When the King brands us, pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries. He doesn’t mean to make us criminals. He means to make us monsters.” 

—Captain J. Flint 

 The Pirates’ House in Downtown Savannah 

The Pirates’ House, located at 20 East Broad Street in Savannah, is a popular restaurant and tavern with parts of its history built on playful slivers of myth and other parts made from fragments of fiction. 

When I moved to Savannah to attend the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Pirates’ House quickly captured my then 7-year old daughter’s imagination. Kids love the place. So, I did, too. 

Savannah founder James Oglethorpe assigned a plot of land at this location to become a botanical garden. The garden was modeled after the Chelsea Physic Garden, established in 1673 in London, England. General Oglethorpe dedicated his garden to the Trustees of the Georgia Colony. 

With assistance from botanists around the world, James Oglethorpe acquired and then had planted various medicinal herbs, spices, indigo, grapes, and cotton, among other plants, to carefully study the possibilities for the growth of vegetation in the unique weather and soil conditions of the new colony. 

The hope was for the garden to prove successful in creating a wine and silk industry, focused on the Mulberry tree. Cotton, of course, would eventually become a staple crop in Georgia. 

The Herb House, a small building to house the original gardener, was built here in 1734 and is now part of the Pirates’ House — a section that is considered to be the oldest building in the State of Georgia. The growth of Mulberry trees did not go as hoped. But the growth of the peach tree did.  

Georgia, as you know, is nicknamed the Peach State. 

In 1754, the colonialists abandoned Oglethorpe’s garden. The Herb House transformed into a tavern serving seamen visiting the Savannah port. Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! 

Captain J. Flint, of course, is a fictional character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. It has been claimed and has become a ‘true myth’ that the Pirate J. Flint died while visiting Savannah; his unfortunate death caused by drinking too much rum. Before dying — or so the story reads — Flint hands his treasure map to Billy Bones with an ‘X’ marking the local where the treasure is found on the island. 

Sea novels were quite popular among the young in the nineteenth century; the imagination of sailing off into the unknown, seeking treasure, facing battles with dangerous pirates, while confronting unknown natives from far off exotic islands, was as intoxicating to the young mind as a large mug of rum. 

During your visit, they will tell you stories of the tunnels leading from the Pirates’ House to the Savannah River, used to smuggle rum and all that Pirate booty into and out of the port city. Naturally, all in fun. 

And there are plenty of tales of the ghost of Captain Flint, still busy haunting the tavern, to keep your children wide-eyed and entertained; fortunately, giving you additional time to push back a favorite adult beverage or two. I can heartedly recommend the delicious ‘Bloody Pirate’ — a drink that provides this Russian Girl an old-fashioned taste of vodka.