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A/N: I've returned, along with a new chapter, this time on smuggling. Thanks to all who reviewed the previous chapters. Enjoy!


Crimes Against The Crown
By Sinnamon Spider

Smuggling


As far as acts of piracy and other illicit activities went, smuggling had never been high on Jack's List of Exciting Things. He had, of course, smuggled the odd cargo in a pinch, and after discovering the slaves in the hold of the Wicked Wench, years ago, he had quite promptly smuggled the Negroes upriver where there lived a voodoo woman he was acquainted with, and he delivered the slaves into her care. But there were far more lucrative and interesting ways for a pirate to turn a profit, and Jack had turned down offers to smuggle various goods on more than one occasion.

But Jack's disdain for smuggling was soon turned into respect, once the rumrunners returned to their island cache.

He had, as he later told Elizabeth, spent those three days on the beach, sneaking a few bottles from the underground hoard of quite fine rum. But it had not been quite the vacation he had lightly glossed over when the irate girl was grilling him about his escape. He had been drinking not to forget his current situation, but to end it.

Jack Sparrow was going to drink himself to death.

He decided it was a far better death than slow starvation or an ignoble bullet to the brain. What better way for the most notorious pirate in the Spanish Main to perish? What could be more fitting than death by the sweetest nectar in the world? Yes, Jack Sparrow would go out with a silly smile on his face and an empty bottle in his hand.

After drinking four bottles of the heady rum, he had spent the next two hours being violently sick, and in the aftermath, he realized that drinking oneself to death was not as easy as it seemed. Then he saw a ship in the distance.

The rumrunners were not pleased to see that their cache had been broken into, but they were pacified by the contents of the purse that Barbossa had not managed to liberate Jack of, and soon he was sailing away from the accursed island.

He spent three months with the rumrunners, and his previous notions of the ease – and therefore dullness – of smuggling were challenged. The men on the ship had the action honed to an art; the loading of the cargo, the careful forgery of essential documents, the impassive faces as the holds were searched for contraband. Jack learned tactics and little tips he had never even dreamed of, and his agile mind was already at work devising ways to apply them to other illegal activities.

He never refused an offer to smuggle again. He was quite aware that were it not for smugglers, he would be nothing but bones on the sand of an unnamed island somewhere in the ocean…

…preferably with an empty bottle clutched in a skeleton grip.