‘Dan Seavey: Confessions of a Great Lakes Pirate’
‘Dan Seavey: Confessions of a Great Lakes Pirate’ captures life of Midwest maritime legend
Actor Tom Kastle and Director Francisco Torres explain how they bring the centuries-old pirate from the sea to the stage
In the late 1800s, a Great Lakes ship captain had more to worry about than icy water and temperamental gales. There were pirates on the lakes, thanks to a lack of law enforcement on the water. The ruffians had their eyes set on precious cargo like timber, cattle and leather goods.
“These were just renegade sailors and captains that went out and stole stuff. And they stole pretty much everything that wasn’t tied down, and some that was. They were all over the place,” said author and Upper Peninsula historian Mikel Classen during an interview on WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show.”
Ship captains of the time surely avoided the famed pirate “Roaring” Dan Seavey. At nightfall, Seavey and his small team of men would loot ports and sail the stolen goods to Chicago.
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But Seavey had a soft side, too. He taught boys in his local Escanaba, Michigan to sail and doted on his many children.
Today, Seavey’s complex character and storied life are the subject of a one-man show titled “Dan Seavey: Confessions of a Great Lakes Pirate.” The show will be at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison on Saturday, March 28.
Madisonian Tom Kastle brings Seavey to the stage with a bit of musical spice. He’ll perform a few songs and play the concertina, an instrument similar to the accordion. Francisco Torres directs the show.
WPR’s Larry Meiller recently spoke with Kastle and Torres about the mechanics of a one-man show and the history of pirates on the Great Lakes.
The following interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Larry Meiller: Tom, you’re the star of the one-man play here: “Dan Seavey: Confessions of a Great Lakes Pirate.” Give us an overview of what the audience can expect when they come.
Tom Kastle: I captained some of the boats on the Great Lakes, like The Windy and the Red Witch in Chicago and was a relief captain on Dennis Sullivan in Milwaukee.
People come on board the ship, and eventually someone will say: “Were there pirates on the Great Lakes, captain?” If you take out your phone and Google “pirates, Great Lakes,” Dan Seavey is the name that’s been coming up for years.
He was a notorious character, born in the last part of the 19th century, and died in the 1940s. He was in that transition between sail and steam. And he was a definite character.
LM: Francisco, Dan Seavey is a pirate, and so we consider him a villain in a lot of ways. How do you expect audiences to react to his character? Will they be rooting for him?
Francisco Torres: Dan Seavey did do some questionable things in his time, shall we say. We didn’t want to put that under the rug.
But we also wanted to highlight the things that he did that were good. He was good to children. He was good to his kids. When he was there, of course, he missed a lot of his kids’ lifetime. So really, the idea is to make him more of a rogue. You kind of root for that roguish kind of individual, and Tom slides right into it nicely.
LM: We should talk a little about the history of pirates on the Great Lakes, because it’s not at all like the pirates that we have seen in the films.
TK: The thing about the piracy is that it’s just anything you steal on the water.
Take the pirates of the Caribbean. If they came across gold and silver, it was kind of out of the ordinary. Most of the time you’re just stealing whatever the ship has. When you attack a ship, you probably don’t know what’s on it. So it could be grain, or could be fabric, could be lumber. Seavey was definitely known for stealing stuff like that.
There’s a part of the play where he talks about that, and he says: “One time, we just cast her lines off and sailed her to Chicago to sell the cargo. I mean, not gold, nor silver, not pirate gold. Pieces of wood, as I recall, cedar posts.”
That was true of most of the Great Lakes pirate stuff. Unless you got super lucky, you’re not going to get gold or anything super valuable like that.
LM: Francisco, how do you help Tom embody the character?
FT: It could be anything from how he stands to how he sits. In essence, I’m the eyes of the audience. So I’m trying to help him to be able to showcase, “Hey, when you wink right here, this could mean something interesting to the audience.”
LM: Were concertinas a part of the lore of the ships and so forth?
TK: It’s kind of assumed that if you’re a sailor or you’re performing maritime music, you have a squeeze box of some kind.
There was this book called “Music of the Sea,” by David Proctor, a long time ago. And he pointed out that on Royal Navy ships, they had trumpets and they had orchestras.
Captains basically funded their own vessels, and then they got prize money for whatever they took. And so they would try to outdo each other. If I had two trumpeters and a drummer, then Francisco would get five trumpeters and six drummers to outdo me, and then we have this whole thing going on.
Proctor wrote that the reason we have standard tuning is because, basically, there was this thing that the Royal Navy did once, way back in the day.
They were given sheet music and all the different ships had to perform. They all came together and no one was playing in the same intonation. It was this cacophony, and I believe it was the Royal Navy who said, “That’s it. We’re done. We’re going to have everyone tune to this particular frequency.” And it came closer to standard tuning.
Editor’s note: the Overture Center for the Arts is a WPR business sponsor.
https://www.wpr.org/culture/dan-seavey-confessions-of-a-great-lakes-pirate-midwest-maritime-legend
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