Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Hornigold

Pirates have become cartoon characters in your modern culture so you could be forgiven for forgetting that the real thing were much more badass than the sanitised version in your head, we were unspeakably violent, often mass murderers and thieves and a career choice for people who liked to slash and hack away at people during the day and drink rum and vomit a lot at night.
As far as Pirating goes, i was a success story starting out in the Bahamas with little more than a few canoes but as we captured more and more ships my motley crew of scurvy dogs grew including teaching the pirating game to one of the most reknown and feared pirates of all time and i ended up commanding a huge 30-gun warship called The Ranger, then the most heavily armed in the area which made sailing over to merchant ships and stealing their goods and jewels extremely easy.
My protege was a young disenchanted goods importer called Edward Teach who quickly discovered that there was quicker and easier ways to make a living than humping around folders and files and it was so simple that sometimes we would do it just for kicks, one night we overtook a merchant ship and the only thing we demanded was everyone's hat, explaining to the puzzled crew that we got drunk and tossed ours overboard the night before, then we thanked them and  took off without stealing anything else.
Despite having the weapons to take over any ship we fancied, we avoided attacking British-flagged ships as we then had the fig leaf of cover that we were attacking England's enemies but my crew wanted to expand our operation and when i refused, they cut me loose in a sloop and they took off to raid anyone they fancied with Teach, or Blackbeard as he was now calling himself, as their leader.
Now unemployed i did consider my next move and did a bit of pirating on the side while waiting for opportunities to present themselves but word arrived of a general pardon for pirates offered by the King of England who not only offered a clean slate but also large sums of money for the capturing of other pirates so i became a pirate hunter chasing some of the same guys i used to run with.
I did round up a few of the old gang before sailing my ship into some reefs and perishing but i may not have been the most famous pirate but i taught the man who was everything he knew so i get a mention in every book and movie with the word 'Blackbeard' on the front and i raise my bottle of rum with a yo ho ho to that.