Tabletop Adventures

We have one more special item to include from our visit to the St. Augustine Pirate and Treasure Museum – a genuine pirate’s chest, belonging to Captain Thomas Tew. (For a little more on Thomas Tew, see the previous post.)

We managed to get a decent photo of the information card for this item, but here is the text:

World’s Only Surviving Pirate Treasure Chest

Imagine what riches this 150-lb. 400-year-old metal chest once held! It belonged to Thomas Tew, who made an enormous fortune raiding ships loaded with precious jewels, ivory, and silk in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea.

If you look inside the lid of the ornate painted chest, you’ll find shapes of mermaids worked into the design. If you explore the bottom of the chest, you’ll see a small case. That’s where Tew locked particularly valuable items.

[Under the portrait:] Thomas Tew left this chest behind in Newport, R.I., when he sailed “on account” one last time in 1695. He was killed while trying to board an Indian merchant ship.

A view of the whole display.

Another view of the front of the chest and some of the interior.

Here is a better look at the interior, with a clear view of the locked case mentioned on the information card.

Note the small box on the wall to the left, which holds the key to the chest.

On the left in the display is a second information card. The text reads:

“Where Does the Key Go?”

You probably guessed the keyhole on the front of the chest. But that hole is a fake. Look again.

The real keyhole is on the top of the chest. Can you see it in the mirror? It’s under a metal bracket that Tew slid aside to lock and unlock the chest.

This photo shows a good view of the actual keyhole, reflected in the mirror behind the chest.

This type of tricky chest has great potential for roleplaying games. It doesn’t matter how skilled someone is at picking locks if that nice, prominent lock is a complete fake!

We hope you’ve enjoyed our little visit to the St. Augustine Pirate and Treasure Museum. If you’d like to visit it yourself, you can find more information at www.ThePirateMuseum.com .  You can also read a 2025 review at Reason.com that reflects our visit well.

For more on the history of Spanish treasure ships lost near Florida, you can visit Florida History in 3D, a website of the Florida Division of Historical Resources.

Some minions of Tabletop Adventures once had the opportunity to visit the St. Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, and this seems like an appropriate week to reminisce. This museum includes not only many artifacts from and about pirates, but its owner locates sunken ships so it includes recovered treasures as well.

One popular feature was a cannon, set up as if to fire.

To make it even better, this was an interactive cannon – there was a way to press something to make a cannon sound as often as every 30 seconds. Not everyone in the group was equally excited about this possibility.

The museum showed off many of their artifacts by including them in dioramas.

A closer view of the person in the scene shows him admiring some treasures, necklaces or ropes of pearls.

In the photo above, the chest upon which the person is resting his foot is just barely visible. Here is a closer look.

Pirates from the Caribbean Sea sometimes roamed long distances searching for treasure. In 1692, Captain Thomas Tew took his ship across the Atlantic and south around Africa into the Indian Ocean. In the Red Sea, he attacked a fleet of the Mughal Empire of India, which included treasure ships. Tew is said to have captured treasure worth 100,000 British pounds. (That would be similar to gaining over $12,000,000 in modern times.) Other pirates found out about his success, and in a few years several ships were making the long, long journey to the Indian Ocean in search of Mughal treasure.

These items are ones that could have been taken by pirates in the Indian Ocean.

A ship of the Mughal Empire, carrying a massive amount of silver coins, went down off the coast of what is now Sri Lanka. It was found by divers in 1963 and these treasures are from that ship, including silver coins that have formed a solid mass.

Look forward to details of one more special item from the Pirate Museum, tomorrow!

Here’s another pirate-related post for our “Pieces of Eight” event! One of the best things about pirates is watching them in action, bringing history (or fantasy) ‘to life.’ Some minions are already making plans to spend the evening of Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th) watching what they believe is the greatest pirate movie of all time: Muppet Treasure Island.

Of course, not everyone agrees that this is the best pirate movie. It is amazing how many people (or websites) have put together lists!

We’ll start with our own list of family-friendly movies either featuring or including pirates, ones we have seen and enjoyed. As always, everyone should decide what is appropriate for their own families. (Links are to IMDb.com, formerly Internet Movie Database.)

Muppet Treasure Island (G, 1996)

Peter Pan (G, 1953, animated)

Swiss Family Robinson (G, 1960)

Treasure Planet (PG, 2002, animated)

The Goonies (PG, 1985)

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (PG, 2003, animated)

Hook (PG, 1991)

The Princess Bride (PG, 1987)

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (PG-13, 2003)

Here are some other sites that have compiled lists of pirate movies for kids and families. There is overlap with our list, and with each other, but each has something to offer.

25 Kid-Friendly Movies About Pirates For Your Little Buccaneer, Romper

10 Best Pirate Movies For Kids (And Where To Watch Them), JustWatch

20 Great Pirate Movies that will Make Learning an Adventure, Homeschool Giveaways

Sail the High Seas: 15 Must-Watch Pirate Cartoons for Kids, Cartoon Vibe

We hope you enjoy these fun ideas! Look for another list of movies for an older audience later in the week.

Other than knowing they were some type of coins, which were apparently important to pirates, few people are really sure what “pieces of eight” were. Of course, anyone can look such a thing up for themselves, but here are some handy facts.

In simplest terms, they were valuable silver coins (surprise!), but the story begins with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. (For time orientation: these were the monarchs who sponsored the voyage of Christopher Columbus in which he first reached the “New World.”) One of the coins used in Spain was the silver real (“royal”) coin. In the late 1400s, Ferdinand and Isabella did away with other coinage and standardized the real. This coin was issued in various denominations from 1/4 real to 8 reales. The largest coin, as valuable as eight of the standard reales, became known as a peso de ocho (8) reales or real de ocho, a “piece of eight.”

Originally these silver coins were minted at a few major cities in Spain. However, large deposits of silver were later discovered in Latin America, after which minting of reales began in Mexico and what is now Peru. The richest source for many years was Cerro Potosi, a mountain in the central Andes (in the modern country of Bolivia); silver has been mined there from the mid-1500s to the modern day.

Silver coins from Spain’s colonies in America not only went back to Spain; they were extensively used in trade. The most efficient way to transport the silver was in the largest denomination of coin – it was much easier to ship 100 reales de ocho than to send 800 smaller coins. They were shipped to the Philippines (where they were used in trade in Asia) and to other colonies around the world. The pieces of eight also were extensively used in the British colonies in America and later in the United States, where they were legal to use as payment until 1857. The pieces of eight became the first major international currency.

Using such valuable coins as currency had drawbacks, however. Imagine having to pay for everything with $50 bills, without any smaller bills available to make change, and you will have some idea of the situation. In order to make change or pay for less-costly items, people would cut a real do ocho into wedges, similar to cutting a pie. The pieces were called “bits”; each piece (if cut evently) would be the equivalent of one real.

Apparently the close association in people’s minds of pieces of eight and pirates is due to the book Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, where Long John Silver’s parrot frequently squawks, “Pieces of eight!” With or without a parrot, though, any pirates in your roleplaying game will thank you for plenty of valuables to take as plunder.

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Ahoy, mateys! Talk Like a Pirate Day be on the horizon. It’s coming up on September 19th, so we’ll hold off on going full pirate-talk just yet. Tabletop Adventures is celebrating with eight days of pirate-themed posts, up to Talk Like a Pirate Day itself.

The first thing to know is that we have put together a special bundle product for the event, available on DriveThruRPG. Now through September 19th, all our pirate-related products (both for-pay and free) are available as a single bundle on DriveThruRPG, at a 20% discount from their regular price. This bundle includes “Black Flags: Piracy in the Caribbean,” a setting book designed to allow groups to play ‘real world’ pirates. It also features an NPC Solos product, “Cap’n Marcroft, Rogue and Rake,” plus two related free products, all gathered in one convenient place. Pick up this bundle now and be ready to buckle some swashes!