The pirate known as Captain Jack Burton was a brigand of the highest degree; a greasy, salt-crusted knave and a rogue of self-proclaimed infamy. He spoke thunder and breathed rum, provoking dread fear in any who dared be within earshot of his wild, flailing diatribes. He preferred his drink in the most loathsome of dimly lit taverns, and wore his demeanour like a dark cloak, concealing a king's ransom of wisdom beneath it. I was a young, misty-eyed lad fresh upon my first adventure into the world with nothing but virginity and a purse full of travelling monies, and looking back I can now see that our acquaintance was nothing less than the work of providence itself.

I met him at a guesthouse in the great seaside port of Auckland while en route to the eastern coasts in search of apprenticeship, and had my youthful curiosity not gotten the better of me one fateful night, I might have prospered in an entirely different life - one of dull routine and unfulfillment. But for reasons I can only speculate the Captain found something in my innocence, and shanghaied me to be his merry rum companion, introducing me to a life of insobriety and colleague that would have shamed my father and turned my mother in her grave. And were I not so young and hungry for experience I might have resisted and allowed my prejudices to hold sway, leaving me bereft of the wisdoms and sage metaphorical insights he spent the better part of a year imparting to me over rum pots in the various, objectionable and pirate-infested drinking establishments within the village that became our habitual homes away from home.

I have done my best to chronicle those rum-fuelled escapades, and recount all of what Captain Burton told me in his own garbled and richly slanged tongue, leaving as many stones within my memory unturned as age and the passage of time have allowed. Seeing his words again, even though merely of ink and page, I can see how much deeper and more profound those insights have become since being marinated with mine own experiences, and how much they have shaped me and my noble empire into being.

These are not the words of a man, nor of any philosopher I am aware of. They are the words of a voyager; a rebellious, bitter and insightful wandering drunkard who ran both hotter than the devil's own fiery branding iron, and colder than the waters where lay the graveyard bones of Davy Jones himself. He was a woeful, slurring bard with a disillusioned spirit and a penchant for dramatics; his own worst enemy. And yet I have never, in all my years since, come across a stouter heart, a more unbreakable spirit, or a more loyal servant to a life adrift.