A letter from Cornelius Frestagon

To the reader who has wandered this far —

I do not, as a rule, sign letters. The compositors at Urbanicity have been at me for fourteen years to put my name on something the paper might keep. I have refused on the grounds that a publisher who explains himself is no longer publishing — he is testifying, and testimony belongs in a court, not on the front page. This letter, then, is an exception. Read it as one.

You have come to a site that we have, with some embarrassment, called Pirates Preview. The name is not modest. The thing it points at is a project I have lived inside for the better part of two decades: a complete fictional anatomy of the brotherhood of the sea between roughly 1580 and 1725 — the years we call Phase One, the years between Drake’s wake and Bonnet’s noose. Every named pirate in our records has a portrait, a ship, a faction, a quarrel, a small private oath. None of them are, in the strictest sense, real. All of them are, in the looser sense that fiction permits, true.

I am not the author of any of them. I am the publisher, which is a stranger thing. I sign the checks, I read the margins, I sometimes kill an issue at the press if the type is too clever for the story. The reason this site exists is that we are about to begin moving pieces of the archive into public view through Urbanicity’s pages — a serialized fiction we will call, when the time comes, the Brine Gate Chronicle. What you see here is not the Chronicle. What you see here is the antechamber: a single brother of a feud (Edmund, of the Fang Brothers), his twin and enemy (Aidan), a ship’s surgeon who did not want to be a pirate (Doktor Hargreaves), and the canonical principles by which all of them are read.

I write to you also because three names will appear in the Chronicle so often that you should know them now. They are the three admirals whose decisions, made and unmade, set the weather of the entire archive. I do not love them all. I do not need to. The work is to keep their accounts plain.

John Saltwell — spare with words, reads everything, trusts paper more than men. When Saltwell sails, the matter is finished. He carries the Crown’s authority and most of its restraint. I have shared more cups of tea with him than I have liked, and I will not pretend his rule is a kindness; I will say it is a rule.

Isabella Tidecrest — reads weather like a chart and fights in heavy seas no other admiral will accept. If a convoy under Tidecrest is lost, it was already lost when she sailed. She is the reason the Saltwell flagship can hold a line against the Black Admiral’s gunnery and not crack. She does not read this magazine. She does not need to.

Samuel Blackwater — reads a ship’s manifest the way other men read a hand of cards. Twelve of Carleton’s cargoes impounded in fifteen years, the most of any officer of the harbor. Blackwater is the man who proves that paperwork is a weapon. He has signed cargo manifests that have cost more lives than any cannon I know.

You will hear more of all three. You will hear more of others, eventually — the captains, the quartermasters, the witches and the costume-witches, the surgeons and the sirens, the ghosts who stay aboard and the ghosts who walk ashore. None of it is finished. None of it is meant to be.

For now, please consider this site a hand extended — a small selection of doctrine and a small selection of faces. The Chronicle, when it begins, will be in the magazine. The site will continue to grow underneath it, as quietly as I can manage.

Yours, in the matter of ink —

Cornelius Frestagon

(margin signature: “Frestes”)