DAN SEAVEY

CONFESSIONS OF A GREAT LAKES PIRATE

Published: Saturday, March 21, 2026 9:00 am
By: Tom Kastle

I started out sailing on the Great Lakes aboard tall ships like the schooner Charlotte Ann, a former Chesapeake Bay oyster boat built in 1888, about 100 years after she was launched. Since then, I sailed and captained other Great Lakes sailing vessels like Windy, Friends Good Will, Inland Seas, and Denis Sullivan plus a few seasons captaining classic 1950s tour boats on the Chicago River.

My “other life” was that of a Great Lakes singer which took me all around the Great Lakes, both coasts, Europe, and even to New Zealand where their National Museum’s replica tall ship turns out to be a Great Lakes scow… but that’s another story.

Whether on stage or aboard some vessel, one question would inevitably come up: “Were there pirates on the Great Lakes?” It was a question that I didn’t have an answer for until I learned of “Roaring Dan Seavey” a piratical character who had sailed the same waters I was sailing just a few generations before. Today, if you Google “Great Lakes Pirate,” Seavey immediately appears on your screen.

Long story, slightly shorter, over the last decade, I became heavily involved in theater and developed the idea of writing a one-man play based on Seavey’s life which was, in a word… colorful. If I could play Voltaire or Shakespeare’s Henry IV, why not Seavey? I found that if you tallied up all the “Seavey stories” around the Great Lakes he would have to have lived at least two hundred years to complete them all. I had to narrow things down a bit.

As my main guide I used Dr. Richard Boyd’s biography, “A Pirate Roams Lake Michigan: The Dan Seavey Story,” plus a few other sources for color. One story I got directly from the daughter of an Escanaba ship builder who, as a boy, had tried to steal apples from Seavey’s boat. Seavey was known for a few things, including being an often brutal and violent “pirate” and, at the same time, being a great defender of kids and some marginalized peoples. He was a bootlegger as well as a Marshall. He was also a farmer, lumberman, barkeeper, trapper, barroom brawler, prize fighter, and gold miner during the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. He married three women and never really unmarried two.

I wanted Seavey to be portrayed in the Long John Silver mode; a colorful character, a flawed character, and a man who has done terrible things but, in the end, you leave the theater cheering for him and wishing him well. I have no idea if Seavey was ever a singer but there are a few traditional Great Lakes songs included in the show along the way.

The play is directed by Francisco Torres and, after doing a few preview shows to tweak the script, Dan Seavey will walk the decks of the Playhouse at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, WI on March 28th, produced by Four Seasons Theatre as part of World Premiere Wisconsin. For more information and tickets, you can visit www.fourseasonstheatre.com/on-stage-on-air-2025-2026/

tags: Boat, Dan Seavey, Great Lakes, Pirate, Sailing