Charleston Pirate Tours: Ghostly tales of swashbuckling piracy
Take a stroll with Charleston Pirate Tours, and you’ll find out why pirates wore eye patches.
Professional storyteller Eric Lavender doesn't wear an eye patch, but he does wear dreadlocks and full pirate regalia as he leads the downtown walking tours, with “Captain Bob," a blue and gold macaw, perched on his arm.
“We joke that pirates wore eye patches because they let their parrots sit on their shoulder, pecking out their eye,” says Lavender in his native South Carolina drawl.
But the truth is that the eye patches helped the pirates see in low-light situations. “If they went into the bottom of a ship, they could move the patch to the other eye,” said Lavender. If they entered a dark bar, often as dangerous as the hold of a plundered ship, the patch helped them see what they were getting into.
The Charleston Pirate Tours take visitors on a walking tour through historic neighborhoods of the original walled city. Lavender, a former parole officer, sifts fact from fiction in his historically accurate tours.
Describing Charleston’s Golden Age of Piracy, Lavender delivers a history lesson along with tales of such pirates as Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard, Richard Worley and Charles Vane, and ferocious female pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. The pirate guide points out pirate "hangouts, ‘haunts,’ and final resting places of pirates who made the old walled city of Charles Towne one of their ports-o-call.”
He’ll point out the Church Street home that “is the only house in city has on historic marker that tells you it’s still haunted by a ghost.” The ghost is that of a Rhode Island physician shot in a duel with his best friend over a woman.
Guests will hear how Blackbeard blockaded the harbor and laid siege of the city, of Stede Bonnet’s capture and execution, the romance between Anne Bonny and Calico Jack, and the headless pirate ghost, who guards a buried treasure.
You’ll see a rare Huguenot Church, founded by French fleeing religious persecution, the spot where the city hanged pirates, and the neighborhood that inspired the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
The family friendly tours last 90 minutes to two hours and reservations are required. Tours meet at the Powder Magazine, a National Historic Landmark, and part of Charleston’s Museum Mile. Admission to the Powder Magazine museum is included in the price of the tour.
Posted by Diane Loupe
