The Black Pearl

Before the ship, there were dolphins

In the late summer of 2012 I kept stumbling across driftwood dolphins on the shore. Sea dragons. Mermaids. An octopus. They were the work of Frank Lund, a retired accountant who was on the beach most mornings, seeing what the tide had delivered overnight.

Mostly it's all plastic. Last week we found a plastic net, all tangled up in the rocks. I didn't see rubbish. I saw perfect mermaid hair.Frank Lund, talking to me for SevenStreets

People asked him if he was being paid. "I just smile," he said. "I tell them it's free."

A keel on the sand

Frank's neighbour, Major Mace, started coming down with him. That Christmas the two of them built a nativity scene out of beach finds. In January 2013 they laid down something longer. A keel. Then ribs.

Frank knew better than anyone that nothing lasts very long on the beach. They built it anyway.

Strangers with logs

Then people started stopping. A woman from Oregon helped Frank haul a quarter-ton log up the sand. Dog walkers came back with planks. Kids came back with their parents. Major dressed her with discarded flags gathered from Vale Park, and his wife Sue became part of the crew who kept her shipshape.

I've had some fantastic days with people I don't know at all.Frank Lund, Liverpool Echo, February 2013

Someone found a wetsuit on the tideline, stuffed it with straw and stood it on deck. They called him Johnny Depp.

She gets a name

The masts went up, three of them, from the longest timber the river would give. Rope, netting, bunting. A hand-painted sign with a skull and crossbones.

By February the Liverpool Echo was already calling her New Brighton's Black Pearl, after the ship in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The name stuck, and so did she.

Fire

At 8.07pm the fire brigade were called to the promenade. Someone had set her alight. Two hose reels had it out by 8.27, but the back of the ship was badly burned.

It's a shame, a lot of kids especially have come down to see it.Frank Lund

The call went out on Facebook and Twitter. Men, women and children turned up with tools, a barbecue and free pies, and rebuilt the back end in a single evening.

The surge

A tidal surge drove the Mersey higher than it had been since 1987. The promenade flooded. The Black Pearl went over the rocks and out into the river.

The Black Pearl went out to sea and sailed off in pieces. We must have watched her for half an hour.Frank Lund

On 3 January 2014 the waves came back for what was left. A news agency photograph of them breaking over her went round the world.

The letter

Photographs of the wreck travelled. One of them reached Johnny Depp, who had sailed a ship called the Black Pearl on screen. He sent Frank a short letter. It ended with five words, a nod to the last line of the first film.

Go and retrieve that horizon.

We can't not have her

We can't not have her, it's that kind of situation.Frank Lund, the day after the surge

So they went back to the tideline and started again with whatever the river returned. That January I started the official Black Pearl Facebook page, so the people who loved her could find each other. By April she was standing.

Someone wrote on her page: "So long as there are people and driftwood and spirit it will always come back."

A flag for Clarky

The Black Pearl became the place New Brighton came to remember. My brother Liam Clark, Clarky to everyone, died in a car accident on 10 September 2019. He was 21, a young dad, a goalkeeper for North Wirral Saints and a huge Liverpool fan.

Our brother Zachary started Clap for Clarky to keep his memory alive. On 2 October 2019, in the 21st minute of Liverpool's Champions League game against Salzburg, thousands of fans at Anfield stood and applauded him. Zachary said it felt like "Liam's family had extended by more than 50,000 people."

On what would have been his birthday, family and friends gathered on the beach, and Pirate King Noddy unfurled a flag in his memory.

Clarky. You've got to have courage, because courage is the ability to get up when things are getting you down. You get up and fight back.The flag the pirates raised for Liam

The last voyage

She rode out Storm Ciara in February. In the second week of March, heavy winds and a spring tide broke her apart. On 14 March volunteers were on the beach gathering every piece of wood they could find and stacking it up. The crew wrote: "We are busy making plans for a rebuild."

Days later, the country went into lockdown.

The people who had built her again and again were getting older. And a ship on a public beach comes with questions: who checks her every day, who insures her, who gives permission. They were never answered in her favour. What was left of her was still on the sand in January 2023.