Even the CFC don’t know what the fuck this means.
4 Yonder
The Sea of Yonder, and the windswept islands scattered across it, are the domain of the Skeleton Pirates:[12] walking, talking cadavers who have very literal trouble holding their drink. Thanks to their indifference to oxygen, the Boneys[13] live as much beneath the waves as on them, and conduct breathtaking aquatic tours from their capital in the drowned city of Thalassinor. Just don’t be fooled by their bony grins: your average Skeleton Pirate is obsessively political, extremely sincere and about as gifted with humour as they are with skincare techniques.[14]
5 Map’s Edge
The colossal viridian expanse of Map’s Edge dwarfs the other seas, encircling them like the fist of an angry blue giant. But despite its immensity, it’s astonishing to note that this sea contains almost nothing. No islands more interesting than little hillocks of sand and gull shit, and certainly no settlements. Apart from the odd lost Captain, nobody spends any time in Map’s Edge, and so it’s barely worth mentioning.[15]
2. UNDERSTANDING SPUME
A Brief History
The true history of Spume is hard to piece together, since it’s not written down: paper and parchment are hard to come by in this watery place, and what little exists is usually reserved for making treasure maps. As such, the Pirates recount their history entirely through sea shanties, in which the details are almost entirely drowned out by repetitive refrains about heaving ho and lifting jugs of grog. After listening to thousands of hours of this nonsense, earthly historians have collected this sequence of best guesses as to the eras of Spume’s past.
1 The Prepiratical Era
Spume is occupied by a thriving maritime empire, which grows rich through harvesting Kraken on an industrial scale. But the strain of maintaining order over many distant islands takes its toll: sailors turn rogue, congregating in hidden ports and plundering trade at their leisure. These are the first Pirates, and before long they begin to outnumber the empire’s navies.
2 The Curse
Ruined cities – perhaps relics of a drowned civilisation – are discovered on the seafloor, and a vast quantity of gold is found within. It turns out to be … haunted.[16], [17] Those who take it are stricken by an awful curse: they become animated skeletons, immortal and unable to satiate their hunger or thirst. The social disruption caused by the sudden influx of miserable skeletons is the last straw for the empire: mass mutinies spread, all government collapses, and soon only Pirates – and Skeleton Pirates – remain.
3 The Golden Age of Piracy
For generations true anarchy reigns, as Pirates rob other Pirates in a global feeding frenzy. It’s so action-packed, nobody bothers to write anything down at all.
4 The Silver Age of Piracy
The Golden Age proves not to be sustainable. With piracy so lucrative, fewer and fewer people bother to engage in building ships, refining gunpowder or farming food. Scurvy becomes a crippling pandemic, and timber becomes almost as valuable as gold itself.
5 The Bronze Age of Piracy
After a drawn-out nadir of economic auto-cannibalism, civilisation on Spume flatlines. Ships become vanishingly rare – most pirates sail on sprawling rafts constructed from detritus, and fight with spears and clubs rather than cannons and flintlocks. Starvation and disease are rife, and some crews become entirely feral, drifting the seas like swarms of flotsam-borne rats.
PARANTHROPUS PEIRATES
Back in the Prepiratical Era, Pirates were declared hostes humani generis – ‘enemies of all humanity’ – by the empire they preyed upon. The Pirates thought this was quite cool, however, and adopted the descriptor themselves. But what sense did it make in the Golden Age of Piracy, when human civilisation had been entirely replaced by Pirates? To the Pirates, it was simple: if they had been declared ‘enemies’ of humanity before, then surely they had become non-human by definition. And with humanity now functionally extinct (since everyone had become a Pirate), buccaneering anthropologist Professarr Andronicus Skinner named Pirates a new species – Paranthropus Peirates – in a taxonomic ruling that no biologist has yet dared to challenge.
6 The Council of Free Captains
Realising that life on Spume is on the edge of a precipice, the last reasonable mariners form the Council of Free Captains (CFC) and declare a ceasefire across the Seven Seas. They hold a summit with the Captains of the Skeleton Pirates, who have become fierce isolationists, and agree a set of ground rules for the conduction of piracy: the Pirate’s Code. Under the Code, crews must split their time between thievery and the meaningful creation of resources, and observe strict guidelines as to which circumstances are suitable for behaving with lawless abandon.
Oooooh, I’ll tell ye the tale of the birth o’ the Code
Heave to, my boys, heave to!
The good word that governs the barnacle road
Drink up, my boys, drink up!
’Twas old Captain Dolan who first wrote it up
Ohhhhh, raise the capstan!
Told us how much to brew, and how much to sup
Ohhhhh, weigh anchor!
— True History of the Pirate’s Code, lines 1–8 out of 534,120
Spume today
After a marathon recovery, Spume is currently in what the CFC calls the Platinum Age of Piracy: the delicate sustainability policy enshrined in the Code has been honoured, and while resource scarcity is still a concern, the increasingly efficient and responsible nature of Kraken-hunting and the development of an undersea salvage industry by the Skeleton Pirates are making life more comfortable all the time. Now, with the advent of tourism, fresh gold – always the most treasured resource in a world of Pirates – is finally entering the economy. And while there was an initial period of awkwardness while the CFC figured out the rules for robbing visitors, these have now been formalised and are no longer the cause of any diplomatic crises. With the Seven Seas returning a greater bounty every year, and the trustworthy, hooked hand of the CFC at society’s moral tiller, now is the perfect time to visit Spume.[18]
