Soon, it was a watering hole popular with seafarers, dockworkers and a budding young writer named Jack London, who the proprietors say wrote notes for "Call of the Wild" there (the square outside is named for him).
Mr. Jones, 69, who was born and grew up in London, is one of the foremost interpreters of the genre of folk music known as sea chanteys, traditional British and American songs associated with seafarers and their lives.
Perhaps the most striking statistic was that in 2012, Somali pirate attacks — recently the bane of shipping in the Indian Ocean — dropped by almost 80 percent from a year earlier, with 851 seafarers fired upon, compared with 3,863 in 2011.
Half of the world's merchant fleet, with 1.2m seafarers on board, sails under a flag of convenience.
Dingoes came to Australia 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, probably with Asian seafarers, and already at least partly domesticated.
The Pacific rat, Rattus exulans, a native of Southeast Asia, travelled with Polynesian seafarers to, among many other places, Hawaii, Fiji, Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa, Easter Island, and New Zealand.
Step back in time The coastal town of Largs, on the Firth of Clyde, will be overrun with Nordic seafarers when the Largs Viking Festival comes to town (largsvikingfestival.com; 29 August - 6 September).
To keep pace with current developments, automation seems to be one viable option when it comes to keeping ships running with fewer seafarers available.
Hurwitz, meanwhile, doesn't seem to identify that much with nefarious seafarers, other than observing International Talk Like a Pirate Day every September 19.
4. Long John Silver The roguish buccaneer from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 adventure yarn Treasure Island set the template for fictional pirates ever since: schooners, "pieces of eight", tropical islands, treasure chests, maps marked with an "X", and one-legged seafarers with talking parrots perched on their shoulders.
Mr. McPherson has already carved out his niche on Broadway with "The Seafarer," about a poker game in which Satan holds a formidable hand.
