Her foster father, Henry Morgan, captain of the<i>White Hand</i>was finishing a raid on a wealthy Spanish merchant ship, when a small Tasmanian devil attacked him, using a sharp kitchen knife.  He was taken by the little girl’s fierce determination, black hair, and thick sooty lashes.  The crew didn’t discover a single woman, nursemaid, or documentation identifying the child, but her spirit and courage made her the darling of the<i>White Hand</i>.  She could understand fluent Spanish and French, but still had a hard time forming vowels.  Deciding her care was better under the eyes of several ‘uncles,’ they adopted her and named her Rosalie, Rosy for short.  A foundling on a Spanish ship, christened her again with DelRosaio for a last name, a ‘little rose in a rose garden.’  They joked about the thorns, someone should find a middle name for thorns.<br/><br/>For years no one gave a second thought to the fast-little person, running underfoot on lazy days but there to lend a hand when the weather changed.  No social restrictions, sunshine, and an experiential classroom taught Rosy intricacies of life on the open sea.  Until her first menses, the crew ignored her true gender.  Henry, doting father (not that anyone would say this to his face) indulged her desires to learn everything there was to be a pirate.  Her ‘condition’ made them all realize a new species was onboard.  She was packed up and taken to a very proper convent to be given a ‘genteel’ education with everything money could buy.  Unfortunately, the abbess escorted the hoyden back to her father, returning all endowments plus more, proclaiming Rosy was not fit for society.<br/><br/>Since then, Henry and uncles encouraged her to be as ‘fit’ in what she wanted to be, a pirate queen in the making.  So long as an uncle lived, no one was going to take advantage of their charge.  Now in her twenties with a growing reputation, Rosy embarked on garnering the fattest prize thus far of her career.  Her crew (made up of offspring of her father’s crew) shadowed a French trading ship entering pirate hunting grounds and preparing to seize control when disaster struck, in the form of Captain Phineas Jackson of the English armada.  Catching her unawares during a quick stopover, he bartered her for safe passage through Spanish controlled territory.  Furious for being captured and humiliated in having another pirate rescue her, Rosy was ready to spit fire.  Glaring at the man in front of her, she imagined a dagger within her grasp and plunging it with satisfying finality into his smiling face.<br/><br/>“I’m not sure who you are but if you help me to escape and free my crew, I will be forever in your debt.”  Her struggles to free herself made her cheeks rosy and clothes disheveled.  When the stranger did nothing, she looked up at him in annoyance.  “Well, are you going to stand there all day or do something?”