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I’ve always liked pirates, the
ocean, travel, excitement, risk, history, and boats, but it wasn’t until I
visited Key West ,
Florida in 1973 that I was able to live that life. At the time, the
island of Key West
was a sleepy and poor fishing town at the end of the Fla. Keys,150 miles
from the mainland. You had to cross 28 rickety bridges to get there and
"anything goes" was the life. I quit my job in L.A.
selling motorcycle parts as soon as I got back from that Key West vacation.
I finally knew where to live.
In those days marijuana smuggling was prevalent. It was like
almost everyone I knew had some kind of deal going. Nobody worked. It seemed
either they had a check from some past life event or they were dealing pot.
The town was totally corrupt. Many of the "town fathers" and police were
later indicted for smuggling activities and a few prominent lawyers were
disbarred.
A lot of the pirates had police
scanners because when smugglers were about to be stopped by the Coast Guard
or Marine Patrol (Water Nazis) the smugglers would throw the bales overboard
to get rid of the evidence and we called that pot "sea weed" and a
bale was "square grouper". So there was a lot of square
grouper floating around, I mean TONS of it. When the pirates would hear the
authorities on their VHF radios and police scanners talking to each other and giving
out the location the pirates would zoom out to that location in their fast boats and grab as many bales as they could
before the man could get organized enough to catch them. In those days the
pirates had faster boats and knew the waters better and knew all the small channels
throughout the mangrove islands a lot better than the man did.
Many of the corrupt politicians
in Key West used to party at The
Top of the La Concha a sleazy hotel on Duval Street. That was a good bar
and it was in the tallest building in the
Florida Keys (all seven floors).
The view was great and overlooked the main street and on the other side Key West
Harbor and its approaches. The sunsets were
spectacular from there. The Top was where everything happened.
Duval St.
was where everything else happened.
You could do just about anything
in Key West. The average cop didn’t know a thing. (I once walked down
Duval St.
from the
Atlantic Ocean
to the
Gulf of Mexico
two days before Xmas carrying twenty-two lbs. of sea
weed my friend had just found floating out on the flats. I had it
in my pillow case with a piece of plastic holly tied around the neck. I
even passed a patrolman on the street and wished him a, “Merry
Christmas”.
One happy hour I was
at The Top
and the new
County
Attorney (the former County Attorney was fired because he was at a party
on a yacht flaunting a one pound bag of marijuana. Ironically, the City
Attorney, himself under federal incitement for smuggling, was still missing on his yacht
somewhere in
the Caribbean.) told me that he had just petitioned
Washington
to get a Letter of Marque. I had heard the name, but never knew what it
was. He said it was a license to operate a private warship and they have
been issued since the 13th century. I thought he was kidding.
I could just imagine my own private warship! He said under the constitution the
Congress can still issue these licenses. He wanted to get a Letter of Marque
so he could arm a fast warship and become a privateer and capture drug
smugglers and split the profits with the government. I thought it odd that
he wanted to do that considering so many of his friends were involved in
smuggling. He said it was purely for economic reasons. At the time the
government was paying a high percentage of the street value of drugs that
were seized as a reward for turning them in. He figured to make millions.
Fortunately, he never did get a Letter of Marque. But it did get me
thinking.
I was
fascinated with the idea of a license to have your own armed
warship (Privateer) and started to research and collect copies of these
documents. Then I started experimenting with ways to make new paper look
ancient. That was the tricky part. Then I started adding other old
documents as I found them. This web site is the result of all that interest. True to form, I
have researched, stolen, plagiarized and generally acted like a pirate to
get all these documents on the site. Piratedocuments.com
is now the largest collection of authentic Letters of Marque and Admiralty
documents on the web because of that happy hour. And I’ve only posted
about half of my collection. This has to be one of the most unique gifts
going. Personalize an historic document. Wowee!
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Captain Conch
N 24.68553 W 81.37003
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