Black Freighter

The Black Freighter is a fictional pirate ship that appears in Tales of the Black Freighter.

History[]

Even though pirates are supposedly the equivalent of comic book heroes, there is absolutely nothing romantic, admirable, or likable about the pirates in Tales of the Black Freighter. The series features one of the darkest depictions of pirates in all of fiction, including other works where the pirates are villains. The Black Freighter itself seems to be a semi–demonic vessel in which only the most evil of men are drawn to join its crew.

In "Marooned", the Black Freighter attacks the unnamed main character’s ship and destroys it, and he winds up on a distant island with his entire dead crew and the remains of the ship all around him. The man worries about his family, as the pirate ship had been heading towards the direction of his village, so in desperation he puts together a grotesque makeshift “raft” from the pieces of his ship and some of the dead bodies, and begins riding it back home. Along the way, the man becomes increasingly insane from weariness, anger, and fear, and eventually believing that the pirates must have already reached his village and killed everyone, the man's goal in his mind is to kill all the pirates in revenge rather than save his friends, thus his cause ceases to be heroic.

By the time the man finally reaches land, he has become completely insane and violent, and the first thing he does is murder two random people, who he believes to be pirates, and steal their horses and clothing, to reach the village faster and look less recognizable, and when he goes inside his own home he begins to beat the person in his wife's bed to death, again thinking that it is a pirate, until it is revealed that it really IS his wife, that the pirates hadn't come yet, and that the man has become just like them.

Horrified, the man runs away back to the shore, where he sees the real Black Freighter making its arrival. Knowing there is no hope for him now, he climbs the ship's rope and boards it to be killed and/or join the other damned souls that make up its crew.

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Trivia[]

The Black Freighter serves as a metaphorical reflection of Watchmen's main narrative's themes and characters. It represents the darker aspects of human nature, the consequences of obsession, and the moral decay that occurs when individuals are consumed by their desires for vengeance or power.