Cooper Hawkes Whitelist Application

Forum Name: zigackly

steam64 id: 76561198085276826

character name & background :

Player: Cooper Hawkes

Trade: Carpenter's Mate

Story: Life was hard in the almshouse; left in the gutter alongside the unwanted leavings of gin soaks and penny whores, dependent on the conscience-salving gifts of the nobles for a crust of bread and a bowl of mutton and cabbage soup. If we were lucky the cook had not cheated us too bad and the fare would not be half rotted, but such as us were never often lucky.

I never knew a parent or a kindly face, or any I could call a friend. Pinch-faced, filthy and half-starved, we all did what we could to get along, which was more than often to take what we could from each other, like rats fighting over scraps.

For this was Good Queen Bess’s London, and for those not blessed with the light of noble birth it were a place of surpassing darkness where men and women whiled away what life they had in the alehouses and gin joints, the cock pits and playhouses. To fuel these habits, we begged or we stole or we hustled; not for the likes of us was gainful employment or the merchant life. Born in the gutter, live in the gutter, die in the gutter … this was our creed.

And such a one was I. I robbed and did foul murder, I cursed and spat, I elbowed and punched my way past my fellows like a drowning man will fight for his life, leaving his bootprints on the shoulder of his crewmates as he strives for the surface.

Such a one was I, even after the press got me on a drunken night and put me to crew on a navy brig. I learned nothing new from rum and the lash, in the sour taste of gunpowder smoke, bloody with the ruin of my shipmates under fire, mouth dry and skin hard with salt, and sun and sea.

Nothing that is until the Ship’s Carpenter saw something in me, or so he said, and put me to work under his Mate. There was a fascination for me in the shaping of wood and metal fittings, in seeing the shape in the knotholes and grain, in carefully taking away what was not needed and leaving what was good. It was here I found also that man could be a brother to man, and perhaps somewhat of the same process was acting on me.

The Carpenter was a godly man; a son of merchants with letters and learning, and he filled my head with the same, although I never took much faith in a god who would create the likes of me. I worked for that man like as a thirsty man will down his ale, or a hungry man chew his meat to the bone, and learn a trade I did in the end, becoming Carpenter’s Mate when a Spanish ball took the head clean off of my “superior” in the heat of an action off the Roanoke Colonies.

That old soaks death was the birth of the man who stands before ye now, born anew at the tender age of 19 with newfound responsibilities and a carpenter’s crew of my own to look to. And aye, I found kinship then in my crew, and learned to fight for the life of others near as hard as I’d fought for my own.

Perhaps only when a man can stand above others it gives him that lofty point of view as can let him see the commonalities in our humanity, or perhaps it’s just a by-product of the finer food and conversation of the officers, who were always a breed apart from lower deck scum such as I. So I grew to learn their ways and their letters, and perhaps somewhat of their manners rubbed off on me and all, although bite too deep below the surface and ye might still find something as will rot the teeth in your gums.

How did I come to this place? After 15 years as Carpenter’s Mate under my saviour, I shipped on one of Hawkyn’s fleet, sailing under Bess’s letter of marque to take Spanish gold. Driven hard before the wind after a bloody engagement, we were forced north towards Bermuda, but were as like bound for Davy Jones Locker, as this was a ship killer of a storm.

Suddenly a faerie light came on us. Elmo’s fire ran down from the mastheads, and strange lightnings started to break up the ship. I remember being flung from the deck and my head clashing with the rail; I remember a mouthful of salt tang and gasping for air.

I remember nothing more until I awoke washed ashore in this place full of strange, savage beasts with an eerie bit of glowing metal grafted into my wrist. Can a man make a life in this place? Such a life as I can have, then that I will, as I see now that a life can be had, and a better one nor I deserve, most as like.