The Seven Seas
The Seven Seas is the warm-water world of the great age of sail, where Crown frigates and pirate sloops share the same trade winds and the same shallow reefs. Sun-baked colonial ports do business by day while the free-haven roars by night; merchant galleons fat with sugar and silver beat north through hurricane lanes, and somewhere out past the charted shoals a fabled island holds a hoard a dead captain buried and only an old map can find. It is a grounded, salt-stained world of harbour taverns and counting-houses, sea-shanties and pieces of eight, where the line between privateer and pirate is one royal signature wide. Mind your rigging, watch your purse, and trust the tide before you trust the man sharing your bottle.
Rules of Reality
The Articles of the Account
Every pirate crew sails under articles, sworn upon a Bible or a boarding-axe before the voyage: shares divided by rank, no fighting aboard, lights out at eight bells, and a set price in pieces of eight for a lost eye or limb. A captain rules only by the crew's vote, and a crew that turns on its articles answers to no one but itself.
Letters of Marque and the Long Drop
A sealed letter from a king turns a sea-robber into a patriot privateer; without it the very same raid earns a dance at the rope's end. The whole difference between a hero and a hanged man is one signature, and forged letters change hands in the free-haven for a fat purse of silver.
The Hurricane Season
From the heat of high summer to the first cool of autumn the great storms walk the sea-lanes, and only a fool or a desperate man keeps a deck under sail. Wise captains careen their hulls and drink away the season in port, which is why the free-havens are fullest, and most dangerous, when the sky turns green.
X Marks Nothing Plainly
A treasure map is a riddle a dead man left to spite the living: paces counted from a landmark long since toppled, bearings taken off a tree the storms have felled. No hoard in these waters was ever buried where the cross is drawn, and half the corpses on the beaches are men who dug exactly where the map told them to.
The Free Trade
The Crown's duties are murder on an honest cargo, so half the goods that move through these islands move at night, untaxed and unlogged, through cave-coves and complicit innkeepers. Smuggling is less a crime here than a profession, and the line between a respectable merchant and a free-trader is mostly a matter of which official is watching.
Species & Powers
Humans
The peoples of the Seven Seas are all of one stock — sunburnt planters and jack-tars, king's officers and freebooters, freed maroons, island-born and company clerks alike. What divides them is allegiance, trade and the flag they sail under, never blood.
Key Locations
The Spanish Main
The long mainland coast to the east and south, a green wall of jungle and fever-river behind a string of forts, factories and guarda costa stations, where the Company trades under the Crown's guns and the Crown pretends not to see what the Company trades. Every creek hides a smuggler; every fort hides a bribe.
Port Royal
The Crown's great harbour-town, a proper colonial port of brick warehouses, a stone fort and a magistrate's gallows kept busy with pirates. By day its quays groan with sugar and silver bound for home; by night its grog-shops and gambling-dens earn it the name of the wickedest town afloat, for even king's men have a price. A frigate or two always rides at anchor under the fort's guns.
Nassau, the Free-Haven
The lawless pirate anchorage where no king's writ has ever run, a sprawl of tents, careened hulls and rum-shacks heaped along a shallow beach too thin for a navy ship of the line to enter. The brotherhood votes its captains here, fences its plunder and drinks its prizes away beneath a black flag, and a bold stranger with a good story can ship out a wealthy man or a dead one by morning.
Treasure Island
A fever-green island far to the south, ringed by reef and remembered in a dead captain's stained chart for the fortune buried somewhere in its hills. A few rotting stockade timbers and the bleached bones of a marooned crew are all that greet the diggers; the parrots scream a dead man's name from the palms, and more treasure-hunters have left their skeletons here than have left with gold.
The Admiral Benbow Inn
A sleepy whitewashed inn on a lonely northern cove, where retired seamen drink their pensions and watch the coast road for faces they'd rather not see. Little ever happens here but the tide and the gossip — until an old sailor takes the upstairs room, pays in foreign silver, and starts watching the road himself. Many a great voyage has begun over its hearth without anyone meaning it to.
The Maroon Mangroves
A vast tangle of green creeks, hidden lagoons and high inland hills where the free villages of the maroon council lie beyond the reach of any patrol. Outsiders who blunder in are swallowed by the swamp; those who come in good faith trade for fish, fruit and the priceless knowledge of safe channels. The council remembers every keel that ever hunted them.
Smuggler's Cove
A hidden notch in the western cliffs where a sea-cave runs back into a dry chamber a sloop can warp into out of sight of the lanes. The free-traders land their untaxed rum and silk here by lantern-light, paying off whichever revenue-man is on the take that month, and many a fugitive captain has hidden out in its dark until the hue and cry blew over.
Company Factory Wharf
The fortified trading-station of the Honourable Company on the far eastern coast, all neat warehouses, a deep stone mole and ledgers kept to the last barrel. Its supercargoes set the price of sugar and rum across the islands and its hired guards turn away anyone without a chit. Power here wears a clerk's coat and signs in ink, not blood.
The Spanish Galleon Wreck
The broken back of a treasure-galleon piled on a half-tide reef between the free-haven and the southern hills, masts long gone but holds still half-buried in coral. Free-divers work it for stray pieces of eight at slack water, and the wreck is a known meeting-place for crews that would rather not be seen entering port together.
The Council Village
The largest of the free villages, set on a defensible hilltop deep in the maroon country, where the elders' council meets beneath a great silk-cotton tree to weigh every stranger and every bargain. Provisioning grounds, smoke-houses and lookout posts ring it, and no patrol has ever found it twice in the same place.
The Rendezvous Cay
A hump of sand and sea-grape barely a cable long in the open water east of Nassau, with a single crooked palm and a barrel sunk in the sand for letters. Crews that have lost each other in a blow meet here; crews that have quarrelled settle it here, where nobody can be hanged for what the tide washes away.
The Hurricane Hole
A deep, land-locked pool behind a mangrove bar south-west of Nassau where a sloop can ride out a hurricane with her cables made fast to the roots. There is a spring, a rain-cistern and a lean-to of old canvas; the last crew in left a barrel of biscuit and a warning cut into the palm.
The Guarda Costa Station
A whitewashed watch-house and gun-platform on a headland of the Main, where the coast-guard's lateen-rigged guardas lie ready to stop and search any sail that shows a foreign flag. Its captain takes a tenth of every seizure and a fifth of every ship that is let go.
History
The Buccaneer Dawn
Some forty years past
The Cattle-Hunters Take to the Sea — On the wild leeward shores, ragged hunters who smoked beef over green-wood fires — the boucaniers — were driven off the land by the Crown's planters and took up small boats and long muskets instead. They turned their deadeye aim on passing treasure-ships, and so the brotherhood of the sea was born from a barbecue and a grudge.
Some thirty years past
The Sack of the Silver Port — A great captain of the buccaneers gathered every sloop and longboat he could and stormed a Spanish silver-port across the isthmus, marching his men through the swamp to take it from the landward side. The plunder bankrolled a decade of the free trade and proved that the brotherhood could humble a crown.
The Golden Age
Within the last decade
The Republic of the Free-Haven — When the great war ended and the crown turned its privateers loose without pay, thousands of idle sailors flocked to the abandoned harbour and made it their own. They flew no flag but the black, voted their own captains and articles, and for a few wild years ran a republic of thieves that no king could enter.
A few years past
The Blockade of the Sugar Port — The most feared captain of the age, a giant with smoking matches braided into his black beard, blockaded the harbour of a wealthy colonial port and held its ships to ransom for a chest of medicines. The Crown paid, the town seethed, and his legend grew until the whole sea seemed to belong to him.
The King's Reckoning
Three years past
The King's Pardon — Weary of the black flag, the crown sent a new governor to the free-haven with a printed pardon for every pirate who would swear off the trade and a hangman for every one who would not. Half the brethren took the king's mercy and turned honest, or turned pirate-hunter; the other half slipped their cables and ran for the open sea.
The present day
The Hunt for the Buried Hoard — An old sea-chest changed hands at a sleepy coastal inn and out of it came a stained chart marking a fortune a dead captain buried on a fever-green island far to the south. Now navy, brotherhood, company and every privateer with a fast keel races to read its riddle first, and the whole sea holds its breath over a single sheet of paper.