1 of 1 copy available
Not since Moby-Dick...No, not since Treasure Island...Actually, not since Jonah and the Whale has there been a sea saga to rival The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, featuring the greatest sea-faring hero of all time, the immortal Pirate Captain, who, although he lives for months at a time at sea, somehow manages to keep his beard silky and in good condition.
Worried that his pirates are growing bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's high time to spearhead an adventure.
While searching for some major pirate booty, he mistakenly attacks the young Charles Darwin's Beagle and then leads his ragtag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog-filled streets of Victorian London. There they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, radioactive elephants, and the Holy Ghost himself. And that's not even the half of it.
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab
Fresh from their mishaps with Charles Darwin and the evil Bishop of Oxford, the Pirates set sail in a bouncy new vessel–purchased on credit. In order to repay his debts, The Pirate Captain is determined to capture the enigmatic White Whale, hunted by the notoriously moody Ahab, who has promised a reward.
Chaos ensues, featuring the lascivious Cutlass Liz, the world’s most dangerous mosquito, an excerpt from the Pirate Captain’s novel in progress (a bodice ripper, of course), whale ventriloquism, practical lessons in whale painting, a shanty-singing contest in a Las Vegas casino, and a dramatic climax in which the Pirate Captain’s Prize Ham saves the day!
Move over, Herman Melville.
-
Creators
-
Series
-
Publisher
-
Release date
February 10, 2010 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307489562
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307489562
- File size: 4338 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
March 30, 2009
Pirate Captain returns in this installment of Defoe's loony pirate yarns (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Ahab
; The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists
), only to lose the Pirate of the Year awards. (Though Captain's beard is “fantastically glossy and luxuriant,†he has oiled himself in preparation for a swimsuit round that doesn't exist.) Smarting from his loss, Captain retreats to the island of St. Helena, where—to the chagrin of his crew, including “the pirate with the scarf,†and “the pirate who liked kittens and sunsetsâ€â€”he delves into bee husbandry. Alas, geography, goats and the machinations of Napoleon Bonaparte threaten to disrupt a life of bucolic contemplation. Lovers of Monty Python and the novels of Cabin Boy
star Chris Elliott will appreciate this sendup of swashbuckling sea adventures. -
July 16, 2012
In Defoe’s rollicking fifth novel in the series, the pirates are delightfully irreverent, inane, and idiotic. Previous adventures have involved Napoleon, “the Communists,” famous scientists, and Captain Ahab, but this outing begins with a trip to the pirates’ private bank in Geneva, where they are seriously overdrawn. A newspaper ad connects them with three emblematic figures from the romantic movement who are looking for “exotic adventure”: poets Byron and Shelley as well as Mary Godwin, who will soon write Frankenstein. The “Pirate Captain” (his mates go by equally generic names, such as “the pirate with gout”) offers the services of his ragtag crew and his ship, and the odd, but consistently comic adventure gets underway. The plot, ostensibly the search for a “lost Socratic dialogue,” takes them to London (where they pick up mathematician Charles Babbage), Oxford, and eventually to the Carpathian Mountains and the home of “Count Ruthven” (an obscure reference to an early vampire novel by Byron’s mistress, Caroline Lamb). Sophomoric and knowing, equal parts satire and farce as if written by Monty Python, the novel proves Defoe to be clearly on more than familiar terms with the romantics, and he skewers everyone and everything in a laugh-out-loud performance. Agent: Eric Simonoff, Janklow & Nesbit.
-