When I was a young man, I served as a cook on a small wooden crabbing ship. I was more a potato peeler than anything resembling a chef,  as we had potatoes with every meal and they took the longest to prepare. I’d spend what felt like hours peeling and peeling and peeling.  The captain told me we had to have potatoes. Not because he enjoyed them, but because they might serve as a warning. He said my job was as important as the scout in the crow’s nest on top of the mast. Apparently, if I were to peel a potato and it came out looking like a skull, with the brown divot eyes looking like sockets and a missing nose and a toothy grin, it meant Captain No-beard was close.

                Captain No-Beard was the most feared pirate on the seas in those days, you see. The stories said he sailed the Bermuda Triangle claiming the souls of lost sailors. Dead men tell no tales, old boy, and none had arrived to give a clear description of Captain No-beard, so all figured the missing sailors were dead. Claimed by the evil No-beard.

                Through heavy fog, some sailors claimed to have avoided being spotted. They claimed to have seen the Captain and his monstrous crew sail past with howls and wails and cackles. They called them the skeleton crew. Not because they were so few, but because Captain No-beard was a skeleton. That’s why he had no beard. It was said that his first mate was a huge toothy beast, capable of tearing a man in two with his large mouth alone. No-beard’s lookout: a witch who didn’t even need eyes to see for she saw fear as a color and this color flushed every man and woman’s face who saw her or heard her evil cackle. There were others, too—crew members—some claimed to have seen a vampire mopping the poop deck; others say they saw a green monster with a set of teeth as wide as an anchored buoy; still others are sure they witnessed a pair of ghosts or banshees flying among the sails. These spirits were silent and could sneak up on a man before he had a chance to scream. The sailors who saw this monstrous crew were terrified. Gave up sailing altogether. Thankful, they said they were, for having the fog there to conceal them and to keep the clear form of these monsters somewhat of a mystery.

                It was a particularly stormy night in the Bermuda Triangle. I was below deck cooking. After peeling a couple dozen potatoes I carved the potato that looked very much like a skull. Two brown potato eyes sunk under a brow of yellow-white meat. A third spot was triangle in shape and look like a nose of a skeleton, or rather the lack of one. An evil grin spread across the lower part of the potato and a feeling of dread spread in my chest.

                I ran, stumbling, with the skull potato to the upper deck. ‘Captain! Captain!’ I called, but I could not find the captain nor any of the crew.  The boat was eerily quiet. I looked around, finding no sign of them. Fog surrounded the ship on all sides and I thought perhaps they’d rowed ashore in a dinghy, but none of the small boats were missing. In the middle of the main deck I stood, confused and scared. I could hear only the sound of the waves crashing against the hull and my own heavy breathing.

Suddenly a horde of strange, monstrous creatures charged at me from the starboard side and scooped me up in their many arms and carried me off my ship and onto theirs. There, I saw my captain and the rest of the crew. They sat at a tea table, looking confused. The monsters kept offering them, and me, disgusting beverages and food. A green drink with worms and eyeballs and what looked like bat wings was offered to me by a witch.  They wanted us to eat.

                ‘Eat,’ growled a great beast as he devoured some of the goop himself.

                Our first mate said, “Don’t eat it, boys. It’ll turn you into a monster just like them.” So we did not eat, because the captain agreed.

                Except, over the course of an hour, one man got hungry… He ate what a green monster gave him, as the monsters all cheered and howled and hooted. He devoured a goblet of what appeared to be grave dirt and worms. The man who ate it began to change. His face grew green and crouched over as if in pain, and a few of the other crew members cried out in terror, “He changes! He changes! He’s soon to be a monster! A monster!’

                ‘I warned him,’ the first mate said.

                It was about then that Captain No-beard appeared from his quarters. With a soft patter of his bony leg, then a heavy stomp of his wooden peg leg, he stepped into the light of the full moon. An awful sight. He looked not unlike the skull-and-crossbones pirate flag that waved on the main mast. Bones picked clean, probably by seagulls, a skull under a pirate captain’s hat, an eye patch over one eye, for this skeleton captain indeed had an eye. He said to me, in a seemingly gracious voice, “Welcome. Enjoy,” but we knew him to be a deceiver. He wanted us to be monsters. He wanted us to eat. A last meal. He wanted us dead or monsters like the man who ate the grave dirt.

                ‘Before you kill us?’ I said, voice quivering.

                ‘Kill you?” No-beard said. “Why would I?’

                ‘Because dead men tell no tales.’

                “Dead men tell tales if you let them,” No-beard chuckled and his crew erupted in more cackles and howls.  We watched as our crew member turned greener, transforming. But the man did not change. The food merely made him sick, green about the gills. He puked over the side of the ghost ship and was better.

                 After another hour of strange dancing and howling, this Captain No-beard let us go back aboard our ship. I suppose he let us go to spread the tale of how horrible he and his crew were, so that is what I’m doing. He also took my skull potato. He said it was a gift, but I think he wanted me not to have proof of what happened.