Pirates engraved their hometown on the inside of their gold earrings. If their body washed up on a strange beach, the gold paid for the coffin and the engraving told the finder where to ship the bones home. Freeman is doing the same thing. He is just the latest in a line that goes back much further than pirates. In 1991, hikers in the Alps found a frozen man who had died 5,300 years ago. His ears were pierced. The holes had stretched to 11mm wide. We call him Ötzi. He is the oldest person known to have worn earrings, and he predates pirates by nearly five thousand years. Ancient Sumerian queens were buried in gold hoops the size of doughnuts. Persian soldiers wore earrings into battle for luck. By 600 BC, Greeks were placing a small coin called an obol in the mouth of the dead. It paid Charon, the ferryman who rowed souls into the underworld. No coin meant your soul was stuck on the riverbank for a hundred years. That coin is the ancestor of the sailor earring. By the medieval period, Scottish law reportedly required fishermen to wear a gold earring so that if they drowned and washed up somewhere strange, the finder had enough money to bury them properly. Pirates added the address-engraving trick a few hundred years later. Then came Cape Horn. The Dutch found the passage in 1616, where the Pacific and Atlantic crash into each other. Rogue waves, icebergs, ships smashed against rocks. Sailors called it the graveyard. If you made it past the Horn alive, you earned a gold loop in the ear that faced it. Cape of Good Hope earned a ring in the right ear. Both capes plus a lap around the planet earned three rings. Freeman has been sailing since 1967. He has covered close to 40,000 miles in open ocean, mostly on a Shannon 43 sailboat. His wife pierced his ears when he was around 35. He calls himself a blue-water man, sailor talk for someone who crosses oceans instead of hugging the coast. His 2019 Facebook post explaining the earrings was four sentences. He said the gold is worth just enough to buy him a coffin if he dies in a strange place, that this is why sailors used to wear them, and that this is why he does. The hoops in his ears are doing a job people have been asking jewelry to do for over five thousand years.