His old man died early on, leaving Stede with a 400-acre estate. I guess the esteem bar was lower back then. By this definition, I also consider myself a man of letters, though I haven’t experienced any esteem for it. He was born in 1688 and purportedly came from a “good English family,” had a solid education, and was “generally esteemed a Man of Letters.” I’m guessing that meant he knew all 26 of the letters and could generally string them together to form sentences. I’m not consistently botching “Steve.” Maybe his parents botched “Steve.” At any rate, I’m just going to call him Stede because, as you’ll see, he deserved no better.ĭetails of Stede’s early life on Barbados are hazy and, quite possibly, boring. 1įirst of all, I need to get something out of the way: his name is indeed Stede Bonnet. This is what I imagine Stede Bonnet was thinking when, in 1717, he quit his life as a wealthy plantation owner on Barbados, quit his marriage, and quit his children to pursue a short, unrestrained, violent life of piracy. “But why,” the narrator goes on, “would I want to do that? I chose not to choose life. Choose a f*cking big television”-OK, maybe not that last bit. Have you ever seen the movie Trainspotting? It’s mostly about Scottish heroin addicts and Iggy Pop, but it’s also about the choice people-and maybe men, more often-sometimes make to be self-destructive for no rational reason.Īnd, while this is the story of Stede Bonnet, who was an English pirate (briefly) in the 1700s, I think the opening monologue for that movie applies here pretty well: “Choose a job.
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