Special Guest Blogger: Captain Morgan

Most people today associate my name with Rum but unlike most pirates, i never hung around in bars boozing it up with wenches until much later in life.
My father thought i was going to follow him into the world of farming but i wasn't going to spend a lifetime knee deep in cow poop so i bid farewell to my native Wales and crossed the Atlantic to became the leader of a band of pirates called Brethren of the Coast and targeting the Spanish ships laden with gold with the blessing of the British Government.
I wasn't technically a pirate, i called myself a privateer and was therefore licensed by the British government to attack the Spanish any time the two countries were at war which was pretty much all the time and i even led a daring raid on the Spanish town of Porto Bello in Panama with the clever ruse of capturing a bunch of Catholic nuns and using them as human shields, the God fearing Spanish dared not fire at us and we walked in and captured their town and a handsome pile of gold for our trouble, 100,000 pieces of eight for the return of the port and it's inhabitants.
My reputation for violence was legendary, one of my party pieces was strapping a leather cord around the person's head and tightening it with a metal bar until their eyeballs popped out but despite the almost cuddly image of me today, i was as bloodthirsty and brutal as the rest of the pirate fraternity and concerned only with indulging my every whim and amassing as much wealth as possible but i never wasted all my gold on booze and wenches, i used most of my share to buy up huge amounts of land in Jamaica.
I eventually become the Governor of Jamaica and the proud owner of three plantations and hundreds of African slaves but although i had personally given up the life of Pirating, i continued to finance many raids on the Spanish and French fleets by other pirates.
When i returned to England i was treated as a hero and King Charles II even knighted me but my goal was always to become one of the landed gentry even if it killed me and eventually it did, doing what all the landed gentry do which was eat too much, drink too much and do very little else and i died of dropsy which is a cute name for the painful swelling due to the build-up of fluid in the body's tissue.
So enjoy the drink which now bears my name and always remember that if you drink enough Rum you will do great things, crazy things yes, but they will be great.