‘North Carolina’s pirate’ Sinbad to dock for jamboree Nov. 1 & 2
Capt. Horatio Sinbad and his crew will be among the living history reenactors at Blackbeard’s Pirate Jamboree Nov. 1 & 2 on the Berkley Manor grounds. His documentary about building a boat will be shown at 2:45 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2. See more info here.
It was a momentous turn of fate.
Imagine, the entire course of your life’s journey, an adventure lasting nearly 75 years, the result of seeing a 96-minute movie when you were eight years old?
It’s an extraordinary story that could have been spun from the imaginations of writers Jack London or Mark Twain.
An eight-year-old boy from middle America sees the 1950 movie “Treasure Island.” He dreams of life on the sea as a pirate, builds his first ship—an eight-foot pram—to sail and plunder vessels on a nearby lake.
The lake was too confining for a budding pirate. It also had a scarcity of prospective victims. A few unsuspecting fair maidens, however, could be had, one of whom would later become his first wife and the mother of his four children, but that came later.
Bored with school at the advanced age of 16, he runs away from his Michigan home and winds up serving as a mate on a 96-foot schooner in the Windward Islands for three years. There, he earned the nickname, Sinbad.
You know the name, but you probably don’t know the entire story—how he and his wife, Marilyn, were nearly drowned after his second home-built sloop, the 22-foot MEKA I, sank during a hurricane in the deadly Graveyard of the Atlantic 200 miles east of the Outer Banks.
After drifting for two days in a life raft they were fortuitously rescued by a passing freighter.
Undaunted, while working for a few years as a draftsman for General Motors back home, Sinbad scrimped every dollar—he prefers to call them doubloons—to build in his backyard a proper 16-ton ocean-going pirate vessel, the majestic brig MEKA II.
Without much forethought, he could hardly have predicted the ordeal he would suffer trying to get his ship out of his backyard and afloat two years later.
The adage “Life’s a journey, not a destination” could be his motto.
In a recent interview, the one-of-a-kind Sinbad told me, “You’re just looking down this horizon and you decide, ‘I’m gonna set sail and see what happens.’ And that’s the whole adventure of it for me, because I didn’t know all the answers. But (seeing the movie Treasure Island) was the driving force that sent me on that road.”
What an adventure it has been.
He and various members of his family have lived aboard the MEKA II for 57 years, sailing more than 65,000 miles.
When his fraternal twin daughters, Molly and Sarah, were born, Sinbad constructed a double gimbaled highchair so that the girls could sit upright to be fed no matter which way the MEKA II was pitching or rolling on the ocean waves.
During the times that the boat was docked and the two-year-old girls were temporarily left on deck unsupervised, they wore harnesses attached to the boat’s lifelines. “We’d go on deck to look for them and if we didn’t see them, the first place we’d look was aloft in the rigging, and there they’d be up on the crow’s nest,” Sinbad recalled, laughing.
It was among Molly’s earliest memories.
“At that time, we were docked down in Florida,” she said. “Against our parent’s orders, Sarah and I had been feeding marshmallows and even our diapers to an alligator that would sometimes swim up to the boat.”
One day, mad that she was sternly ordered not to feed the alligator, Molly threw her diaper overboard and then wiggled out of her harness. She then climbed the ratlines to the crow’s nest. “Mom came on deck looking for me,” she said. “My diaper was floating in the water and mom immediately thought that the alligator had eaten me. She screamed for dad but then she heard me laughing up in the crow’s nest.”
You can relive many of Sinbad’s adventures at Ocracoke’s Berkley Barn at 2:45 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 2, during the annual Blackbeard Pirate Jamboree when we screen Sinbad’s documentary film, “Boat Building in Your Own Backyard.”
What else should you know about the adventures of North Carolina’s pirate?
He’s done just about everything imaginable to sustain his dream. He’s designed and built boats, a restaurant, a house and a barn. He’s operated a sailing school and attended more pirate festivals and tall ship events than he can remember.
He’s written books, made a documentary and even a feature-length movie.
By Sinbad’s side for more than 45 years has been Lt. Terry Brown, his second wife. When she signed aboard the crew, she had no idea what she was in for or how much work and danger would be involved.
“Through all these years she stuck with me, Sinbad said. “I mean, the worst times, the worst storms, the worst everything, she’s stuck with me and she’s still here. And I marvel at that. I feel so lucky, so very, very, very lucky.”
Over the years, the Meka II’s nine cannon have fired at U.S. Navy submarines, warships, North Carolina ferries and other pirate vessels, expending thousands of pounds of black powder.
He brought a tall ship event to Beaufort in 2006 by winning a race at Jamaica with a crew of teens.
But what is Sinbad most proud of?
A framed parchment hangs on a wall in his captain’s cabin with then-President Ronald Reagan’s signature identifying Sinbad as an officially commissioned privateer.
The document is known as a “Letter of Marque.” (Allowing a privateer to legally plunder ships of an enemy nation in wartime.)
“That was a pretty interesting accomplishment and an adventure in itself,” Sinbad said.
Pretty interesting? Did I mention that Sinbad can be subtle at times.
The MEKA II was invited to participate in “Operation Sail” for America’s Bicentennial in New York Harbor in 1976.
Knowing that his little pirate ship would be dwarfed among the 225 sailing vessels, 16 tall training ships from around the world and 50 naval warships from as many nations, Sinbad sought a way to stand out. What he needed was a Letter of Marque that no one else had. He petitioned the government.
Secretary of the Navy John Warner invited Sinbad to Capitol Hill before they went to the White House to meet then-President Ford.
Always keen on putting on a good show, Sinbad and his crew arrived in Washington wearing their full privateer accoutrements.
“Heavily armed! I mean cutlasses and many pistols,” Sinbad recalls. “Being naïve my whole life, I didn’t realize what I was doing.”
Needless to say, it caused quite a commotion.
After being temporarily handcuffed and pressed against a wall by the Capitol police, Warner intervened, and off to the White House went the pirate crew from North Carolina.
It’s all because Sinbad watched the 96-minute movie, “Treasure Island,” when he was eight years old.
Now, in the words of the inimitable Sinbad, “Carry on.”
