Creative History

  In the late 1730’s the Empire of Great Britain had been at relative peace for nearly a quarter of a century.  However, as a new decade dawned, the United Kingdom was about to go to war with the almost equally powerful Empire of Spain over a human ear--Captain Robert Jenkins’ ear to be more specific. In 1731 Captain Robert Jenkins was in command of a ship called the Rebecca and he was sailing his ship around the Caribbean, ostensibly to protect the British colonial possession of Jamaica as a Captain in the Royal Navy, but in reality he may simply have been looking for Spanish, French or other non-English cargo ships to board, capture and plunder.   In the mid-eighteenth century there were few real substantive differences between naval ships and pirate ships other than one (the naval ships) had to split their spoils with their respective governments, while the others (the pirate ships) simply engaged in drunken debauchery with whatever they looted.  It wasn’t...

  Noon on the day after Christmas in the year 1900.   The crew of the Irish clipper ship Hesperus reached the coast of the Flannel Isles and prepared to dock alongside the desolate, rocky, archipelago's newly built lighthouse.  Upon arrival, the crew of the Hesperus discover that the lighthouse has no flag flying from its mast and no one greets the newly arrived clipper to welcome them ashore.  The Hesperus’ Captain Jim Harve, blows his ship’s whistle and fires a flare skyward hoping for a response, but the Flannel Isle and its lighthouse remain silent and seemingly abandoned. After a few tense moments a boat is launched from the Hesperus and a sailor named Joseph Moore, who himself is an experienced lighthouse keeper, is sent ashore. Moore arrives at the Flannan Isle Lighthouse and finds the gate closed; the beds unmade and all the clocks not set to the proper time-something very uncommon in the highly disciplined maritime world of the United Kingdom. A search ...