I think that the gods of art have smiled upon me today, 'cause not only did they wake me up earliy enough to find a program about the pirate Black Sam Bellamy on the NatGeo channel, they also allowed this little beaut to crash out of my pencil. The gods have thus supplied me with pirates to fuel my obsession as well as the temporary skill to draw one. I'm thinking the gods must like pirates, so now that we are apparent amigos in piratehood maybe they'll have pity on me in artistic endeavors elsewhere.

Anyhoo, "Black Sam" (here depicted as a German Shepherd) was apparently born poor in Devon, England and his family moved to Cape Cod, MA when he was young. He fell in love with a girl named Maria whose parents wouldn't let her marry him 'cause he wasn't well-off enough, so he went and joined a pirate crew so he could get rich relatively quick and come to claim Maria as a rich man. He later engineered a mutiny against the captain who had taken him on and became the new and very well-liked Captain, and lived an extremely fortunate pirate life for a little less than a year and a half before he went down with his flagship the Whyda 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, after having pillaged more than fifty merchant vessels from Spain, France, and England.

I love pirates. Srsly. They win.