The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

and marching onto the deck, where several of the pirates were already gathered.

'It's just a ten-gun brig,' said the scarf-wear­ing pirate, scratching thoughtfully at a livid scar that ran the length of his cheek. On most people a scar can be quite disfiguring, but several of the pirates thought that in the pirate with a scarf's case it actually added to his rather rugged appeal.

A ten-gun brig? Really?' said the Pirate Captain, frowning at the news.

'I was expecting something bigger. Seeing as it's carrying all this gold for the Bank of England,' said his number two.

'Perhaps they're trying to keep a low profile,'

said the Pirate Captain, with some misgivings. 'Are those cannons ready?'

'This sort of makes us bank robbers, doesn't

'Aaarrr. But you knew you'd be bending a few laws when you became a pirate. I'm not sure the ivory smuggling we were doing the other week was entirely respectable. Or all that trawling for cod, come to think about it.'

'Cannons ready, Captain.'

An eerie silence suddenly becalmed the pirate chatter, as the crew waited for the Pirate Captain to give his order to make good the attack.

'Fire a cannonball at that boat!' said the Pirate Captain.

Four

WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE UNFORGIVING DEEP?

‘Confound it, man!' said Robert FitzRoy, captain of the boat about to be attacked by the pirates. 'I told you women and the sea were a mighty bad combination.'

FitzRoy was young for a ship's captain, just twenty-seven, but the man he stood back to back with was younger still, a full five years his junior. Yet neither bore the frisky demeanour that you would expect to find in people under thirty.

'I can't help myself, Robert,' said his compan­ion, Charles Darwin, cradling his big round head in his hands. 'I love her, and I mean to marry her!'

'But I love her too!' said FitzRoy. 'She drives me to distraction! You already knew that.'

'Damn women, with ... with their hair ... and their faces ...' muttered Darwin.

'I must demand satisfaction,' said Captain FitzRoy. 'You don't leave me any choice.'

The cabin was a little small for a duel, neither

man quite being able to stand up properly with­out grazing his head, but needs must at sea.

'Three years' voyage ... and it should come to this,' said Darwin, shakily pouring powder into his pistol. 'May the best man win.'

'You're a botanist.⁷ I'm a trained naval officer. I don't fancy your chances much,' said FitzRoy.

The door was flung open with a crash that made Darwin wince, and in ran the breathless cause of the two men's argument, the lovely Lady Mara. 'Please stop!' she said with her lovely mouth. 'There's—'

7 Darwin was serving as an unpaid naturalist onboard the HMS Beagle. The Beagle was unimpressive for its day - just ninety feet long and of a notoriously unseaworthy design. In his notes Darwin described the voyage as 'one continual puke'.

But before Lady Mara could say any more, a cannonball splintered through the cabin wall at tremendous speed, and buried itself in the side of her pretty head, knocking her off her feet, and leaving her quite dead on the floor. Darwin and FitzRoy stood, dumbfounded.

'Well. I...'

'Should we ... ?' Darwin gestured at his gun. 'Hardly seems much point.' 'What a damned fool I've been!' laughed Darwin.

'Oh, I'm just as much to blame,' said FitzRoy with a grin, pocketing his pistol, and slapping his friend on the back. They would have hugged right there and then, but were interrupted by a further crash as first another cannonball and then a pirate screamed in through the window. The two men stood stock-still.

'Don't make any sudden movements,' whis­pered FitzRoy to his companion. 'Remember - he's more scared of us than we are of him.'

'That's bears, you idiot,' hissed Darwin out of the side of his mouth. 'I don't think it applies to pirates.'

At the doorway, a second pirate appeared, with a luxuriant beard and a pleasant, open face, all teeth and curls.

'I'm the Pirate Captain. And I'm here for the gold!' he said.

Everybody froze. For a moment the only sound was the gentle roar of the ocean, and some wheezing from the pirate with asthma.

'Well, uh, help yourself,' said FitzRoy eventu­ally, slightly perplexed. Darwin was too terrified to speak.

'Not that there's a great deal,' continued the young captain. 'I think some of the portholes might be made of gold, but then again they could be made of brass. Same sort of colour, so it's difficult to tell'

'Rah!' said the Pirate Captain, with a frightful bellow. 'I know you're carrying a hundredweight in gold bullion!'

'Really?' said FitzRoy, genuinely surprised. 'I haven't seen anything of the sort.'

'Perhaps the bit of boat that's under the water is made of gold,' ventured Darwin, finding his voice at last. 'I mean, it could be made of anything for all we know. You never get to see it.'

The Pirate Captain's icy blade against his throat struck him silent.

'Search the hold, men, and bring me back some gold,' said the Pirate Captain, with a sneer reminiscent of Elvis.

The pirates were pretty slick by this stage of their piratical careers, and they had managed to overrun the entire ship in a matter of minutes. The only casualty on the pirate side had been the pirate dressed in red, who had twisted his ankle trying to do that trick where you slide down the face of the mainsail, cutting it as you go with your cutlass - which worked fine up to a point but still left a twenty-foot drop once he reached the bottom of the canvas.

'Ouch! My ankle!' he cried, but none of the other pirates had much sympathy for his reck­less showboating. A group of them headed into the hold - but instead of the clinking you would associate with gold, all they could hear was the chatter of creatures. One of the pirates tore at a tarpaulin, only to discover row upon row of cages, each containing some sort of monkey.

***

'The gold must be hidden inside these monkeys!' shouted a pirate. Several of the pirates put down their flickering lamps, picked up monkeys of various different types, and slit them end to end, but all that spilt out was monkey guts.

'Gold!' said the pirate with an accordion, holding something yellowish up hopefully.

'That's not gold. It's a kidney,' said the pirate with a hook for his hand.

Covered in bits of creature, and thoroughly dejected, the pirate crew tramped back to FitzRoy's cabin.

'Pieces of ape! Pieces of ape!' squawked Gary, the ship's parrot.

'Will somebody shut him up?' scowled the pirate in green.

'There's no treasure here, Captain. Just a lot of stupid creatures,' said the pirate with a scarf.

'Just like I told you,' said FitzRoy.