Some twelve years ago, I took some sort of online quiz that bestowed upon me a pirate name.
Mad Charity Rackham.
I knew the Rackham name, of course. I read a couple of books on real pirates, gosh, back in the late ’80s or early ’90s. Calico Jack Rackham was one of the ones I remembered. Since then, I have enjoyed the “Black Sails” series, which included Jack and one of his female crew members, Anne Bonny, as characters in a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel “Treasure Island.”
So, I thought Rackham was a cool pirate name to have.
And, I can be a bit mad, in both senses of the word, so that’s fitting.
Then, there’s Charity. Not a name that meant anything to me in 2008, but now I know that one of my great-great grandfather‘s sisters was named Nancy Charity. He named one of his own daughters after her.
It makes my pirate name that much more special to me.