OOC: Meet Captain Flint

[fears_no_one]

About the Canon!
The Black Sails television show hit US Netflix and I watched the first two seasons in three days. And Captain James Flint is what would happen if you took Anakin Skywalker, Steve McGarrett, and Barbossa, tossed them into a blender and made a murderous red-headed pirate. So here I am, playing him. I have a type.

Black Sails ran on Starz for four seasons from 2014 until 2017 and at its very heart is gay prequel Treasure Island historical fanfic and I'm honestly shocked they got away with it. The story centers on Captain James Flint, the smartest, most ruthless pirate in the entire Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. It's his buried treasure that the characters in Treasure Island search for.

The Golden Age of Piracy was a genuine period in world history, and the portion of that age after the War of Spanish Succession (1715-1726) was made famous in British literature because it was the time where English privateers (people who stole stuff from Spanish ships because the queen and then king gave them permission to) suddenly became unemployed by said king and were left with no wages and just stealing stuff and sailing as skill sets. Now kinda (justifiably) pissed, the pirates did not limit themselves to Spanish ships. Basing themselves out of Nassau, New Providence Island (nominally an English colony, realistically run by pirates in a tiny, first--but also murderous and chaotic--step away from direct English rule), they wreaked havoc on the Caribbean islands ruled by the Spanish, but also up along the North American coastline, and across the West African coast.

The show begins in 1715, twenty years before the events of Treasure Island, and intersperses real historic figures--pirate captains Benjamin Hornigold, Charles Vane, Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Blackbeard himself--alongside the fictional Flint, Long John Silver, and Billy Bones. On the surface--because it is a pirate show--it's about chasing treasure, losing treasure, burying treasure, double crossing each other, drinking rum, stabbing people who may or may not deserve it, and wenching.

Ten years before the show began, the last governor of New Providence Island (now the Bahamas) had gotten too greedy about the bribe he was expecting to receive from a pirate captain and for his arrogance, his wife and 9 year old child were taken out into the center of Nassau and their throats were cut. He was left alive so he could tell the tale about what happened and exiled back to England. There was a reason pirates were declared hostis humani generis: enemies of all mankind. Many of them were legitimately freaking terrifying.

The cast is large and slightly unwieldy, with several plotlines going during each season as the show follows the politics and life on Nassau and how they interact with the various pirate crews they alternately hate and depend upon. Every person has their own motivations for what they are doing and why they are doing it and none of them match up with anyone else's (and that was what made it genuinely difficult to control Nassau and its trade for more than a hot second in reality). There are moments where you want to scream Can everyone stop doing stupid shit for just one second? because just when some progress is about to be made, another character will undercut it. No one's holding an idiot ball, they are just not very big-picture thinkers."

About Flint (Here there be spoilers!)


When the king brands us pirates, he doesn't mean to make us adversaries. He doesn't mean to make us criminals. He means to make us monsters. For that's the only way his God-fearing, tax-paying subjects can make sense of men who keep what is theirs and fear no one.

Meet James Flint. He's already slightly annoyed with you.

He has not always been a pirate. Born James McGraw, he was raised by his grandfather--also a seafaring man--and is well read (in numerous languages) and very smart despite his background of not-being-a-lord (quite the failing in the Royal Navy in the 1700s). He was a Navy lieutenant on the rise in 1705 when he was assigned to advise Lord Thomas Hamilton, the son of Earl Alfred Hamilton, one of the eight Lords Proprietor charged with running the Province of Carolina. The province covered what eventually becomes North & South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and the British West Indies. These guys were very wealthy and very much not to be messed with. The elder Hamilton put his son in charge of working with the Navy to come up with a way to neutralize the pirates in Nassau who were interrupting the flow of trade throughout Carolina. James is instantly captivated by Thomas' wife Miranda as well as Thomas himself: both open, slightly brazen people who are far more liberal in their thinking than the time would generally allow for.

Working with James, Thomas comes up with a strategy to take two British men-of-war to the bay in Nassau for a targeted raid on the beach. Then they'd arrest and hang a dozen of the pirate ringleaders as a message to the rest. Just before his father arrives, Thomas proposes a new strategy to James: granting the pirates royal pardons and giving them the chance to turn from a life of theft and murder and back to honest work on New Providence Island. He wants to offer any man who wants it a second chance. James tells him that in a time of war--England is fighting Spain--this will be seen by the Navy and the Parliament as at best weak, at worst seditious, to reward men in open rebellion to the Crown. Thomas counters that politically expedient or not, pardoning most of those labeled pirates was the moral thing to do. This, as you might've already guessed, bites Thomas squarely in his hopelessly naive ass. His father takes this idea…let's say less well .

The political portion of the fight does not stay a family matter as Alfred and Thomas duke out the proposal for Nassau and pirate rehabilitation in Parliament through proxies for months. Meanwhile James is off on a naval vessel to the Bahamas to see how the governor would take either proposal. Remember the part in the summary where the governor's wife and child were horribly, publicly murdered? Yeeeeah, that's the news James comes back to England to relay and suddenly pardoning any pirates goes from politically untenable to suicidally terrible idea. Thomas, the dumbass idealist, thinks that they can shift to death for only the really bad pirates and pardons for the rest, and not even James can change his mind. James makes a last attempt to get the Navy to throw its support behind Thomas' plan (leaving a colony in chaos could be a chance for Spain to take over the entirety of the West Indies) and takes it to the father-figure of an admiral who'd gotten him the position with the Hamiltons to start with.

He should've remembered that the man had a prior relationship with the Hamiltons, because James walks into a meeting with the admiral and gets one with Alfred Hamilton instead. Alfred informs him that not only does he know about James' affair with Miranda, he knows about James' other relationship with Thomas. Fuck you I'm rich only gets you so far in the early 1700s and it wasn't going to cover throuples, however consensual, when Sir Alfred was already looking for a reason to get rid of his problematic son. Flint is summarily dismissed from the Navy and told to take Miranda and GTFO of England, never to be seen or heard from again. Thomas is sent to Bedlam Royal Hospital. When James and Miranda begin their exile in Nassau, they learn Thomas had taken his own life at the hospital.

Fuelled by grief and rage (so, so much rage), James takes all of his military knowledge and Thomas' hopes for the Bahamas, and becomes Captain Flint, the smartest, scariest son of a bitch in the West Indies. Because fuck England.

He is nearly six feet tall and carries himself like a man used to being--and taking--the attention in a room. He has red hair, piercing blue-green eyes, and does not attempt to hide his intelligence or his complete disdain for people trying to manipulate him. (He expects manipulation. He just wants you to be better at it.) That said, he's charming when he wants to be, charismatic without trying, and mesmerizing to listen to when he's passionate about something. His voice has a growl to it like he's spent a lot of time yelling over crashing waves (which he has) and he speaks with an English accent.

Flint is not a nice person. He has to be more ruthless than the most hardened person on his crew. He takes prizes (pirate talk for steals shit from boats ), he murders people (including Lord Alfred Hamilton, who he hunted down and executed. Flint does not forgive easily), he assassinates British magistrates for hanging pirates. He sinks ships with crews still aboard them, he sacks two towns just during the four season run of the show, he brains a guy with a cannonball to the face in the very first episode. He is notorious both in the Caribbean and across the British Empire, and the sight of his black flag is enough to get merchant ships to surrender.

But Captain Flint, as we learn as the show continues, is not all that is left of James McGraw. He would very much like to let Captain Flint die and to walk into a life that isn't just kill and be killed. He doesn't let many people behind the facade of Flint--only Miranda and eventually John Silver--but he does care what people think of his villainy. As Silver puts it, It must be terrible being you. But he is not willing to put Flint aside until he arrives at his goal: a free Nassau that is strong enough to tell England to fuck off.

Let's see what learning about the future will do to his past."

Questions, comments, concerns? Hit me up!