now i'm curious, and i couldn't find anything definite by searching it up. what's the deal with potc and tripoli?
In Dead Man's Chest, a disgraced Norrington says to Gibbs, “I nearly had you all off Tripoli. I would have...if not for that hurricane,” to which Gibbs replies, “Lord, you didn't try to sail through it—?”
Now, huge disclaimer that I am no sailor nor general maritime expert, but it strains credulity that Norrington would have chased Jack and his crew as far as any of the Tripolis he could possibly be referring to (Libya or Lebanon being the most likely). Jack was indeed headed that direction, as per the screenplay the prison he escapes from at the start of DMC is in modern-day Turkey, but as far as I can tell the Mediterranean isn't prone to hurricanes, specifically, of any sort. To be honest it's also wild that they had Jack go all the way to Turkey at all, as the rest of DMC’s action, including the Davy Jones plot he was supposedly there to jumpstart, all takes place in the titular Caribbean.
It's geographically and meteorologically unlikely and brings up all kinds of logistical questions for fic writers. Even if Norrington is supposed to be off the rails at that point, it makes far more sense for him to chase Jack all around the Caribbean and Atlantic (and run into a storm there) than to make it past all one bajillion colonial/sovereign checkpoints in the Mediterranean with his job intact.
