Pirates & Privateers
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![[Picture - A Pirate Ship]](../art/pirateship-sm.jpg)
The
romantic pirates, buccaneers, and privateers we grew up
on may bear little resemblance to the reality, yet the myth
that was born of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island
remains compelling. Here is a guide to both facts and fiction
on the net:
Early Texts
A General History of the Pyrates, 1724, and
The History Of The Pyrates, 1728,
by Captain Charles Johnson, as searchable text and facsimile images
of early printings, at the Beaufort County
section of the North Carolina History and Fiction Digital Library web site at
East Carolina University. New !
The 1932 assertion by John Robert Moore that "Captain Johnson"
is really Daniel Defoe was demolished (to use David Cordingly's term)
by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in The Canonisation of
Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Facts
Treasures
of the Pirate Ship Whydah in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, is a public display of artifacts from the first
pirate ship ever salvaged.
Commanded by pirate captain Samuel Bellamy, the Whydah
sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1717. The site includes
articles
on the excavations.
The Lives
of Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the most notorious female pirates,
from A General History of the Pyrates.
An Act
for the Restraining and Punishing of Privateers & Pirates (1681),
at the Connecticut River
Museum site.
The New England
Pirate Museum site includes educational materials for various grade
levels.
Beej's
Pirate Image Archive includes maps, documents, and public domain
portraits.
Fiction
The Adventures of Peter Pan
by J. M. Barrie, as HTML, from Project Gutenberg.
Peter and Wendy,
at Fireblade.
The
Robert Louis Stevenson page at the University of South
Carolina includes links to online versions of Kidnapped
and Treasure Island, arguably the most influential book
on pirates ever written.
Treasure
Island by Robert Louis Stevenson at the Literature Network.
The Robert Louis
Stevenson Home Page, edited by Richard Drury
at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo, has
notes on Stevenson's life and works, links to electronic texts,
museum and library collections, and critical works.
Howard
Pyle's Book of Pirates at the University of Virginia.
Wolves of the Sea,
Being a Tale of the Colonies From the Manuscript of One Geoffry
Carlyle, Seaman, Narrating Certain Strange Adventures Which Befell
Him Aboard the Pirate Craft "Namur", by Randall Parrish, 1918.
Blackbeard, Or,
The Pirate Of The Roanoke: A Tale Of The Atlantic by B. Barker, Esq., 1847, and
Kate Bonnet: the Romance of a Pirate’s Daughter
by Frank R. Stockton, 1902, also at the North Carolina History and Fiction Digital Library. New !
The One Essential Reference
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of
Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly (UK: Little, Brown, 1995;
US: Random House, 1995. ISBN 0-679-42560-8). An astonishly even-handed
book that puts the historical facts of piracy in proper perspective, while
addressing the parallel evolution of the romanticized pirate of
fiction, film, and storybook. [PKM]
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3 July 2004