Cover art by Jo Andrews

Robinson Crusoe Maybe

Colin Gee

The tide is nigh! C’mon me hearties and all the Pieces of Eight you can think of. That’s right, Colin Gee’s crazy, hilarious and outright brilliant book is upon us.

Never has something so unoriginal been so uniquely original. Gee packs humour and swashbuckling into one of the most entertaining reads you will get your hands on this year. We’re very thankful to Mr Gee for trusting us with this fine example of what makes us tick and are happy to announce the release date for Sunday 20th July!

I am going to spare you any more pirate related promotion and let you see for yourself! Arrr! (okay, I lied).

Check out the first chapter here!

Robinson Crusoe Maybe

According to my rudimentary calendar I have now been on the island for twenty-three months and so am only a few days away from my second birthday. The sea gave me birth from the rocks on 30 September 1659, and I gasped my first breaths with my face full of Neptune’s second element, seaweed, brothers washing dead behind me like dolled dandies in the frothing placenta, nipples up in the surf.

But we don’t (want to die), they shrieked as the wave hit our jollyboat and rolled it, but dying is precisely the risk, I thought in that moment. Without the dying there would be no stakes whatsoever in this life and we would quickly lose interest, which is why they have to keep dropping around us on all sides, to keep us honest, to keep our hands in. And as fear of death is unique to the living, I know they are now in a better place.

Here on this island I staggered my first steps, spoke my first words, ate solid food for the first time, and now know to sit over a latrine far from my bed tent to do my business, and wipe with the softer leaves, and cultivate the local plants, and tame the turtle. I am potty trained, and cook my own meals, and live on, though death surrounds me on all sides – though I must boobytrap my palisade and castle from those that would harm me, and shoot fire into the whites of their eyes.

I live on with my dog and two cats and the shivering, speaking jungle, but keep wondering why we kept pets on a man-of-war, thinking back to those Jolly Rogering times, and wondering what we fed them. Though they be good company I must be furtive around these beasts with food, for they know no master but their own bellies and will make off with any little scrap.

I should say my cat and dog and cat, for thus they always go when we plunge through the trees on point for varmints, or on the real hunt of which I have yet to speak.

When I died I left my first wife and newborn son behind me, for which I forgive myself. Nomine patri filiique. Each of us runs this life at a great risk, perhaps the greatest of risks, but I think we may all someday emerge through Neptune’s rocky knees onto a tropical paradise all our own.

And if not it were best not to think on it, and if that paradise were not wholly our own it were best to make it so.

Point your fusee into the blanks of their eyes and squeeze the trigger, and they will drop like sacks of potatoes.

I am not saying that I have lived a good life, to deserve salvation or any destiny whatsoever. The man-of-war was not a navy gunboat anytime in the recent past, but one we invested by trickery and murder and used to pirate in, up and down these coasts for a number of seasons.

One hat, a loincloth, and two shoes that were not fellows was all I found of my mates in the aftermath of the hurricano that crushed us against the island, so that we were forced to abandon ship aboard a boat that was quickly overwhelmed by a lot of water.

The wave that got us was thirty fathoms high, where a fathom is a man. I for one was under it for what seemed like the rest of my life before it spat me out on the sand and kelp. I stood baptized like a wood totem on dry and heaving land.

I would tell you I was captain of the battleship, and maybe that would be it. Or maybe I am too embarrassed to admit to my lost command, so I tell you I am a minor officer, or a stowaway.

I stowed away on Trinidad to escape the pirate life and return to my young family, but such was my luck that that same forty-two-cannon King’s own man-of-war was improbably outgunned in the open sea by a young buccaneer name of Wilmot, who stood upon a deck of four-and-twenty only, and pounded and boarded. Wilmot, who took his grog strong before breakfast, executed every man aboard who did not turn and go pirate, so many of us died immediately.

‘Turn and go pirate under me,’ he screamed, as the man of war’s captain stood on the end of a shivering plank eight storeys above a six-knot wake, and was followed into the arms of the unforgiving Caribbean by many a brave sailor, ‘and get rich, or else follow these into a quick and watery grave.’

Fortunately for the likes of many on that boat we had already been pirates in Campeachy and on sweet Trinidad, just had thought to renounce the life. Sheepishly we removed our powdered wigs and Sunday best to reveal earrings, massive biceps, gold molars, throbbing dicks, and parrots with tiny fists – stepped forward.

Because look, if I was actually captain to that forty-two-gun battleship with a King’s commission and had run her onto the rocks in a light hurricano, well that is beyond my ken to comprehend. I would walk face first into the sea, my friend, and be drowned.

So I was with Wilmot for a time and then on with Captain Bob in his much lighter, buckinger schooner, who was the singlest son of a bitch on the high seven seas, as time would tell, who walked always with a parrot on his shoulder with whom he would converse.

The parrot was Captain Bob’s counselor, a doctor and Quaker, claimed Captain Bob, though the rest of us could not distinguish sounds from syllables in what the bird would squawk. I myself was no foremast hand as many assumed but an apothecary by trade to whom happened to come natural the butchery, thieving, and fornicating upon careworn mattresses to which I was by circumstances bound, and happy to be hand over fist in gold, so I knew that the bird was no doctor, not even when the skies were blue and cheery in those early days.

Several times I saw Captain Bob himself operate on a man upon a sloping, shuddering deck in the teeth of a near-galer, all the time with his so-called surgeon the parrot William on his shoulder. William would hoot and hop and Captain Bob, taking the spiced rum by the neck and slamming home a knife between the suffering patient’s teeth, would converse in low tones with the bird, sticking in his dagger and feeling around, lips prowling his good teeth.

The irony is that if we had not jumped ship in a panic we would probably have all survived the storm, for when dawn dawned on my first day as a new baby I quickly spotted the man-o-war about one mile out across the low tide mud flat, washed off the reefs now and stuck in a soggy bottom but as intact as the Virgin Mother, upright and probably swimmable out there.

I stood for a long time in my tattered britches looking out across the bubbling waste, from which I could see none of my pirate brethren to pull out and bury. I expected to see arms reaching up from the goop, maybe a humped backside or a leg, but there was no sign to be distinguished from the birds.

Well, maybe they washed ashore on another part of the island, I shrugged, though I knew it was just a lie I told myself to put off the visions of agonizing death under piled waves of brine and muck.

Now why did men ever come to the West Indies? I have been sitting here talking to Rex about this, and we have come to some certain conclusions. Natural resources, for one, absolute freedom for deux, and curiosity last of all. In search of fortune, freedom from tyrannies, tyranny over the tyrant, even death sought the aquamarine pioneers. Death I would say was the main driving factor, in fact, to separate us from the animals. Many came as slaves, too, whether expecting servitude or otherwise being taken by surprise and clapped into irons with a lot of gnashing of teeth.

The most startling figure I came across in my early years in the Caribbean waters in fact was on a small island where I did not so much rove with as feed off a party of ex-Wilmots, who had been separated from the by then down-at-the-heels captain, a group of wastrel buccaneers who had set up base in a secret cove where I washed up, as was my wont.

The third night, after claiming I was the mate of a fellow named Jim, which no one could deny, I took in my hand the lawn darts and began the epic winning streak of my life, stuffing their oversized notes of tender, ducats, and gold doubloons into my baggy trousers and buying everyone rum with their own monies, until they called me aside, failed to knock me down, and I laid down the lawn darts and rolled off into the bushes on my legs down past the sleeping sentries in the moonlight to the landbridge brig where the prisoners were left for their crimes against the pirate code, nature, or being born damn unlucky.

There I found Connor, we held conference through the bamboo bars, and I stashed my monies with him. Best place for monies is in a prison Connor always said, my great bag of worthies with him. In the morning, coincidentally, Connor was all alone, though they had been four in the cage when I passed him my personables, but my monies were ours, he said, as I come up the beach scratching my sorry, throbbing face, and click went the lock and we rejoined the party, and he did not lie.

This has not been a challenging island for me, the island I have come to call Mitsy Mandoblé, but mostly because I immediately became king of my own man-of-war, which I reached by some difficulty, swimming out to her at high tide, and got up into by climbing through the bow chains. I stood on her deck in just my skivvies, listening for several minutes in a superstitious rapture, until I had concluded there were no survivors, that all my competition had been wiped clean from the slate. I had after all seen the fools jump from the ship with me, all of us thinking she was broke apart, and go screaming into the monsoon.

Connor was a massive man beast who towered at least six inches above me and was covered in the thickest black hair on his face, neck, shoulders, arms, and tongue. He told me I was a damn fool for going back to the main hut and their games of chance and helped me melt back into the shadows of the ex-Wilmots, where they had more than their share of willing women, and we partied discretely for a fortnight before making off with our winnings on Captain Bob’s boat when he promised us a cruise in the East Indies, with gold and carpets and cloves and Grand Mogul’s daughters, leaving the ex-Wilmots in an eight-knot wake.

The first thing I did aboard the fresh and silent hulk after the wrack was to break into the captain’s cabin and gaze about at all the silver and gold trinkets. I immediately (and do not ask me how) got some enormous candlesticks down my shorts and heavy glittery spoons in there before I could even help myself, but feeling the ridiculous weight of those things I stepped back and had a look at myself in the full-length mirror and had to laugh. After all, what good would all the money in the world be to me on my new island? Rather I needed food, and guns, and extra britches.

I let the silver fall to the silent deck, went to the barrel of arrack in the corner, dipped myself a tall mug, fetched a cigar out of the captain’s sideboard, and flung myself upon his soft and satiny bed with its regal blue fluffed covers. There were bars of chocolates in a box, my pretty, and I set to reading the captain’s love letters that I found in a drawer which were addressed to various women and boys he had stashed in different ports along those smoldering coasts.

My dear Davey, our captain had written to a boy named David, All my dreams since we parted are of tasting your ruby lips and of your etc. etc., and he got particularly excited describing the other things they would do after the captain dressed Davey in lady’s socks and garters, and had tied him to the four-poster they seemed to have rubbed threadbare in Campeachy.

When the tide began to go out, however, the ship gave a sudden lurch so that I was tossed from my reveries almost onto the deck, and scrambled out in a flurry of letters to investigate. Well there was a great hole in the larboard side, I noticed immediately, and in fact the ship was bound to get rocked off her perch and come apart in the next big blow, I said to myself, and it was a miracle that the weather had been cloudless and fair as I lazed about in bedclothes, miming the better parts of the letters and popping chocolates into my mouth.

I immediately set about making a raft with which to ferry supplies to land, and with the first load landed a pile of biscuit, grog, powder, and shot onto my beach, as I began to think of it.

Looking about I knew then I had to decide upon a spot for my base camp. Squinting into the tall grasses, I did not hesitate, but chose a spot in the middle of the island, about a hundred feet up a hillock through thick trees a stone’s throw from a freshwater seep or crick where the meadow met a rock face, and that spot I began to cover and fortify, constructing a bigtop of masts and sails against the cliff, which I floored with a wooden deck of planks pulled from the ship, upon which I piled my provisions: salt beef, ship’s biscuit, grog, arrack, Christmas wines, powder, shot, a stack of muskets and sidearms, cutlasses, bronze knuckles, ropes, barrels of tar, sails and sailcloth, and all good things. In one section of my new fort I set up a kitchen with a pot-bellied stove and a table of long planks that I stacked with pots and knives and utensils, and on the other side I furnished what would become my bedroom, with the captain’s bed and all its velvet furnishings including the mirror and desk and books and maps and logs and letters and paper and ink for writing.

I was just about all set, I congratulated myself, dipping sweet arrack into my tumbler again and again and again and again and again, and falling back in torchlight of my own making, curling up with a bunch of love letters to someone called Daphne Showpole.

There were also two large wardrobes stuffed with men’s clothes, but they had gone strangely mildewed in the time the boat had sat sopping on its side in the mud so I was only able to salvage one full suit of clothes for a man. The rest of what I found intact of mold were women’s garments in the captain’s cabin and dresses, presumably Davey’s, which I did not sniff to put on when the weather turned brisk later that month.

And that is how I began to dress as a lady.

And all of these things I did with the work of my own fingers, stubborn chin, and absolute cunning, for strong arrack and a complete lack of social context has always been a mother to invention, I sneered into the howling, mooning wind.

And far away in space and time Connor and I bumped along on Captain Bob’s boat, a gunship of four and twenty that would take no no for an answer, and made its own luck no matter what transpired, cutting a bloody swath from big Brazil, around the Cape of Good Speranza, and far out into the Indian Ocean.

Release date!