With the canoe's woven leaf sail crackling in the wind and the outrigger scudding over the waves, Jack has no trouble finding good reasons for his sudden departure from Redruth Island. He rehearses a simple version of the story when he calls to trade fishhooks for preserved breadfruit and green coconuts at the village of Kirakira (which his washed-up chart identifies as an Isle of Solomon that Sarmiento de Gamboa, veering from Old to New Testament, named San Cristobal). Bidding Kirakira farewell, Jack sails off towards the point of the star compass that ought to take him (with a stopover at Mili or Kusaie) from the Islas de Salomn at 9°24'S, 173°46'E (from Seville) to his father's Shipwreck Island at 19°18'N, 166°38'E (from London, itself obviously 6 degrees east of Seville).

He's somewhat disconcerted when his intended stopover turns out to be not Mili or Kusaie, but Pulawat, which he recognises from Tevake's teachings. There are two problems with Pulawat: it's too hostile to land on, and it ought to be at least 15 degrees west of where Jack's charts place both the Isles of Solomon and Shipwreck Island.

Jack knows he's not drifted even one degree off his heading, so he decides to keep on northwards, with maybe a tad more easting, just to be on the safe side. He could, of course, turn back, but what would be the point of magically acquired charts if they didn't take you somewhere? Anyway, he's having far too much fun. It isn't until the coconuts are empty and the point where he expected to find Shipwreck Island is surely far behind him—or possibly beside him, but certainly not near—that he starts to wonder if the whole thing was a mistake.

By this time, Jack's more or less persuaded himself (and totally convinced his imaginary listeners) that he stole a canoe and fled Redruth to escape the vengeance of several native families whose daughters had given birth to suspiciously pale-skinned children. (In the interests of narrative dynamics, he omits to mention that the islanders were firstly not much darker than himself, and secondly delightfully relaxed about their daughters' activities. Or that said daughters knew tricks that will serve him well for avoiding complications in the future. If he has a future.)

So I tunnelled me way out o' the cannibals' meat locker in the dead of night, an' I'd nearly made it to the beach when the village sorcerer came a-runnin' after me, waving his k'snippasnippa (which is a stone knife they use for ceremonial castration, very nasty) an' chantin' spells to call the gods to blast me with lightnin', or possibly giant lobsters. (I was still workin' on the local lingo.) So I ducked behind a big palm tree an' bopped 'im over the cranium wiv me spyglass. Laid 'im out cold. Din't do the spyglass much good though, so I chucked it onto the sand beside the old necromancer an' legged it. Reckon 'e's prob'ly showin' it to some poor fool right at this moment, tellin' 'im as how it's all there was left of the notorious Jack Sparrow after the gods'd done blastin' me with whatever it was... (In fact, the spyglass was Jack's parting gift to Tevake.)

Jack knows he ought to decide whether the wrathful fathers wanted him castrated, cremated by lightning strike (or possibly lobsters), or simply roasted and served on a banana leaf. But even a half-worked-out story beats admitting that he set out on the open ocean trusting in only a couple of charts of dubious provenance and unknown reliability and his own—admittedly exceptional—talents. Or that unspecified powers appear to be interfering in his life.

Not that a small amount of mysterious interference would go entirely amiss at this point.

"At least one of those bastards got his longitude all wrong." Even to himself, he sounds petulant—and alarmingly croaky from lack of water.

"Of course they did!" retorts his rational self, not croaking at all because, well, just because. "This far out to sea, everybody gets their longitude wrong!"

This is perfectly true. How could he have forgotten? Must come from spending so long among people who've never heard of longitude. Or of rum. He really misses rum...

"Could use a drink right now," he says, possibly out loud.

At this point, either he passes out or the sky turns black with unnatural suddenness. Next thing he knows, the canoe is caught in a rainstorm of such intensity that it fills the hull with several inches of fresh water.

"Ta very much," croaks Jack, leaning forward to scoop water into a coconut shell. "Don't mind if I do."

He's busy filling and stoppering his supply of coconut shell flasks when the rain gives way to fish. And crabs, which is odd out here in the deep ocean, but Jack is fast recalibrating his scale of oddity. He sorts crabs and fish into different compartments of the canoe, where they won't nip his toes.

"D'you know your bloody chart's no good?" he asks (less croaky now) for he has a shrewd idea who's behind the recent increase in meteorological phenomena and piscine suicides. "I sailed just west of north from it and ended up in Pulawat instead of Mili. Then east of north: now look where I am!" He tries to sweep an arm round the horizon, but finds this makes him dizzy.

"The sea cannot be measured by numbers on a page!"

It bloody well can if you get your sums right, thinks Jack, but keeps his mouth shut for once because it might be unwise to contradict supernatural females perched on the outrigger struts.

Said female pulls an object from the water and hands it to Jack with a smile. It looks like a box of hardtack: one that's spent a very long time on the seabed. With difficulty, he prises it open to reveal a soggy mush of drowned weevil porridge. He pokes the tip of one little finger into the mess, braces himself, and licks it, tasting salt and the decay of ages.

"Not bad!" He forces a smile. "Should make a nice stuffing for the flying fish."

She smiles wider and passes him a barnacled, weed-encrusted bottle. Now this is more like it. Jack's smile forms all by itself.

"I can't help forming the impression," he ventures after a while, emboldened by a few swigs of the mellowest rum he's ever tasted, "that you want me to visit my father, or this island of his. Now why would that be, I wonder?"

"You very like yo' father." She laughs at that. "Him lost at sea too, 'fore you got born. Played me at dice for him life. We made an accord, him an' I. You be a part of it."

Jack doesn't like the sound of that at all, but she's still talking.

"That trinket him leave you make you a Pirate Lord, Jack Sparrow!" She sniggers at the title; maybe she just thinks it sounds silly. Then she looks Jack in the eye, deadly serious. "Would you promise the trinket to my service, to do jus' one favour when I ask it? Promise me that, an' I can tell you how to sail to Shipwreck Cove." She smiles again, but the hunger in her eyes makes Jack's skin crawl.

"This one favour... Is it liable to cost me anything I'll regret?" Remembering Granny's tales, he adds, "Which includes life, or anything else that I would regret were I still in a position to know how I felt about it."

"Jack, Jack," she croons, ruffling his soggy hair. "How could I harm you? So long as you don' cheat me, you got no cause to fear. No cause but the sea..."

This last is a good point. Fish, rainwater, and even rum will only sustain a man so long, and he has a feeling the weather will set against him if he tries to turn back. And "pirate lord" can't be all bad. So there's really not much choice.

"Done," he says, somewhat bleakly.

"Done!" She grins, and gestures east by north. At the tip of her pointing finger, lightning cracks the horizon.

"Right! That way!" says Jack grimly and turns to trim the sail.

As far as he can tell, she doesn't stay to watch or give any more directions. She doesn't need to. He follows her heading perfectly, day and night, tacking when the wind is against him, correcting after sleep or storms drive him off course, but always making headway in the right direction. He can never understand why other people seem to find this difficult.

~

Shipwreck is a tiny speck. Without Tevake's landfinding methods, Jack could have sailed right past it; but he follows first the te lapa, then the swell patterns, and finally the birds, until the water changes from blue to green and there's coral and sandbanks below him. No wonder they named it Shipwreck! There are grey crags and a big reef ringing it around as far as Jack can be bothered to look, and a whole maze of shoals, jagged with coral rock. Jack doesn't need to check his map; he perfectly remembers the one twisting path a ship must thread if it's to come safely through the channels.

But the canoe isn't a ship and he'd rather land discreetly somewhere where he can hide it out of sight and slip into town unnoticed. Come high tide, he gives the canoe a good bail, throws out the last of his supplies to lighten it further, and paddles cautiously into the labyrinth. The little craft is shallow enough to cope with anything that doesn't disturb the surface water; he half floats, half drags it over the main reef and into the still water of the lagoon behind.

It's then he realises the central island has no shore, nor indeed visible land of any sort: instead, there's what looks like a pine tree with windows. There must be coral, or basalt, or something holding the thing in place, but it's buried too deep under accretions of driftwood and, well, of shipwrecks to show anything but spars and masts bristling from a tottering pyramid of pointy wooden bits. So much for finding a deserted beach.

He barely has time to tie up to a jetty before he's surrounded by a pungent crowd of men with rusty, notched, but generally dangerous-looking—and specifically unsheathed—edged weapons. Jack still has his sailor's knife hidden in the folds of a barkcloth sash, but that's it. He wishes his britches hadn't disintegrated beyond repair: the pubic leaf suddenly seems rather inadequate. He smiles and holds up his right hand, palm out, allowing the left to rest on the sash just over the knife.

"Oi!" calls a voice, "Where the fuck did you wash up from?"

"Tha'sright! Go on an' ask 'im another, 'cos 'e looks like a cove wot speaks the King's English..."

"C'est un des cannibales des îles..."

"Nwng hong nyéung a hkéng yang w?"

"Mais non!"

"Yu savvy tok pidgin? Husat nem bilong yu? Yu stilim kanu?"

"¿Que?"

Jack bows to the two Englishmen and, in his best Askew, says, "Permit me to introduce myself, gentlemen. Jack Sparrow, lately navigator on the Golden Venture, unfortunately lost contact with my ship while conducting a cartographical investigation of the Islands of Solomon, narrowly escaped from cannibals on numerous occasions, and bearing an urgent, private message for the Keeper of Shipwreck Island. And you would be...?"

"Dunno wot 'e's on about," says Oi.

"Me neither," agrees his mate. "Ain't no Keeper of Shipwreck Island."

"Viens avec moi, mon petit. On avait justement besoin d'un nouveau mousse." One of the Frenchmen puts an arm around Jack's shoulders and tries to lead him away, but Jack shakes him off. He didn't come all this way to be anyone's latest cabin boy.

"Well there'd bloody well better be a Keeper of Something hereabouts," he blusters (for doesn't it say Ask for the Keeper on Da's map?) He points to the tatty leather pouch that still hangs round his neck. "I've got it in writing."

"Writing?" Oi looks startled.

"¡Escritura!" translates a short, fat pirate. A gasp goes up from the French and Spanish.

"The... Code!" whispers Tha'sright in the ensuing awestruck hush.

"Aye!" says Jack. "The Code!"

A brief fight ensues over who's going to take Jack to the Keeper, but then everyone puts their weapons away and acts frightfully civilised. Jack is escorted up the wooden alleyways, wondering what on earth this Code business is all about, and whether the fearsomeness of pirates has been seriously overrated. Perhaps Shipwreck is some kind of pirate asylum where they confine the incurably stupid. But then what was Jack's father doing here?

~

"Well, not a message exactly," admits Jack, trying not to shift from one foot to the other under the Keeper's dark gaze. "Not as such. More of a... token." He's reluctant to take the thing from his pouch after keeping it secret for so long, but steels himself to get it over with. If this Keeper decides to, well, keep it and give Jack nothing in exchange, well then Jack doesn't want whatever it is the Keeper's keeping.

It's been years since he opened the pouch: the leather might as well be welded shut. Jack slices it open with his knife and hands over the talisman, together with the crumpled, washed-out map.

The Keeper holds them up to the light. "Well bugger me clockwise!" he says at last. "Julie's brat!" He looks sharply at Jack, who stares right back, resenting the term "brat" but not saying anything yet. "When were you born, lad?"

"Dunno," says Jack, who doesn't.

The Keeper pulls him across the room to peer at their reflections in a mirror. "Aye," he says at last. "Like enough. How'd you really get here?"

"Sailed," says Jack, "like I said. Round the Horn on the Venture; past the Isles of Solomon on my onesies." It sounds damned impressive, he decides. "Longitude was a bit tricky, what with doldrums an' waterspouts an' all, but a few adjustments, a spot of nautical intuition an', well... here I am!"

"Penniless and stark naked in a canoe," finishes the Keeper, most unfairly disparaging in Jack's opinion.

"I've got a sash," Jack protests. "And my mua'uaka—pubic leaf, Mr. Askew called it."

The Keeper turns away suddenly, coughing and spluttering. "Aye," he says when he's himself again. "Thank Christ for moo-whackers! But what am I to do with you, Jackie? Do you even know what it is you've brought me?"

"Not entirely." If there's a right moment for proclaiming yourself a Pirate Lord, Jack's fairly sure this isn't it. His belief in himself is temporarily somewhat smaller than his mua'uaka.

"This worthless-looking bauble..." The Keeper flicks it with his fingernail, making it dance in the sunlight that slants through the stern window above him. "...is one of the nine Pieces of Eight, so-called for reasons that needn't detain us now. Each Piece of Eight makes its owner one of the nine Pirate Lords. (Don't get excited, lad: they're as big fools as regular pirates—bigger, most of 'em.) Now, do you have any idea of the trouble it'd stir up if I were to summon the Brethren Court—the other eight, that is—and tell them that the long-lost ninth Lord is a scrawny ship's brat from an honest merchant vessel—an honest merchant vessel that most probably sank, if it's not still sailing round in circles?"

Jack studies his bare toes, feeling somewhat sick.

"You have to be a captain to be a Pirate Lord, Jackie. And all you're captain of is a small, leaky canoe."

"Not s'posed to be watertight," mumbles Jack, who's become very fond of his canoe. "More flexible that way. Less chance of breaking up in a storm, and it'll float even when it's swamped."

"I'll take your word for its hidden qualities, but I'll not be presenting you to the Brethren until you get yourself a ship and cease to be a laughing stock. 'Twould bring dishonour on the Code." Dismissively, he tosses Jack a small purse. "Get some britches too, while you're at it."

Jack screws up his courage for one more try, hating the Keeper with every bone in his body. "I'm a bloody good navigator," he says. "I'd like to see any of your eight Lords make the voyage I just made!" He wishes his voice wouldn't squeak like that.

"There's not one of 'em could do it," agrees the Keeper, to Jack's amazement. "But I can't put you before 'em yet, lad, for—fools though they be—they'd soon figure out what you ain't seen. Did Julie tell you nothing about yer father?"

Jack shakes his head, confused by the change of tack. "Only that he was a sailor." It takes a minute to dig down through the layers of fabrication. "An Irish pirate."

"Aye, an Irish pirate named Bob Teague. That's my name, boy: Captain Robert Teague."

Jack never especially wanted a father. He certainly doesn't want Captain Robert Teague with his brat and his leaky and his dishonour on the Code.

"Never saw you," he mutters.

"I went back to the Wench one time," says Teague, doing a good job of looking wistful. "They told me you'd all gone. No-one knew where."

"Bollocks," says Jack succinctly. "Mam went back to her people, but my sister an' me, we stayed. We'd've seen you."

"There was a daughter, but I was looking for Julie. Or her boy. Didn't wait to speak to the wench."

"Oh."

"Where'd your mother go? I'd like to see her again. She was quite a lass."

"She's dead," begins Jack, but smoothly adjusts his heading, "dead important among her own people. But I reckon she might see you, if you ask nicely."

"Her own people?"

"The Jivaros." Jack can't suppress a smile, but does his best to modulate it from wicked to fond. "Of Peroo. If you like, I can draw you a map."

~

I don't think Teague ever showed anyone the map of Peru, but thanks to the wonderful justawench, the map Jack drew of Shipwreck Island: