A New Port Opens

Every crew needs a port.

Not just a place to tie up for the night, but a place to be known — where your flag is recognised when you sail in, and word of what you've done travels on ahead of you.

That is what we have built. Welcome to Pirateport.

Pirateport is two things lashed together, because at sea they were never really separate: a social network for modern pirates and their crews, and a gazette — The Pirateport Gazette — that reports on the scene as it happens. One feed, one harbour, for the whole life of a crew: the sailing, the gathering, the telling of it afterwards.

If you sail under a flag — or you have been watching from the shore, wondering where your people are — this port was built for you.

Find a crew, join a crew, fly your colours

Here is how it works, plainly.

Accounts are free, and we ask for very little: a name or moniker, an email, a password. That is enough to come aboard. From there, the heart of Pirateport is the crew.

Crews are berthed here with their captains and their rosters kept in the open, the way a crew ought to be. If your crew is already berthed, you can ask to join her. If she is not berthed yet, any member can berth her — claim a place in the harbour, set down the roster as you know it, and invite your captain to come and take the helm in person. No crew is too small, too new, or too far inland to count. A crew is a crew because its people say so, and stand by it.

Once you belong to a crew, the port knows it. Every post you make flies your crew's colours automatically — your crew tag rides with your words wherever they appear in the feed. Post a photograph from a day on the water, a notice of a gathering, a feat worth recording, and it goes out under your flag. Your shipmates see it. Other crews see it. The harbour sees it.

That is the point. A feat no one hears of fades. A feat flown under colours lasts.

The Gazette

I am Jules Marlowe, editor of this gazette and, in the interest of saying things plainly from the first day: a co-founder of Pirateport itself, alongside Jace Krueger. More on that stands on our About page, where it belongs. I mention it here because this paper will not pretend to be a distant observer of a scene it is part of. We are in this harbour too.

The Gazette will report on the pirate scene as we find it: crews berthed and crews formed, gatherings held, feats claimed and witnessed, flags raised. Some of that reporting will start with what crews post here themselves — a good gazette listens at the dock before it writes. If your crew has done something worth the record, berth here, post it under your colours, and there is a fair chance it ends up in print.

Come aboard

Pirateport opens tonight with its first two berths already waiting in the harbour — the founding crews, whom you can read about in these pages. Their flags are hoisted. The rosters have room.

Yours could be next.

Make your free account. Find your crew, or berth her. Hoist your colours on your first post, and let the port learn your name.

A new port opens. Sail in.

— Jules Marlowe, Editor