Talk Like a Pirate Day Treasure Hunt 2016: Answers & Winners

Thanks so much to all who helped write clues, and many thanks to our tireless treasure hunters! It was quite a challenge, and you all did wonderfully.

If you participated in the hunt, but have yet to receive your Corsair Coffer badge () on your profile, please let me know.

Now, on to the solutions to our clues:

Treasure 1 (290 found)
http://www.librarything.com/tag/pirates
line 1: "over 20,000 'leagues'" was meant to indicate the # of times the tag was used
line 5 shows who's included on the page
line 8 indicates it's a "tag" page, by rhyming with "flag"

Treasure 2 (232 found)
http://www.librarything.com/tag/lice

Treasure 3 (194 found)
http://www.librarything.com/work/457438

Treasure 4 (333 found)
https://www.librarything.com/work/1812
Salient clues were "crooked cook," "black spots," and "Long John" as in Long John Silver, the villian of the book, who is a crooked cook who has been given the dreaded Black Spot by his crew.

Treasure 5 (341 found)
https://www.librarything.com/work/6252
Clues were "lost boys," "nanny dog" "past the stars" "crocodile tick-tocking away" "mermaids"

Treasure 6 (238 found)
https://www.librarything.com/more/store/cuecat
line 2 refers to the USB cord that plugs in, aka the "tail" of the CueCat
lines 4 & 6 refer to the blinking red light when the CueCat's asleep, then steady when it's ready to scan
lines 8 & 9 refer to the CueCat "code" it spits out, and where it places your books after scanning (to your collection)
line 12 indicates you can find it in the LT Store.

Treasure 7 (688 found)
http://www.librarything.com/er/list
"list" and "unpublished book" "you'll receive"

Treasure 8 (215 found)
http://www.librarything.com/tag/rum
"Grog" was a type of watered-down rum served on ships, and was rationed. A fo'c'sle, or "forecastle" is a part of a ship and was to help place you where rum might be found. Also, this was slightly more obscure than going "yo-ho yo-ho where's the ____ gone?" and also who doesn't love William Carlos Williams?

Treasure 9 (203 found)
http://www.librarything.com/work/178
Biggest hints given by other members were "The title is a proverbial phrase meaning 'In a bad place'..." and the recommendation to look at the history + pirates tagmash page.

Treasure 10 (230 found)
https://www.librarything.com/tag/Mithraism
Good hints given by members were to look at the Wikipedia page for Cillician pirates.

Treasure 11 (282 found)
https://www.librarything.com/author/melvilleherman
Cetaceans are an order in part comprised by toothed whales and dolphins, so a "pallid cetacean" is the white whale.

Treasure 12 (246 found)
https://www.librarything.com/venue/2580/Pirate-Supply-Store-826-Valencia-
author Kristi says: In testing this out, I used site search for "Valencia Street" and found it rather easily. hadn't thought of venue search! Lines 3, 5 & 6 gave telling clues for the page.

Treasure 13 (208 found)
https://www.librarything.com/groups/piratelover
The penultimate line was the biggest clue for me: "X marks the topics"—indicating Talk and the "ignore" button, which is an X

Treasure 14 (326 found)
https://www.librarything.com/author/rowsonsusanna
Charlotte Temple was the title of her most popular book on LT.

Treasure 15 (336 found)
https://www.librarything.com/work/4936
"As you wish" is the key phrase oft uttered by Westley/the Dread Pirate Roberts

Treasure 16 (195 found)
http://www.librarything.com/work/6837720
Author elenchus's additional clues:
1. The sailor had a reputation of being unorthodox if not insane
2. He was not a foremast jack
3. He fought in the Quasi-War
4. Served in the United States Navy
5. Surname shared with a Knight of the Round Table

Combine #1 and #2 to get nickname, good enough for an LT search.

Thanks for putting on such a fun treasure hunt! Can't wait to see who won! :-D

I don't have to feel bad about not getting all of them, although I do, because there is 0% chance I'd get the Romance Dawn manga.

I haven't checked to see if there is a Bug Report for this, but my profile is showing both the 2014 badge and the 2016 badge. I did not participate in the 2014 badge (I wasn't even here!).

>4 Heather19: No bug report yet, but myself and another member on the other thread reported the same.

This was a lot of fun but I certainly wouldn't have gotten through the clues if it wasn't for the additional help in the thread. It was a great way to get more familiar with parts of the site.

I also got both the 2014 and 2016 badge. I thought I saw someone mention that it was too late to change/fix that in the Treasure Hunt thread.

i like to think of it as time travelling booty.

I think we need to flag this to get the attention of LT staff.

Avast! We've hoist the Jolly Roger! We're all pirates now!

>1 lorannen: Did ye get lost at sea?

Additional comments:

Treasure 2
The key thing is that something rode "on" the pirates. To me, that suggests fleas or lice, but others thinking about diseases were in the right ballpark.

It was inspired by Ogden Nash's poem on flees, "Adam / Had 'em" (that's the poem, not the title), which I recently read with my son, and the riddle that Homer (allegedly) died contemplating: "We have what we did not find; what we did find we left behind." The answer to that one is lice too. My son has avoided summer-camp lice. Relatives and parents we know have shaved their children bald on multiple occasions over this issue. Apparently lice have evolved and are much harder to kill.

Treasure 9
http://www.librarything.com/work/178
The thumbnail of the book is that early modern pirates were, in Marxist analysis, the first proletariat. He taught at Georgetown when I was there, and was a big noise; I did not take his courses.

Obscure, but Googleable. I was in a weird mood.

Treasure 10
https://www.librarything.com/tag/Mithraism
The answer was "Mithraism," the Greco-Roman worship of the god Mithras, with its weird underground temples ("mithraea"). The cult has its ultimate origin in Persia, but Plutarch reports that the Cilician pirates were the first to bring its worship west. The Cilician pirates, named after their headquarters in Cilicia, now southern Turkey, were a considerable menace in the Late Republican period. The general Pompey destroyed them in a sea battle off the Cilician fortress of Coracesium, which means "crows nest" and is the modern town of Alanya, where I studied for some months in college.

The Rock of Alanya, a Gibraltar-like thing which holds the ancient settlement, includes a large number of caves, and I'm not the first to speculate there may be underground temples to Mithras in them somewhere. You'd need a bat-proof suit, though. At sunset, they fly out of the main cave and it's amazing and horrifying.

Yeah, super-obscure, but I found that Googling key unusual words from it gave the answer pretty quick, so I went with it. If anyone got it without Googling, I salute you.

Man overboard! I got caught up yesterday in dealing with an upgrade bug. But I've returned t' answer your questions, and, at last, fire the cannons in honor of our winners!

>4 Heather19: and others, I'm looking into this issue, but need to get Tim's help on it. Will likely be Monday before the extra badge disappears.

Hear ye, all sea-faring scalawags!

Ye've all hunted well, and our winners have been chosen at random. Congratulate yer fellow buccaneers!

Those who will be "decked" out in our finest LibraryThing garb (and making their marks across the seven seas with coordinating stamps):

GeezLouise
Felliot
perchance.cl
diana.n
ReadsAny

And the lucky land-lubbers who'll be bringing some new reading material aboard:

lamotamant
bostonian71
gilroy
JeffRReid
macsbrains

Congrats to ye all, and thanks for joining our fair quest!

Winners, I give you joy, for all love!

I've updated each treasure in >1 lorannen: to include the number of members who found each one. Based on Treasure 7, it could look like we had a grand total of 688 crew members swabbing the decks. However, given that that's the Early Reviewers page, I'd imagine that some of those folks were headed there to request books, and not participating in our quest.

The second most-found treasure was #5, with a total of 341—I'd say that's a fairer estimate of our hearty crew!

A grand total of 194 of ye found every last treasure chest. Well done!

Wait. So now I gotta figure out what book I want? Oi!

Hey everyone. The treasure hunt page says, "Any member who finds at least six chests gets their account upgraded to a lifetime one."

>17 TFleet:

Except those who already had lifetime accounts presumably don't get a second lifetime account. It would be useful to have multiple lifetimes, I'll admit, if only to get through my TBR pile.

>18 elenchus: Yes, I was hoping for another lifetime. This one is almost used up and my TBR pile is taller than I am.

I got 10 chests, but I never received the lifetime account... when will those be credited? Does anybody know?

And I received a 2014 badge as well. Weird. I wasn't even a member in 2014. LOL

>17 TFleet: Thanks for the reminder! I'm bugging Tim about the upgrades now.

>19 Taphophile13: and others, if you've got a second account you'd like the upgrade applied to instead, let me know!

>16 gilroy: Me too -- great problem to have!

Thanks, Tim, for a tricky but fun treasure hunt, and thanks to all the folks who posted hints ... it *definitely* made it a lot easier to figure out things.

I'm excited to have won a book! I simply could not narrow down my 600+ book wishlist so the one that arrives will be a surprise.

>11 timspalding: I thought of fleas and lice first thing, but then second-guessed myself because I didn't know kids came home from camp with lice!

For the record, my favorite rhyme for its own sake was #9. :)

Avast ye!

I'll be dancin the hempen jig if i'll be 'andin back my ill gotten loot! No Sir.

If Tim and his Scurvy Crew want their Buccaneer Box back, dey'al be 'avin to find some pretty dark magic wot can swipe booty from under dis corsair's beak. ;)

Congrats to all the winners (especially @gilroy)!

A grand total of 194 of ye found every last treasure chest. Well done!

That's amazing, given how obscure some of the answers were. Thanks to all the hint-givers!

Thanks, LT staff and members, for another great treasure hunt. It sucked me right in! ;D

The trouble with Treasure 2 was that most people would automatically think of something rather larger (and more brightly coloured) that is commonly associated with riding around on a pirate.

I know I certainly was thinking along those lines; and in the UK you don't need to send your kids to summer camp to get the infestation - you just have to send them to school and they seem to magically appear on the first day of term. (At least that's what my sister says!)

Treasure 2 had me thinking rats at first, honestly.

>28 gilroy:

If your kid comes back from summer camp with rats, find a better camp :)

Unless it's rat camp, of course.

But, why are you sending your kids to rat camp in the first place? What sort of parent are you!

It could be Brat camp. The b is silent.

>27 Maddz: While I wasn't thinking something larger, I wasn't thinking lice. In all the years either my friends or I went to summer camp, none of us got lice. When that happened, it was during the school year.

>29 timspalding: well then I thought ticks. Rats was limited to a moment. :)

>33 gilroy: Ticks was also my first thought. That's what we always worried about at camp when I was a kid. Lice were for the schoolyear!

>18 elenchus: It would be useful to have multiple lifetimes...

That might have to wait until Halloween, more of a raising the dead day than Talk Like a Pirate Day.

(Homer: "Did you kids crash the car?"
Bart & Lisa: "No!"
Homer: "Did you raise the dead?"
Bart & Lisa: "Yes!"
Homer: "But the car's OK?"
Kids: "Yes!"
Homer: "Alright. Don't do it again.")

>21 lorannen: Cool, thanks!

>34 lorannen:

Ticks are definitely much more strongly associated with summer camp than lice are for me too, and lice with the school year, but there definitely aren't many ticks on a pirate ship. (I did think of fleas, too.)

I thought Crabs for a moment, then I thought, those would be REALLY bad kids! ;-)

My first thought was parrots...

>38 Maddz: Certainly a more colorful, noisy plague.

>38 Maddz:

Mine too. And I was stuck with the bird, trying parakeet cockatiel, conure, cockatoo etc...

>39 lorannen:

Psittacosis maybe?

When will the account upgrades be applied?

I am very interested in the answer to this, also. Does anybody know? If there is anybody here who has played this game before, and won an upgrade, how long did it take for it to be applied to your account, or did you have to do something to receive it?

>42 wildgeese12002:, >43 SDaisy:

I would recommend directly contacting lorannen via a profile comment.

Thanks for following up, all.

Edited for update: Tim says these will be processed tomorrow. Sorry for the delay!

>42 wildgeese12002: and >43 SDaisy: I've taken care of yours just now!

Okay:

1. The 6+ treasure members who were not already lifetime members were upgraded.
2. Badges were recalculated, removing some 2014 pirate badges from people who were only 2016 pirate-badge winers

I think that covers it?

>47 timspalding: Thanks for handling those last details!

aww, i lost my 2014 chest. It was pretty much the definition of ill-gotten booty. Now i'll have to figure out how to steal one from somebody else. arrrrr.

>49 MrAndrew:

I nasty idea for the 2017 hunt: wresting away booty from other pirates!

Excellent!

>50 elenchus: Off to bury my treasure and hide the map.

Thank you so much!!!

Tim, lorannen et al: YAY!!! Thanks so much! Totally awesome!

Arrr... I've just noticed that the Buccaneer Box I was hiding under a palm tree has been snatched back by Tim and his crew while I wasn't looking!
Ya just can't trust a pirate. ;)

but... why is the rum gone?

It was used to make the Grog which was used up in one of the clues.

Have the new reading materials been obtained and mailed?

>59 gilroy: Working on it. I got very ill (pneumonia) for a while and am behind on stuff generally. They're going out next week! Thanks for your patience. I'll be sending individual updates to our winners tomorrow!

Yikes! I'm sorry you're sick, even with all the modern meds pneumonia is a bad thing. I hope you feel better soon.

Can I stop talking like a pirate now? Arrr?

>61 lorannen: Oh my Gosh, health is more important. I'd rather you be healthy!