The City
Why Baltimore
A seaport that contains the whole problem.
A harbor that never stopped being a harbor
Baltimore's Inner Harbor has launched ships for nearly four centuries. The USS Constellation — built 1854, the last all-sail vessel commissioned by the U.S. Navy — still floats at Pier 1, masts visible from every direction, the kind of vessel a pirate from 1725 would actually recognize. Around her: a container terminal at Seagirt, cruise liners at South Locust Point, the wreck-site of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, two tunnels under the Patapsco, and a deepwater channel that handles more tonnage than half the medieval kingdoms combined.
A city built by war and water
Fort McHenry — the bombardment that gave the United States its national anthem in 1814 — sits at the harbor mouth. The B&O Railroad began here in 1830, the first commercial railroad in America. Domino Sugar still refines on the eastern shore. Johns Hopkins built the model for the modern teaching hospital and the modern research university downtown. The Bromo Seltzer tower still tells time from the old Emerson building. Each of these is a different door into modernity, opened in a different decade, and the pirates will walk past all of them in a single afternoon.
What waits on the piers
Baltimore is one of the few American cities where you can see the time compression directly: the wooden frigate on Pier 1, the container giant rounding Fort McHenry, the cruise ship loading 3,000 passengers for the Caribbean. The pirates' first afternoon will give them the entire shock distribution — a ship they know, a ship they don't, and a ship they can't believe is for pleasure.
Working Landmarks
- USS Constellation · Pier 1
- Inner Harbor promenade
- Fort McHenry
- Francis Scott Key Bridge (wreck site, 2024)
- Seagirt Marine Terminal (containers)
- South Locust Point (cruise terminal)
- Domino Sugar refinery
- Johns Hopkins Hospital
- Lexington Market
- Camden Yards
- Bromo Seltzer Tower
- National Aquarium
- Federal Hill
- Fells Point taverns
- Edgar Allan Poe House
- B&O Railroad Museum
- Maryland Science Center
- Patapsco River channel