Tag: correcting continuity ( timeline of captain jack sparrow )

Dead Men Tell No Tales ( 1752, age 62 )

The entire premise of this show is frank bullshit. Jack, in his youth, was a young man desperate to escape the ways of piracy – his goal in life was to gain the power necessary to rid the seas of piracy and governmental corruption. He wanted adventure and freedom and above all else, he wanted the seas safe from pirates. A man like Armando Salazar would, to him, be nothing short of utterly admirable and worthy of respect.

Jack is clearly in his late teens here, potentially his early twenties – it is possible that he is sailing with pirates at this point but if so, he has no authority to lead them. Jack is untested and untried – there is no reason for any aboard that ship to follow his mad scheming, when they are all clearly older than him. Whether one believes it to be Barbossa or Teague aboard that ship – both men are respectable captains who would be turned to aeons before Jack himself.

Everything about the premise here is a damn disaster of contradiction – but the worst of it all is the idea that Jack Sparrow – a young man who has, at this point, saved and spared lives at every single turn, had a panic attack at a sword for sinking a Naval ship and promptlyreturned that ship and it’s crew to life with clever wording – a young man who has only oncewished to kill anyone, and that person being none other than one who has lied to, spied upon and utterly betrayed him personally – would willfully lead a crew full of men doing nothing more than their duty to certain and horrific death.

We must remember who Jack Sparrow is to his enemies. We must remember that every opportunity he has for murder is squandered. Every chance he has to permanently end an enemy results in them spared somehow. Exceptions to this being those who have corneredJack into fighting for his life – and in those cases the ones who kill? Are still not Jack. ( Borya was destroyed by the princess of Kerma, though Jack’s plan to corner his ship likely would have ended in disaster for the Lord of the Caspian. Borya is clearly inspiration for Salazar’s fate but that’s another thing. What matters here though is it was a fight for life and in the end it was not Jack who took it. As for Cutler Beckett? Jack had ample opportunity – including a point where he had a canon on the man – and instead of pointing the canon at Cutler he pointed just past – familiar enough with how dead inside the man is to predict he might not dodge and account for it. Jack was not the one to destroy Endeavour, but it was a fate Cutler unwittingly orchestrated for himself. Despite being Jack’s long rival, it was not Jack to take him out. ) And yet we are expected to believe young Jack, who admires pirate hunters, would willfully destroy an entire crew and be a sassy shit about it. No, Disney, you utter fucks, I think not.  

Firstly, for the sake of personal continuity, this event takes place when Jack is nineteen years old, and is sailing upon a pirate vessel after slipping out of Shipwreck Cove on Teagueyet again. He was, in fact, a stowaway recently discovered – to make all nonsense here work, the captain of the ship was recently mutineed and the crew was in disarray about whom would lead them when Salazar’s ship came into their sights. Salazar is legendary in his own right – the first voice to call out a plan that sounded probable was immediately obeyed – there was no time for further argument if these men wished to live ( which, naturally, they did. )

The plan was indeed Jack’s. To trick Salazar and his crew into the rocks – yes – however this mystical bullshit was never part of it. The point of the plan was to out maneuver Salazar’s ship – thus granting Jack’s own time to escape. There was the possibility that Salazar would not be swift enough to keep his ship from being bottomed out by the rocks, but Jack was confident a man of such fearsome reputation would find a way to chase after them sooner rather than later.

For the sake of Disney’s bullshit, mystical crap does still happen – however, that is where Disney dies and my hands take the wheel. Jack would not have forgotten Salazar – he would have wondered frequently to the fate of that ship and the lack of it stalking him. There are two paths here that will then be taken, depending on how one wishes to address this disaster drama.

The first is that Jack seeks out Salazar and discovers the curse. He then, being Jack Sparrow, adventures to find a means to break it by way of apology. This is, obviously, an au arrangement available to anyone and noted under Jack’s verse titles. The second is that due to the amount of things Jack is bombarded with, he never gets the chance – but he does, indeed, always wonder where Armando Salazar went, until the day he learns the truth.

If you think guilt would not motivate him more than fear, you don’t know him. Jack will indeed seek a way to break the curse, not out of fear for his life but out of a need to correct his own error. This is the ‘canon’ alteration – that and Jack’s entire demeanor in that film, which was a disaster in and of itself. My Jack will not be a bumbling comic relief element. He will be the same man we have always known and that’s the tea on that.

Stranger Tides ( 1750, age 60 )

Twenty years after the last truly canonical events for my Jack, placing him at the age of sixty and not looking anywhere near it thanks to the Shadow Gold pumping through his veins and granting him longevity ( not immortality; merely a very long youthfulness due to his aging process being slowed remarkably ) the events in this storyline are not entirely contentious to me.

For the most part, I am content with the way Stranger Tides comports itself – Jack remains clever and quick on his feet, he stays well ahead of others in their own games and – despite the occasional failures in that – he does stay true to the core of himself in saving those whoought to be saved and letting nature take its course where it must.

In truth, my Jack is perhaps more energetic than this one and a little more sarcastic and biting. He’s grieving an awareness of the price of immortality while simultaneously seeking it for reasons even he is no longer certain of. He is as lively now as he was in his forties – if not his twenties! – and he sees that those whom he is used to are not aging as kindly.

Jack is placing distance between himself and what he knows ( saving Gibbs / abandoning Gibbs ) because he is ill prepared to cope with loss. He is, after all, a pirate who spends the majority of his time preserving life, rather than costing it – death is not something Jack accepts well or easily, and by this point in his life, it is circling him  like hungry sharks not out for his blood but the blood of all those around him. For a man who saves life, being confronted with the reality of mortality in those he cannot save leaves him bitter and desperate for a way to defeat the inevitable.

The Years After (

1731-1750, age 42+ )

Jack is – not well, and he knows it. He is extremely damaged by his time in the Locker – hallucinations and consistent reminders of things that have done ill by him are wreaking havoc on his stability and his sense of who he still is. Losing the Pearl to Barbossa yet again proved to be his breaking point.  

With Robby Greene dead thanks to the actions of the EITC while they had control of Davy Jones’ heart, Jack turned to Nadifa for aid. He sought a means to die that would be eternal and uninterrupted – one that would keep him from the Locker and all this mess once and for all. If any would know a way, he believed it would be she – but to his discomfort, she instead chose to lift him from his depressive cause and taught him how to heal.

Nadifa and Arabella both worked with Jack, coaxing from him his stories and teaching him ways to regain control over his mind and his emotions. Though it was difficult, in the seventeen years he sailed with them they found ways to return Jack to the man he used to be – and were it not for age taking Nadifa to death’s door, he may never have left. Nadifa was seventy-two and her life had been a long and arduous one – she left the world without regret, something Jack had never seen before in his life, and it changed his perception and understanding of many things.

Not the least of which being his own life, and the fact that though Arabella was consistently applying henna to her hair and wearing wrinkles like medals of honor as she commanded control of her bar in Tortuga, he himself didn’t look a day over forty. He didn’t have the same creaks and sores Arabella suffered from, and most of those they had known for so long were either long dead, or well aged.

A new fear gripped Jack, and eventually he left Arabella behind, as well as his crew on board the Renegade. It was time to stop running from his past and to face it. It was time to reclaim the Pearl and his own sense of adventure. It was time to find a way to challenge the inevitable facts of life, and find a means to make those who made life worth living as lively as himself!

At World’s End (

1730-1731, age 40 – 41 )

Jack is broken. In one of his threads in this particular timeline, he described himself as a compass that no longer pointed north – a compass, indeed, that did not point anywhere. His mind is cracked wide open – he is burdened by hallucinations, a lack of focus, and an inability to decide if he even wants to be alive anymore.

There is a yawning abyss of disinterest in him that the Locker has instilled – one that, in truth, had as much potential to see Jack abandon the cause and leave all to find their own miserable fates as it did to see him do what he did do – and try his damndest for everyone around him.

Jack – at this point – wants to escape his own mind. He wants to escape not death but theLocker in particular. He is unhinged by the place, and he fears above all else the fact offeeling unhinged. The fact he cannot find himself is the truest terror he faces in this storyline – and to confront, face to face, a man who molded his life so impressively as Cutler Beckett?

That was precisely the push Jack needed in order to find himself once again. To remember who he was – what he valued – through no intention of his own, Jack found it in seeing the man who pushed him onto a path of piracy he had been walking the tightrope on for over twenty-five years.

It is standing among the Brethren Court once more that Jack remembers why he stood on that damn tightrope for so fucking long – why he never wanted to be immersed in this life and why, admittedly, he hated it as much as a part of him was deeply fond of it. It is standing before Teague ( who he now knows, for certain, is his biological father ) that he realizes he never figured out what he really wanted in life, but that he had lived, in some manner or other, and he registered that if he was to keep living, then he needed to choose his side and quickly.

Yet for all his terror and uncertainty, for all the clamor in his own mind – when the moment came to save himself or to save another, to save one who he really shouldn’t – Jack remembered himself again, and did so. And in so doing, he sealed himself to a life of unsteadiness – or so it seemed. Losing Beckett lost Jack another anchor to this world – and it was that realization that ultimately lead him to find home, when the Pearl was taken.

Dead Man’s Chest (

1730, age 40 )

Jack is at his worst with communicating with others when it is his own life on the line, because he knows inherently that his life has no value to others. This is not a matter of depression or even low self worth – it is a matter of having been raised by pirates. His childhood taught himevery person will act in their own bests interests first – and saving other people is not, generally, a lucrative thing to do. In fact as someone who has saved many people Jack can attest to this being very factual – outside of turning those one saves into allies and crew members, generally speaking in the long term saving lives tends to do a man very little good, so it is no wonder that few folk bother to do so.

Because of this, Jack is exceptionally secretive because he knows if it comes to light that Davy Jones is after him and the Pearl in particular, not only will he lose his crew – he will not be able to fetch another one. He leads people to follow him by getting them to believe they are after treasure – then, that they are after power – because if there is something in it for them to gain then he knows they will participate. ( Jack also enacts this line of thinking in Brethren Court and, many issues as I have with the series, it is not wrong here, either. )

However – despite the fact it is his life on the line, Jack isn’t honestly keen on sacrificing other lives for his own. He is stalling for time more than anything else – he knows if he gets Davy Jones’ heart, every person he has to use as a stalling tactic will be freed, so what’s a short jaunt on the Flying Dutchman in the long scheme of things?

This is his thought process when accepting Davy Jones’ demand for 100 souls in exchange for his own – though that doesn’t stop him from trying every trick in his goddamn arsenal to get Will Turner back immediately, and that’s something that is very true to Jack. William is, at this point in the game, someone Jack considers a friend – and it goes against Jack’s internal code to turn his back on him – so yes, he tried. This post actually covers my arguments on this front, so no need to go further in on it.

Jack is fighting for his life at the very start of this movie, and literally all the way through it. His actions are more extreme than usual as a result of being very aware that he is outrunning a ticking time bomb he placed on himself thirteen years ago. Jack always manages to find a way out of trouble, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he expects to – and while he takes very long methods to ensure his own survival – there are some things that cannot be escaped, not the least of which being conscience and fate.

Curse Of The Black Pearl ( 1729, age 39 )

Our introduction to Jack Sparrow is as iconic as the man himself. Bailing out a sinking ship, he realizes the cause is lost and rather than panicing or abandoning ship, he climbs to the highest point and lets nature take its course, timing his own entrance with remarkable flare for one whose ship had just been lost.

Within the first minute we learn that he has a penchant for dramatics, is charming with his words, and is capable of deducing means to his ends without any loss ( noting the coin purse, paying for no questions asked, and making profit from it in so doing! )

Jack lies by telling the truth. His honesty is baffling, his words remarkably educated and dizzying in logic that is always steps ahead of everyone around him. A pirate with a bullet he will not fire, who speaks of the idea that those who are pirates can be good men, who looks at a ship not as ropes and sails and hulls but as freedom – this is the man Jack has grown to become through all of his trials.

He is a pirate of convenience still, owning it only when it suits him and brushing it aside whenever it does not. The Lord of the Caribbean, though we don’t know it yet, comports himself uniquely in the fact he is not obsessed with treasure or pillage, but adventure and freedom. He lacks fear of the supernatural in a remarkable manner that reflects well on the past of one who has seen it around every corner.

He is a masterful manipulator, which is to his credit and his bane – people consistently refuse to trust him on account of the fact he is a pirate, and on account of knowing nothing of who he truly is. He is not one who would sacrifice life – he preserves it at every turn and opportunity – and he is an unmitigated genius. Yet the prejudice of the past is not lifted – Jack’s genius is seen as madness, he is seen as daft – and his habit of saving people continues to be something that damns him rather than granting any sort of reprieve.

By the end of the film, Will Turner has a higher kill count than Jack Sparrow, a pirate of some thirty years, as with Barbossa he brings his number of intentional dead to two. ( More on this in the salt that is DMTNT. )  

The Years Between (

1718-1728, age 29-39 )

After the Black Pearl was taken from him by Barbossa, Jack made his way to Tortuga and waited – sure enough, Robby Greene pulled into port along with one of his ships in need of repairs, and the two reunited. After some discussion, Jack joined the crew of the Star Chaser, though when Renegade Freedom lost her captain in a skirmish, as well as her quartermaster, Robby rearranged the crews of both ships and set Jack as the captain of Renegade with Nadifa, a former slave woman who had been crew to the Renegade for three years, as quartermaster.

For nine years, Jack sailed with his old friend and harried the EITC with pleasure. The two men were an absolute bane to slave ships of all kinds, and Jack built something of a community for himself among Robby’s fleet. During this time, he hunted for the Pearlrelentlessly – and one such venture caused incredible damage to the Renegade that lead Jack to an argument with Nadifa so fierce it was said to be heard by the entirety of the fleet despite miles between the ships.

In the end, Jack yielded to Nadifa and named her captain of the Renegade. He was delivered to Tortuga – citing he needed a break from pirating awhile – where he spent his time at theFaithful Bride before growing restless and finally, commandeering the Dying Gull.

Brethren Court (

1716-1717, age 27-28 )

What is character consistency when you can just ignore everything that comes before this point, and use what comes after it to turn people into goddamn caricatures of themselves? This series is a goddamn mess and I list it, primarily to announce what I accept and what I reject. For the sake of brevity – as my salt here is even more vast than the fandom’s salt for Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales combined, I will simply make as pointed an overview as possible.

Accepted Elements:

• Shadow Gold. Jack did in fact drink six of the seven vials – had he drank all of them, he would have been immortal and gained control over the shadows Henry Morgan himself controlled. As it is, by dumping the seventh to the sea, Jack altered himself much less dramatically – but no less poignantly.

  He has extended his aging process – rather than living forever, he ages at a much slower rate of one year per decade, thus why, twenty years from his true canon later, Jack is as spry and youthful as he was when he was forty. He also sees better in the dark than 90% of people as a result of the effects of the shadow gold on his system.

• Sao Feng. Jack’s history with Sao Feng, in that he assisted the man in getting the Deep Sea Opal and therefore wresting his title of Pirate Lord from his own brother, is accepted as canon.  

• Chevalle. The relationship Jack has with the penniless Frenchman who is Pirate Lord of the Mediterranean is honestly one of my favorite things to come from this series. Chevalle is someone Jack has known since he was a child – and someone he has been very mischievous toward for just as long. Chevalle attacked Jack not out of anger or spite, but rather out of pride and the need to feel he was not utterly defeated. Jack mocks the man’s dress and despises his lavender scent, but his memories of the man are mixed with amusement and annoyance. They are not friends, but they are more likely to ally than others might anticipate – despite their bickering about it and Jack’s frequent frustrations – as far as pirates go, they get along fairly well.

• Gentleman Jocard. A slave who organized a revolution and was then rescued ( albeit unwittingly ) in the midst of it by Jack, he served as the cook on the Black Pearl and later was gathered by the freed slaves and named the captain of the Ranger. He later becomes a Pirate Lord, through assisting Jack, and though Jocard says he must kill Jack if they meet again ( for being friends with him is bad luck ) in truth these two remain quite close, and again are quicker to ally than many would expect.

• Benedict Huntington. This man – I swear to god, he was the poor creator’s attempt at Cutler Beckett 2.0 And for as much as this annoyed me ( I greatly preferred Barbara and her control of matters ) one thing that is expressly important is that for all his efforts to kill Jack, Jack in turn actively fought to save the man’s life, and later personally brought Huntington back onto his own ship when the man was a scourge to pirates everywhere and left him the gift of immortal Captain Morgan to imprison. It is a huge illustration that for as much as they ignored, those in charge of this series understood that Jack was not a killer and went to great lengths to illustrate it.

• Sri Sumbhajee. Everything about him and his arc was a goddamn gift, fight me.  

• Jack’s familial relationships. Please see childhood for further insights.

Rejected Elements.

• Barbossa. For god’s sake this was just – sad. We know Barbossa betrays Jack in the end – the absolute cartoon villainy forced upon a man who is abundantly clever was frankly, insulting and cringe-worthy to observe. We do not learn how Jack managed to convince Captain Barbossa to sail with him – nor do we really get much flash back to Crispin’s work beyond the little bit about who happens to be Pirate Lord of the Caspian Sea.

  Crispin’s careful detailing of Barbossa’s mannerisms and frankly, commanding presence were thrown out the window in favor of Wiley E. Coyote, Pirate Version, and that will never be how I see Barbossa, nor how I see his time with Jack. However, the relationship between these two requires its own headcanon so I will keep this brief and to the point. While I do not doubt Barbossa questioned Jack’s very non-piratey behaviour and absolutely intended to take control of the Pearl, I refuse to accept he was so obvious, or so idiotic, about doing so.

• Mistress Ching. The relationship Jack has with Mistress Ching is touched on very lightly by Crispin, but it is one that I have – taken extreme liberties with. Crispin’sMistress Ching not only knew Jack Sparrow, but was actually rather fond of him and considered him to be amusing. Jack, in turn, openly admired her and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was one of the most fearsome pirates in the world, commanding a fleet of ships greater than the Emperor of China himself.

  These two have a long history – one I will write up eventually – but for now suffice it to say Mistress Ching not knowing who Jack is, and wanting him dead on account of Teague, is frankly rejected. ( Frankly because Mistress Ching has far better ways of getting at Teague than by using a boy Teague himself barely acknowledges, but hey, that’s tea for another day. ) While she might not believe in the Shadow Lord business and still need to owe Carolina, she would not try to kill Jack without a very different cause. ( She has tried, and he has tried to kill her, but generally speaking it usually ends how Brethren’s fight did – with one or the other refusing to lay the finishing blow. That, at least, they did right. )

Price Of Freedom (

1714-1715, age 25-26 )

This is the core of Jack Sparrow for me, this is the piece that defines him best and has influenced the better majority of my work involving him. My headcanons on his relationships with most of the Brethren Court comes from Crispin as opposed to the Brethren Court series, as her ideas corresponded a great deal better with my own than the later stories did.

It is not essential to read this work to understand my Jack; any time explicit influence from the Price of Freedom is remarked upon on my blog outside of headcanon matters, it will be discussed beforehand or will have canonical evidence in the first three films ( which again, comprise Jack’s core canon, as my interactions with Jack through the fourth and fifth films differ greatly from what was shown on screen. Covered, of course, in their sections. )

What is important to note here are the following matters;

• Jack was friends with a French pirate named Christophe who inspired him to learn the language, and whose charming nature was so affable that when he was accused of breaking the Pirate Code, Jack refused to believe it and broke him out of prison – only to be assaulted and dragged aboard Christophe’s ship Requin and thus, forced into being outed for breaking the Code himself.

  Jack was badly treated aboard the Requin and eventually cast off in a dinghy with no food or water. Robby Greene dove off the Requin with supplies for both of them, and the two allied together and joined the EITC, where they served side by side for five years.  

• Cutler Beckett made Jack captain of a vessel he owned, called the Wicked Wench, when Jack did something nobody had ever done to him before. Cutler was not used to hearing the word no, nor to seeing men walk away from positions of power – Jack did both, in refusing to captain a slave vessel, and so Cutler quickly changed the offer, feeling he could make use of a man like Jack.

  The Wench caused Jack to wax poetic for two entire pages that honestly leave the reader thinking he is describing his love for a woman before we are granted full understanding. She was everything to Jack, and he personalized her by painting her cabin periwinkle and pink. Boy has 0 regrets, not even when the owner of an escaped slave insults it ( Baby blue and pink?! It’s periwinkle, sir. )

  Freeing slaves becomes something of a habit for Jack when Cutler asks him to find the mythical land of Kerma. Long story short, when Jack refuses to deliver Kerma to Cutler, the man punishes Jack by forcing him to use the Wench to ferry slaves. In the end, Jack cannot do it, and he releases the slaves in Kerma.

  Outraged, Cutler personally withdrew a red hot iron with which to brand Jack a pirate for this action ( which, in fact, put Cutler at odds with a Lord Penwallow, who had in fact once rescued Cutler from pirates and was, in every way Cutler’s golden ticket to a title of his own; the ‘mark’ Jack left upon him, if you will ) and saw fit to punish Jack further by burning his own ship and forcing Jack to watch.

  Jack, instead, threw Cutler off the ship they were standing on and swam to the Wench – Robby followed and Jack sent him off ( thus leading into Robby’s story aboard this blog ) and went down with the Wench – but not before summoning Davy Jones as he had seen the Brethren Court do, and striking the deal that would turn the Wicked Wench into the supernaturally fast Black Pearl.