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The pirates were in town to promote the two biggest attractions in Falmouth – Pendennis Castle and National Maritime Museum, Cornwall.

It’s a bit disappointing. A lot of the most exciting things about pirates, it turns out, are complete tosh. The “black spot” is, apparently, a Robert Louis Stevenson invention. Prisoners did not walk the plank. Tropical islands are not dotted with buried treasure. And the only pirate believed to have interred at least a part of his hoard left no map. That X-marks-the-spot fiction was put around by Edgar Allen Poe.