About Calico Jack

(The followin' be an excerpt from Calico Jack: A Landlubber's History.)

John Rackham--also known as Calico Jack Rackham, or simply Calico Jack--was an English pirate captain during the early Eighteenth Century. His nickname derives from the colorful clothes he often wore. Rackham is also remembered for giving work to female buccaneers Anne Bonny (though she wasn't) and Mary Read (she couldn't). Calico Jack, along with most of his crew, was executed on November 17, 1720.

Of course, that's only part of the story. Calico Jack was indeed executed--in such a fashion that made strangers of his head and the rest of him--but while his body, as legend has it, was given an ignominious burial in a potter's field (on an uncharted isle in the middle of an undistinguished ocean)... his brain was preserved in a cask of rum, from which it has to this day continued to preside over the Worldwide Salt-Soaked Brotherhood of Pirates. Calico Jack's brain's rum cask has been outfitted with two pegs for legs and two hooks for hands, not to mention several earrings, a scarf, an eye patch, and a parrot.

Besides his progressive policies regarding dress and equal employment opportunities, Calico Jack's contributions to piracy include principally his introduction of the most popular version of the Jolly Roger, being that of a skull with two crossed swords beneath it. Calico Jack settled on this design only after discarding ones featuring skulls over crossed salad tongs, star-crossed lovers, and chickens crossing a road.

Calico Jack was reportedly such a fan of the loud music that became popular in the 1750s and 1760s that it came to be known as Rackham Roll in his honor.