Isle of Dogs (38 page)

Dear Trooper Truth,

This is the last time I write you but I was wondering if you could take that picture of Popeye in her red coat off the front page of your web. See, if Smoke see that picture, it will be the end of Popeye ’cause he don’t know anybody still looking for her except the lady supintenderent Popeye got stole from.

P.S. My name is Possum but I use to be Jeremiah Little before Smoke made me join his road dogs or else kill me, he said. Can you call my mama and tell her I’m o.k. and ain’t in any trouble and find out if she still living with my daddy, ’cause if she is, I can’t go back to the basement and won’t have no place to go when I get free of Smoke and move out of the RV?

P.S. P.S. Don’t forget your promise!

Andy replied with an Instant Message assuring Possum that Popeye’s photograph was being removed right that minute, and of course, Trooper Truth would call Possum’s mama and keep all promises. Andy also wrote:

When you are about to leave the racetrack, be the first one to climb into the back of the big helicopter that Trooper
Macovich will be flying. Then slide across the seat with Popeye and rush out the other door and run as fast as you can toward a camper that is flying a Virginia flag and has six traffic cones in front. The camper will be easily visible on the other side of the fence surrounding the helipad, and I will be sitting in a lawn chair in front, disguised as a drunk NASCAR fan. Please stay clear of the tailrotor!

Good luck! Trooper Truth

D
ISCOVERY OF
T
ORY
T
REASURE
H
OURS
A
WAY
!!

by Trooper Truth

The recent arrest of Dr. Sherman Faux (a mendacious dentist who should be avoided by all) has resulted in a shocking revelation that is exciting maritime historians, archaeologists, and treasure hunters around the globe.

If you, my faithful readers, are wondering why you have never heard of the famed Tory Treasure, I now offer you a fairly obvious explanation. The notorious and untrustworthy Major Trader is known for manipulating all official news that circulates throughout the Commonwealth and goes out over the wire to other states and nations. So clearly, the imminent recovery of shipwrecks in the Chesapeake Bay, which will no doubt lead to the discovery of the remarkable Tory Treasure, is information that Trader and others would not want the general public—and especially the Islanders—to have.

During the American Revolution, the most notorious and dangerous Tory raider was Joseph Wheland, Jr., who began his violent, greedy career in 1776 by seizing and plundering on behalf of the British crown. Soon enough, Wheland commanded a small fleet and struck wherever he pleased, burning plantations in Chesapeake Bay country and making off with livestock, slaves, furniture, family silver, jewelry, and any other valuables that he and his men could find—their true motivation having little to do with military victory or loyalty to
the crown. In short, Wheland became an out-and-out pirate and chose Tangier Island as his winter quarters.

From his pirate’s lair on Tangier, Wheland would set sail with his growing flotilla of gunboats and board other ships to steal and slash and shoot. There is insufficient documentation as to how much loot he amassed or how many vessels he sank or how many of his own sloops went down off the shores of Tangier and neighboring islands, but it is safe to say that for more than two centuries, a fortune of undiscovered Tory Treasure has lurked in the silty bottom of the bay. The reason for this deduction is one of pure logic.

Pirates as desperate and ruthless as Wheland not only preyed upon the innocent, but they gave no thought to raiding and slaughtering each other, provided they could get away with it. So if another pirate vessel laden with plantation loot was in the area, Wheland most certainly would have gone after it, unless he feared he might be overpowered. In this regard, Wheland and his pirate crew were no different from the drug dealers of today. When drug dealers stop off in Virginia during their travels from New York to Miami, it is not uncommon for one drug dealer to buy handguns or heroin from another, and then pull out a pistol and open fire. The point is, whoever wins not only gets the booty, but also the money or contraband that was the intended payment. Extra bonuses include cash and drugs from the victim’s pockets, his gold chains, diamond-encrusted watch, rings, and means of transportation.

Drug dealers, like modern highway pirates, are simply land pirates. If you can imagine, for a moment, a band of drug dealers spinning back in time to the eighteenth century and waking up on a gunboat off the coast of Tangier Island, then you can pretty much envision what an encounter with another ship would have been like back then. You can be assured that an ensuing battle between seafaring drug dealers would be no different from Wheland’s attacking another pirate vessel in days of old. Let’s even go so far as to cast Wheland himself in the role of a time-traveling drug pirate. The story would go something like this:

On a crisp October night, Joseph Wheland set off in his black Mercedes with its spoiler, purple-tinted glass, gold mag
hubcaps, fleece seat covers, souped-up sound system, and dangling air fresheners. Smoking a cigarette and nicely buzzed from pot, he left New York and headed down to Richmond with several other vehicles and armed crew serving as his convoy. Wheland was known on the street as Wheelin’ Bone, because he was always in his car, didn’t play hoops or lift weights, and was bone-thin and physically unimpressive. But his appearance did not diminish the terror he struck in the hearts of his victims and other land pirates when they learned that Wheelin’ Bone was in the neighborhood.

Arriving in Richmond in the early morning hours, Wheelin’ Bone and his mates parked along a trash-cluttered street in the federal housing project Gilpin Court, and proceeded to an apartment that was the lair of a local drug dealer other land pirates called Smack. When Smack looked out the window and spied Wheelin’ Bone dressed in a long black coat, black Nikes, and a black warm-up suit that had skulls and bones all over it, Smack got a little uneasy.

“Shit, I don’t know,” he said to several of his lieutenants. “Man, he look bad. Look like he might be packing an Uzi under that black coat a his, ’cause I can see the barrel poking out.”

“You sure that ain’t a buttonhole?”

“I say we don’t take no chances.”

“Shit no, we ain’t taking no chances,” Smack agreed. “I say we shoot ’em through the door.”

Pistol slides snapped throughout the lair, and then the inexplicable happened. Wheelin’ Bone and his crew were about to knock on the door when suddenly they vanished with a strange crackle of static and a flash of intense white light. This frightened Smack and his pirates, and they responded with a salvo of gunfire that ripped up the door and shattered lamps and beer bottles. They fired until magazines were empty. When the smoke cleared, they peered out in astonishment at the dark, empty street.

Wheelin’ Bone and his crew spun through the Third Dimension, passing through the Wrinkle in Time, and landed softly on a gunboat called
Rover,
which was loaded with eigh-teenth-century antiques, jewelry, and sacks of gold dust and silver coins.

“Where the fuck are we?” Wheelin’ Bone asked as he stared out at the peaceful waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the distant shadowy shape of Tangier Island. “Man, I ain’t never seen a boat this old. It don’t even have a motor or a flashlight.”

“Shit, look at these guns!” one of his mates exclaimed, as he inspected a huge cannon. “I sure would like to shoot one of these at a police car!”

Wheelin’ Bone and his crew laughed at the image, and set about to figure out how to safely handle cannons, make homemade grenades, and sail. As days and weeks passed, they were indiscriminate in seizing other ships and celebrated with drunken nights of Madeira wine and rum, because they had quickly run out of pot and crack cocaine and could find no one who had ever heard of either. Wheelin’ Bone and his men became expert at attacking other pirate ships and setting them on fire after they had been pillaged and their crews shot, hacked to pieces, and dumped overboard to be eaten by crabs.

Years passed and the American Revolution ended, but Wheelin’ Bone became only more powerful and lustful. He terrorized the bay and the shores of Maryland and Virginia, and became even more feared than Blackbeard was in his day, although there is no record that Wheelin’ Bone ever had a beard or set it on fire. His modus operandi, which he no doubt learned from stories about Blackbeard that were passed down from pirate to pirate, was to blast his cannons at the broadside of an unsuspecting vessel, which was followed by the hurling of Blackbeard-style grenades that were case-bottles filled with powder, small shot, slugs, pieces of lead, and iron—rather much like modern pipe bombs, except the grenades were ignited by a small, quick match that the pirates lit before quickly tossing the massively destructive devices into enemy ships. Wheelin’ Bone and his mates would then board the disabled ship, step over the dead and finish off the wounded, and raid to their hearts’ content.

Wheland or Wheelin’ Bone (whatever you prefer to call him) faded from historical documentation toward the end of the eighteenth century, and by 1806, piracy had pretty much come to an end in the bay, although those otherwise peaceful waters and neighboring shores became vicious and volatile
again six short years later during the War of 1812. Indeed, the Chesapeake and the nearby Patuxent River to this day remain a focal point of military activity, thus explaining the inconvenient restricted areas I mentioned in an earlier essay that make it so difficult to fly to Tangier Island.

One can only imagine the number of ghostly, broken hulls of ships and chests of loot that have littered the bay floor since John Smith settled Jamestown. Antiquities Law clearly states that found pirate treasure belongs to the location, which in the case of the Tory Treasure is Virginia. Of course, if the treasure can be traced back to the vessels from which the loot was originally seized, then the vessel’s point of departure is highly likely to unfairly claim the treasure, and there will be a long, drawn-out battle in court. I strongly suspect that Wheland’s remarkable stash will be claimed by North Carolina. But all of this is moot if individuals can find the treasure first and quickly pass it off to dealers at a very high price. I am stating the obvious to mention that no one is more capable of rapidly locating and seizing the Tory Treasure than the descendants of pirates who now live on Tangier Island and know the ways of the bay better than any other human beings.

It is my contention that the treasure belongs to the watermen, and we should allow them to have it. Tangier’s economy is depressed. There are strict limits on the number of blue crabs they can trap, and the crab population has been shrinking for years. I am asking everyone, including the governor, to stay away from that crab pot marked by a yellow buoy that is approximately 10.1 miles off Tangier’s western shore. Let decency prevail and greed vanish as you consider that most of us don’t suffer the hard, often unrewarding lives of the watermen. Since their ancestors suffered so much when Joseph Wheland set up his winter headquarters on their island long ago, it would be only fair and right for today’s Tangiermen to profit from that evil pirate’s ruthlessness. It may very well be a perfect example of poetic justice.

Anne Bonny and Wheland never met the punishment they deserved. Even Blackbeard didn’t get what was coming to him. Hacking him to death and impaling his severed head on a gunwale was light punishment compared to the way some pirates were dealt with in other parts of the world. Before piracy
was first romanticized in modern times and then mundanely reduced to armed robbery, it was taken with grave seriousness in past centuries. All you need to do is flip through the pages of the two-volume 1825 edition of
The Terrific Register: or Record of Crimes, Judgments, Providences and Calamities,
and you will be shocked and sickened to see what I mean.

By way of example, I offer what was the typical fate of Russian pirates on the Volga, which in centuries past was so infested with pirates that merchants stopped transporting any cargo of value down the river unless the ships were accompanied by an armed convoy. These Russian pirates, who were not nearly as cold-blooded as Bonny, Wheland, or Blackbeard, were taken alive and no doubt became quite unsettled as they observed soldiers building a float and erecting gallows on it that were equipped with huge iron hooks.

The captured pirates were stripped naked and hung by their ribs on these hooks, and the float was sent slowly drifting down the river, allowing one and all to view the ghastly sight and hear moans of pain. If anyone in the bordering villages and towns the floating gallows passed showed a whisper of pity by offering the wretches water or liquor or a merciful death by gunfire, the punishment for being a Good Samaritan was to suffer the same slow, tormenting death as the pirates. This threat was sufficiently severe to prevent the public from intervening, and in fact, when one pirate managed to escape from his hook and, nude and trembling from pain and blood loss, came upon a simple shepherd, the shepherd’s unsympathetic response was to beat the pirate’s brains out with a stone.

I’m sure the shepherd was quick to loudly boast throughout the village about the unkind thing he had just done, otherwise the story would never have made it into historical records. This is not to say that I believe in vigilantism or torturing prisoners on death row. Nor should you assume I approve of the way the Russians dealt with piracy. But my point is that Bonny, Blackbeard, and Wheland, and their bloodthirsty sea dogs were just lucky they weren’t caught in Russia.

It is quite likely that a piece of iron from one of Wheland’s grenades has led to the discovery of at least one of his sunken ships, and one can only imagine the mysteries and treasures that have rested for centuries at the bottom of the bay in the
area of the yellow buoy I previously mentioned. I realize that some maritime historians will insist that there is no evidence of a Tory Treasure, but I must remind my readers and Governor Crimm that Wheland “Wheelin’ Bone” did not leave a list of all the ships and plantations he raided, and we can’t be certain what ships sank, including his own, and what was on them.

Be careful out there!