"In July [1683], a company of twenty pirates commanded by a certain Captain Wright arrived in Virginia in a bark from the island of Tortuga and settled peaceably on the Eastern Shore, apparently without the least opposition." Dude! Pirates! Tortuga! Is it wrong of me to really really hope they settled in Somerset County? And married into a certain otherwise completely unremarkable family? Shomette cites Dampier as the source; I guess I'm going to be pulling out the ol' microfilm again. (... maybe the reason my Colonial relatives never got their names in the official records is that they were doing things best kept out of the official records! They did sign the Loyalty Oath though. And in the 1774 census, several listed their occupation as simply "mariner." Hmmm.)

Also, the Tindalls' Point Raiders are the coolest pirates ever. They sailed in out of nowhere, pillaged two innoffensive plantations from longboats, sent a threatening letter saying they were going to capture the colonial powder magazine, and then turned up in Rhode Island several months later after sending the colony into a tizzy of unneeded defensive measures. The Rhode Islanders sent them back to Maryland, upon which all five of them promptly escaped. Two were recaptured and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead, although they were declared by the court to be the "least guilty" of the raiders. Then the day before execution, they requested a reprieve that they might be baptized; it was granted. The night before the rescheduled execution, they escaped again, out the window of the jail. No sign nor trail was ever detected.

... Then, three days later, they came back to the jail and "went in at the same place they went out", and in the morning, called for the sherriff. They happily informed him that they'd finished the mission they'd needed to complete and were ready to be executed now, please.

Nobody could ever get them to tell the rest of the story, and eventually, the Governor of Virginia granted them a full pardon out of sheer *curiousity*, and they lived long and law-abiding lives in the colonies.

And you thought Jack Sparrow was sillier than *real* pirates!