit and crying out imploringly in tiny, chittering, birdlike voices.”

On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers

A Host of Characters-Governor Sawney

When Shandy (Jack Chandagnac) met up with the old hoot Sawney. “Swaney was wearing a baggy, bright yellow trousers and an embroidered silk jacket, and if he had on any sort of neck-cloth it was concealed under his tangled beard, which was the color of bleached bones.”

Swaney, otherwise known as the Governor had been to the fabled Fountain of Youth back in 1521. Sawney had dropped blood and had drank from the waters and had become immortal, that is as long as the plant that had sprouted up from his bloodletting stayed green.

Over two hundred years ago Sawney had been the governor of Porto Rico, and of all the islands there about. Sawney, AKA the governor, was no other than Juan Ponce De Leon.

On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers

More Mutterings of the Old Pirate, Sawney

“Bendita sea el alma,
Y el Senor que nos la manda;
Bendita sea el deá
Y el Senor que nos lo enviá”

“Blessed be the soul, and the Lord that keeps it in order; blessed be the day, and the Lord that drives is away.”

On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers

The Mutterings of the Old Pirate, Sawney

“Mas molerá si Dios quisiere- Cuenta y pasa, que buen viaje faza.”

“More will flow if God wills-count and let it happen, and the voyage will pass more quickly.”

On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers