Excellence, 7th Edition - BBC Chartering

A glimpsebehindthe pearlsTwo ships, two pearls - two namesYou may have seen in our last excellence issue acenterfold picture where the ‘BBC Pearl’ was transportingthe ‘Black Pearl’. We thought this was aninteresting coincidence and take this as an opportunityto come up with this unique essay honoring the twofloating devices.Did you know that the ‘Black Pearl’ was originally called‘Wicked Wench’? According to the fiction, the ship wasregistered to the East India Trading Co. and owned byCutler Beckett, the EITC Director for West Africa.Jack Sparrow captained the ‘Wicked Wench’ for CutlerBeckett for about a year, hauling various cargoes, buthe refused to haul slaves. Hoping to recruit Sparrow asone of his many ‘operatives’, he had dispatched Sparrowon a mission to find the lost island of Kerma in order toperk up a treasure trove there. But Sparrow followed hisown agenda, double-crossed his employer and claimedhe couldn‘t locate the island.Suspicious that Sparrow had indeed found both theisland and the treasure, but had not informed him,Beckett determined to browbeat the captain intoobedience, demanded that the young captain transporta cargo of slaves to the New World. Initially Sparrowagreed, but when he realized that he was betrayingthe ‘Wicked Wench’, as well as himself, he rebelledand freed the slaves by taking them to Kerma for safeasylum.Furious that Sparrow had flouted his orders and stolenfrom him, Beckett had Sparrow thrown into jail. Afterallowing him to languish for a couple of months, he hadhim transported to the ‘Wicked Wench‘s’ anchorage,about a mile from the coast of West Africa, near Calabaron the Bight of Benin. There, after personally brandingSparrow with the ‘P’ brand (so he‘d be forever brandeda pirate) Cutler Beckett gave the order to abandonhis own ship, the ‘Wicked Wench’, in order to totallydemoralize his prisoner.Sparrow attempted to rescue his burning, founderingship, but he was too late. The ‘Wicked Wench’ turnedinto an inferno; she sank and took Jack with her.But, while dying, Sparrow called upon Davy Jones, acharacter in charge of ferrying souls who died at seato the ‘other side’, and struck a bargain with him: hissoul and one hundred years serving aboard the ‘FlyingDutchman’ in return for a continued human existenceof thirteen years as captain, plus saving the ‘WickedWench’ and transforming her into the fastest, mostpage 16 | excellence