The Appledore Pirates
Have you ever wondered what an Appledore pirate’s story would be?
Not the costume version.
The real one.
Born between the Torridge and the tide line. Raised on mudflats, shipwright yards, and wind that never quite rests.
He’d know the sandbanks by instinct. Know when the fog rolls in thick enough to hide a hull.
He wouldn’t boast.
He’d sit quiet in a corner of The Beaver. Or nurse something dark in The Royal George. Watching. Listening.
On this coast, survival wasn’t theatre.
It was timing.
Privateer when the Crown approved. Smuggler when it didn’t. Shipbuilder by daylight. Something else by dusk.
Look at the face.
Weather before comfort. Calculation before noise. A man who understood that the sea gives — and the sea keeps score.
Appledore has always lived between legitimacy and legend.
Timber. Trade. War. Ale houses thick with stories no ledger ever recorded.
Some of those stories are probably still in the beams above the bar.
But here’s the real question:
Where did they go?
They didn’t “go” anywhere.
They changed clothes.
Appledore’s pirates weren’t Caribbean caricatures. They were estuary men. Shipwrights. Sailors. Privateers when licensed. Smugglers when margins got tight.
When naval wars ended, some took contracts. When customs tightened, some went legitimate. When timber boomed, they built ships instead of boarding them.
The skills never vanished:
Reading tides. Moving goods quietly. Knowing when to speak — and when not to.
By the nineteenth century, Appledore was building serious vessels. Shipyards replaced shadow cargo runs. The harbour civilised. Paperwork replaced whispers.
Smuggling faded because it had to. Steam. Railways. Tighter enforcement. Harder to disappear into fog once the world industrialised.
So where did they go?
Into the shipyards. Into the Navy. Into legitimate trade. Into family names that still live here.
Or into the tide.
Appledore doesn’t erase its past.
It just lets the estuary smooth the edges.
And if there ever were true pirates here?
They’d have known better than to leave records.