Captain Bad Trousers

Captain Bad Trousers had a problem. In fact he had more than one problem. He had three of them.

He mulled them over in his mind trying to decide which problem was the most serious as he shuffled down the smelly cobbled alley behind The Rusty Port Hole Tavern – the dingiest inn in the town of Port Royale.

They were, in order of most recently occurring:

Problem 1

He had no crew. (He did have a ship though – the Thirsty Pig. Well named, thought Bad Trousers, as she gulped up more water through her leaky planks than any other ship he had heard of).

His previous crew had deserted him when he ran out of gold doubloons to pay them. They also thought he was a less-than impressive Captain and said they were off to find someone who looked a bit more like a real pirate should, which brought him on to …

Problem 2

He was a bit of a laughing stock among the pirate community of Port Royale. This was partly due to the fact that every time he set sail upon an exciting new adventure, it tended to end in disaster of the spectacular kind.

However, he was sure it also had something to do nobody finding him scary.

People were afraid of real pirates. All the famous pirates were feared across the high seas. Their fearsome reputations went before them, and often their victims were quaking in their boots, falling over themselves to surrender, before the first cannon had even been fired. Captain Bad Trousers’s reputation went before him too. But it had the opposite effect. When he raised his flag (The Jolly Splodger) people just laughed and told him to go away.

Problem 3

But his last problem was potentially the worst as it was also the most dangerous.

He was currently wanted by the mad pirate Pierre the Goat, who had declared he would sink any ship that Bad Trousers sailed on. Goat was an outlaw – so couldn’t set foot even in pirate-friendly Port Royale without being arrested, but on the high seas there was nothing to stop him from chasing Captain Bad Trousers down.

The Goat’s issue with the Captain stemmed from an accidental incident during Pierre’s mermaid-themed birthday party aboard his ship – The Flying Plunderamous. All the pirates of the Caribbean had been invited and had been asked to bring a dish along to help with the catering.

Bad Trousers had brought along a batch of his famous oyster and eel muffins. Sadly, it was popular party-goer opinion that the muffins were the cause of everyone at the party being suddenly and explosively sick.

The results were not pretty and, following the clean up, Pierre had had to rip up and replace the planks on his poop deck as no amount of scrubbing seemed able to remove the stains.

Bad Trousers had protested his innocence but The Goat was having none of it and had vowed to run him aground on an uninhabited island with just the coconut crabs for company the next time he saw him.

Captain Bad Trousers sighed miserably as he turned the corner of the alley out on to Main Street and pushed open the creaky door of the tavern. Perhaps grog would help he thought. A few tankards might help him find some answers to his problems. And if not then a few more might help him forget them.