"‘There’s plenty of hams on board, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ repiled the Pirate Captain reassuringly. ‘But let’s see now…’ The Captain gazed into the middle distance and furrowed his brow to make it look like he was doing some difficult calculations in his head. In fact he was wondering if anybody had noticed how shiny his boots were, because he’d had the pirate with a scarf spend the whole morning polishing them. ‘I should say we’d reach England by Tuesday or thereabouts, with a decent wind behind us. It would be a lot quicker than that if we could just sail straight there, but I was looking at the nautical charts, and there’s a dirty great sea serpent right in the middle of the ocean! It has a horrible gaping maw and one of those scaly tails that looks like it could snap a boat clean in two. So I thought it best to sail around that.’

FitzRoy frowned. ‘I think they just draw those on maps to add a bit of decoration. It doesn’t actually mean there’s a sea serpent there.’

The galley went rather quiet. A few of the pirate crew stared intently out of the portholes, embarrassed at their Captain’s mistake. But to everyone’s relief, instead of running somebody through, the Pirate Captain just narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.

‘That explains a lot,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s also why we’ve never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I’m a little disappointed.’"
— Gideon Defoe (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel)

"Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium."
— Gideon Defoe (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists: A Novel)

"'That explains a lot,' he said. 'I suppose it's also why we've never glimpsed that giant compass in the corner of the Atlantic. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed.'"
— Gideon Defoe (The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel)