“Pirates have been around since men went to sea – Julius Caesar was captured by pirates.” – Angus Konstam.

I have always loved pirates. I believe most young children enjoyed playing pirates.

Unlike ‘Cowboys and Indians’ where you wanted to be the Cowboy (and if girls were plating with you they were relegated to being Indians) it was dressing up as a Pirate that was number one. The Navy Officers who fought the pirates and restore law and order – they might just as well have been Indians.

Pirates were actually terrible people they robbed. Whether you were rich or poor it mattered not. And woe be it if you were a female captured by pirates……. As a child it didn’t matter and in a number of the pirate movies it is the pirates who are good and the British officers are in the pay of crooked Lords and Governors, so they are the bad.

History tells us not all pirates were men. Two of the most fierce-some pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were women.

Both these women are featured in a a new book just published, “The Pirate World” by Angus Konstam. This book is covered in an article we have published in iNews Cayman today. You will find it in our top slider – see “The pirate queens”.

If you go to the original source article from The Daily Mail written by Leigh McManus, you will find lots of excellent illustrations that give the article even more appeal.

Even before the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise came along, I was always dismayed as how over the years, the powers that be here allowed our National Festival, Pirates Week, to be shoved into the background in their DOT publicity.

It was almost with an apology Pirates Week was mentioned at all.

I am not saying this from hearsay as I was a large part of Pirates Week for over 25 years and viewed it first hand. Even our father of the House, MLA and Speaker, McKeeva Bush, spoke out against the Festival, even once announcing Pirates Week was going to be abolished.

The voice against Pirates Week was “Caymanians aren’t descended from pirates”. No one with any brain would ever say Caymanians were, so where did that myth come from?

The loss of the free publicity that goes just with the pirate theme has got even smaller. It’s marketed now as “Pirates Fest”. The ‘Week’ was wrong in my participation as it was TEN days. Now it’s FOUR.

Whoever came up with the idea of having the Landing and Float Parade at the BEGINNING of the Festival as happened last year? No, don’t tell me. The organisers must like reading the end of a book, or going to the movies to watch the last fifteen minutes of the movie. Then they go to the start.

However, I’m straying off my point.

We have just seen the incredible publicity we have received from KAABOO. The staging and months of planning that went into it paid great dividends. It was new and the organisers had to start from scratch. A previous attempt by a different organisation had ended in disaster, law suits and many people duped out of their money. All of this they had to combat with.

Perhaps it’s time to let a private organisation take over the reins of the Pirates Festival?

Pirates were already around, from the time of Julius Caesar. How many books and movies have come forth since then?

Read this new book and it might wet your appetite again to come forward and put some life back into a festival that should have been staged exactly as the KAABOO festival without half of the pre=publicity and planning the organisers had to execute.

I believe Pirates will still be with us long after I’ve passed away. It’s just the way it is being handled here that it is dying.

“The Pirate World”, by Angus Konstam, is published by Osprey Publishing and costs £25. You can also find it at Amazon – Kindle S14.46 or hardcover $27.90. Go to: https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-World-History-Notorious-Robbers/dp/1472830970