Captain Compass wasn’t really a captain at all.  In fact, his name wasn’t Compass either. His mother, who really should have known better, called him Rick, named, she said, after the hay rick in which he was conceived. Rick’s dad, Jim O’Shea, didn’t call Rick anything because before he was born he was lost at sea. At least, that’s the story that Rick’s mum was told and, who knows, she might have believed it, even though Jim O’Shea wasn’t a sailor, and used to feel seasick at the sight of the village pond.

Rick O’Shea grew up rather a lonely child. His mother put him to work in the fields as soon as he was old enough to crawl from one turnip plant to another. The few children he did know as he grew up tended to be rather cautious of him as Rick had a most fearsome temper, and he became very good at shouting. Rick also had an extraordinary ability to find his way from anywhere to anywhere else. Tell him to find his way to Bristol, or Weymouth, or Watchet and he could strike out without a moment of preparation and go directly to his destination without ever getting lost. He couldn’t explain how he did it, and by the time he was 16 he had acquired the name of Master Compass, as if that explained it all.

When he ran away to sea (he knew just where to go) he was 17 years old, tall and strong with a very loud voice.  He shouted his way around the ship and soon found he was considered to be one of the top sea dogs amongst the crews, and he was much in demand by the officers on the merchant ships he worked as his unerring ability to find distant places, be it in Spain or the West Indies, worked as well on the sea as it did on land. When he was captured by pirates, along with the rest of the crew, he became so angry and shouted so much that the pirate captain was very impressed and instead of making him walk the plank along with his ship mates, he was taken on as a member of the pirate crew. The reason for his peculiar nickname soon became apparent to the pirate captain, and Master Compass found himself assisting the captain more and more. Before long he was made First Mate, something which really annoyed the original First Mate who, although he couldn’t shout as loud as Master Compass or find a hidden port on a stormy night, was very handy with a knife. That is how Master Compass got the long scar on his face.  That was also the reason why the old First Mate was the very next person to walk the plank.

When the pirate captain fell overboard in a drunken state one dark night in Tobago, Master Compass instantly became Captain Compass and not because he was chosen by the rest of the crew but because he lost his temper and shouted very loud if anyone tried to suggest otherwise. In fact, anyone who persisted in challenging his right to be captain was made to walk the plank.  This wasn’t the smartest idea because the ship was still in the port, and the pirate who had walked the plank simply got up from the dock, dusted himself down, and climbed back on board. This made it appear that the opposition to Compass being the captain was stronger than it really was as in reality it was the same three pirates over and over again until they got tired and went and drank rum with their mates.

The opposition from the crew soon died down, though, when Captain Compass led them on countless raids against fat merchant ships and took all their treasure. He seemed to know exactly where the ships would be and he was always there waiting for them. And so it was when he sailed to the point where he just knew that he would intersect the Santa Maria racing its way home to Vigo.