Voyage of the Red Hand

Story time!

This is a legend about Mad Captain Salgo, a merchant turned rogue by hard times. His vessel, the Red Hand, preyed on the shipping lanes off the coast of the Western Wastes. Salgo had a knack raiding ships as they navigated through the bottlenecks. At just the key moment, the Red Hand would sail out of some hidden cove and pounce on its quarry.

For all the rumor of how Captain Salgo earned the "Mad" moniker, he was no butcher. Captured crews were always put off on the coast, their vessel run aground on a sandbar to be retrieved later.

Captain Salgo was considered mad based on claims that he sailed without a crew. Even taken into account that the Red Hand was a small raider craft, the notion that it could be crewed by only one man was absurd. Who was there to batten down the hatches in a storm? Who sounded the depths? Who cooked the meals? And most important on the minds of the merchant captains was how was this one man able to raid their ships?

To be sure, many of the raids took place at night: lightning strikes against unprepared crews dozing at the watch. But still, it became quickly apparent that one man was playing all the parts. Witnesses says that Mad Captain Salgo had the whole crew up here (tapping the side of the head). He was a small man with a bouncy quality, who never stopped talking, to the captives and to himself. It was as if he would issue himself orders in a loud captain's voice, hop sideways, confirm that the order was received in an entirely different voice, and then run off to accomplish the task.

Salgo's success came from his ability to mimic the crewmen of the vessel he was raiding. He would sneak aboard and convince everyone that he was the real captain, and then proceed to ground the ship on a sandbar before anyone suspected the ruse. This became such a well-known tactic of the Mad Captain that there is a story of a crewman on nightwatch accidently shooting his own captain in the leg fearing that it was Salgo in disguise.