What Did Pirates Actually Do for Fun?

Six weeks out of Nassau and the horizon has not changed in four days. Not in any direction. The sails are slack. The ship sits on a sea so flat it looks painted. You have checked the rigging twice already. Not because it needed checking. Because it was something to do. The man beside you is playing the same four bars of the same jig on a tin whistle he has been playing since Tuesday. You know every breath he takes. You could hum the mistakes. There is no raid coming. There is no prize on the horizon. There is, as there has been for most of this voyage and most of every voyage before it, absolutely nothing happening. This is what piracy actually looks like most of the time. And the question nobody asks — because the stories never get here — is what you do with it.