Ye Intruders Beware: Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration

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YE INTRUDERS BEWARE: FANTASTICAL PIRATES IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF ILLUSTRATION

Anne M. Loechle

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of the History of Art Indiana University November 2010

Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee ______Chairperson, Sarah Burns, Ph.D.

______Janet Kennedy, Ph.D.

______Patrick McNaughton, Ph.D.

______Beverly Stoeltje, Ph.D.

November 9, 2010

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to many people for the help and encouragement they have given me during the long duration of this project. From academic and financial to editorial and emotional, I was never lacking in support. I am truly thankful, not to mention lucky.

Sarah Burns, my advisor and mentor, supported my ideas, cheered my successes, and patiently edited and helped me to revise my failures. I also owe her thanks for encouraging me to pursue an unorthodox topic. From the moment pirates came up during one of our meetings in the spring of 2005, I was hooked. She knew it, and she continuously suggested ways to expand the idea first into an independent study, and then into this dissertation. My dissertation committee – Janet Kennedy, Patrick McNaughton, and Beverly Stoeltje – likewise deserves my thanks for their mentoring and enthusiasm.

Other scholars have graciously shared with me their knowledge and input along the way. David M. Lubin read a version of my third chapter and gave me helpful advice, opening up to me new ways of thinking about Howard Pyle in particular. He also sent me his forthcoming essay about pirates and film and encouraged me to use his ideas as a foil to my own. In addition, David Rickman, the Exhibits Coordinator for the Delaware

Division of Parks and Recreation, met with me in Wilmington, leading me around town and pointing out to me sites important to Howard Pyle’s life, such as his childhood home, studio, and Quaker meetinghouse. David also shared with me his ideas for a forthcoming article in which he describes the connections between Pyle’s pirate character and popular

costumes during the late nineteenth century. My own ideas about pirate costuming stemmed from this very enlightening conversation.

My research trips to Chadds Ford, Wilmington, and Washington, D. C. were successes because of the people who guided me to helpful sources and resources. I owe thanks to Joyce Schiller, the former Curator of American art at the Delaware Art

Museum, as well as to her successor Heather Coyle. I also wish to thank Serena Fletcher, the Head Librarian at the Delaware Art Museum. Virginia O’Hara, the Curator of

Collections at the Brandywine River Museum (BRM) in Chadds Ford, was a helpful guide, and Christine Podmaniczky, the Associate Curator of N. C. Wyeth Collections, took time to share her knowledge with me even though she was in the throes of editing

Wyeth’s catalogue raisonné. Finally, Gail Stanislow worked with me in the BRM library and archives. She gave me a little extra enthusiasm for my topic by telling me about a group of pirate lovers she knows who spend their free time diving along the East coast searching for sunken treasure.

I would like to thank Richard Kelly as well. His collection – the Kelly Collection of American Illustration – includes several swashbuckling paintings, including Pyle’s

Walking the Plank. Richard kindly opened up his home to me. He personally gave me a tour of his many paintings, shared with me their stories, and allowed me time to gawk.

He also gave me several exhibition catalogues in which his pieces have been shown.

Furthermore, with the help of Collections Manager Elizabeth Alberding, I was able to conduct research on American illustration in Richard’s extensive library and in the collection’s digital archive.

These trips were made possible by the generous grant that I received from the

Friends of Art at Indiana University. I am grateful to this organization for its support.

Along with the Friends of Art, some other friends made these visits relaxing as well as academically worthwhile. Rebecca Dubay provided me with a home away from home as

I traveled to Chadds Ford and Wilmington. She leant an ear while I told her about my findings, but we also got to enjoy non-art-related delicacies like good dinners and even better desserts. January Simpson and Maggie Clifton also shared their home with me in

Washington, D.C. Watching The Muppet’s Treasure Island with them added some levity to my trip, although I still felt as if I was doing “research.”

Debbie Kennedy, a good friend and good editor, read multiple drafts of this dissertation. She diligently and patiently corrected my awkward phrases and poor grammar. As she wore out her red correction pens, she never forgot to include positive commentary on even the worst of my drafts. I will forever be indebted to her for this act of mercy.

Throughout this project, my friends have given me a never-ending supply of pirate paraphernalia from coloring books and drinking glasses to Jolly Roger flags, tote bags, and socks. Thank you to all of them; these generous gifts were a source of inspiration and a constant reminder of their support and love.

My family – my mom, my dad, and my brother Eric – supported me through the duration of this project and throughout my career as a student. They never asked when I was going to be finished, but never doubted that I would succeed. Furthermore, as educators themselves, my parents instilled in me the belief that education and inquiry are

not just important to a person’s livelihood, but essential to leading a happy life. I wish to thank them for their insight and love.

And, Aaron: thank you for listening everyday, to the bad and to the good, no matter what.

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Anne M. Loechle

Ye Intruders Beware: Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration

This dissertation examines the cultural significance of the sudden and rapid

proliferation of piracy and pirate illustrations that marked the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. During this “Golden Age” (c. 1880-1920) – an era that witnessed an explosion of magazine and book imagery – the illustrators Howard Pyle, N.

C. Wyeth, and Frank E. Schoonover turned away from the realities and histories of piracy and shaped instead a new, fantastical icon. Pyle, in particular, created this adventurer, immersing him –and vicariously, his admirers – in exotic, violent fantasy. Wyeth and

Schoonover, Pyle’s students, followed in their teacher’s iconographical footsteps even as they developed their own individual styles. So powerful was the fantastical pirate’s appeal that he continued to generate excitement decades after the Golden Age in illustrations as well as in lucrative Hollywood productions. The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003, 2006, 2007) testifies to the hold the pirate maintains over the popular imagination.

In The Goonies – a pirate film from 1985 – a treasure map warns, “Ye intruders beware;” used here, the expression suggests that this dissertation intrudes into the pirate’s world, looking beneath its frivolity to expose a deeper understanding of the pirate icon, the illustrators that conceived him, and the audiences that embraced him at the turn of the twentieth century and continue to cherish him today. The first chapter introduces the question “Why the pirate?” Chapter two inspects the illustrated pirate in relation to fin-

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de-siècle issues of masculinity while the third chapter looks at the icon alongside

contemporary notions of class. Chapter four pries into turn-of-the-century ideologies of

race and imperialism as pirate illustrators promoted both the fear and fascination of the

piratical “other.” The final chapter looks beyond the Golden Age of illustration by examining the continuation of the pirate fantasy in twenty- and twenty-first-century illustration and film. It also examines the reality of piracy that threatens to overshadow the fantastical icon. With twenty-first century pirates marauding the coast of Africa, the notion of a pirate hero must be questioned even as we continue to enjoy the figure dreamt up by Golden Age illustrators.

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Table of Contents

Acceptance Page ii

Acknowledgments iv

Abstract viii

List of Images xi

Chapter One: From Reality to Fantasy: Introduction to the Pirates of Illustration’s Golden Age 1

Chapter Two: The “Lurid Glamour of the Heroical” for Bachelors and Boys 24

Chapter Three: An Outlaw Hero for Brainworkers, Neurasthenics, and Captains of Industry 57

Chapter Four: A Primitive “Other” for Regression Fantasists 92

Chapter Five: Fantasy and Reality: Beyond the Golden Age with Errol Flynn, Johnny Depp, and Somali Pirates 124

Images 155

Bibliography 250

List of Images

Figure 1. Winslow Homer, The Approach of the Pirate [Ship] “Alabama,” 1865. 155

Figure 2. Howard Pyle, Walking the Plank, 1887. 156

Figure 3. N. C. Wyeth, I Said Good-bye to Mother and the Cove, 1911. 157

Figure 4. Two Views of the President. Illustration for Eagle (Brooklyn). 158

Figure 5. Howard Pyle, Initial “I” for “Jamaica, New and Old,” 1890. 159

Figure 6. She was Bound to Go. James Bennie of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Tries To Persuade His Wife Not To Elope and She Wipes the Station Floor with Him, 1887. 160

Figure 7. She Punched the Dude King. The Encounter Bob Hilliard, the Actor, is Alleged to Have Had with a Pretty, Red-Headed Actress, 1888. 160

Figure 8. The Champions Ovation: John L. Sullivan Gets a Rousing Reception from an Audience of Twenty-Five Thousand People at his Great Sparring Exhibition in Boston, Mass., 1883. 161

Figure 9. F. Opper, Johnny’s Ambitions, and How They Were Not Realized, 1887. 162

Figure 10. Howard Pyle, Which Shall by Captain? 1908. 163

Figure 11. Frank E. Schoonover. Fight! or The Brawn of These Lads Made the Pike a Match for a Pirate’s Cutlass, 1922. 164

Figure 12. Howard Pyle, The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow, 1905. 165

Figure 13. Howard Pyle, Extorting Tribute from the Citizens, 1905. 166

Figure 14. Howard Pyle, So the Treasure was Divided, c. 1905. 167

Figure 15. N. C. Wyeth, The Golden Galleon – Tailpiece, 1917. 167

Figure 16. N. C. Wyeth, The Boarders Swarmed Over the Fence Like Monkeys, 1911. 168

Figure 17. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, Endpaper, 1911. 169

Figure 18. Howard Pyle, “Why Don’t You End It?” 1900. 170

Figure 19. Prisoners Pleading, 1859. 171

Figure 20. Parting with the Prisoners, 1858. 171

Figure 21. Charles Dana Gibson, The Weaker Sex, 1903 . 172

Figure 22. At the Club, 1891. 172

Figure 23. Howard Pyle, Kidd at Gardiner’s Island, 1894. 173

Figure 24. N. C. Wyeth, “Stand and Deliver!” c. 1921. 174

Figure 25. Howard Pyle, Cap’n Goldsack, 1902. 175

Figure 26. Howard Pyle, “He Lay Silent and Still, with His Face Half Buried in the Sand,” 1890. 176

Figure. 27. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate Fight, 1922. 177

Figure 28. N. C. Wyeth, It Showed Me Hands and His Companion Locked Together in Deadly Wrestle, 1911. 177

Figure 29. The Pageants of New York: The Police Review; The Parade of the League of American Wheelmen; John L. Sullivan’s Appearance on the Baseball Field; and Opening Day of the Races, 1883. 178

Figure 30. N. C. Wyeth, To Me He was Unweariedly Kind; And Always Glad to See Me in the Galley, 1911. 179

Figure 31. Frank E. Schoonover, Suddenly Blackbeard Whipped Two Pistols from His Sash, 1922. 179

Figure 32. N. C. Wyeth, Ladies’ Home Journal, cover, c. 1921. 180

Figure 33. N. C. Wyeth, For All the World, I was Led Like a Dancing Bear, 1911. 181

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Figure 34. N. C. Wyeth, “One More Step, Mr. Hands,” Said I, “and I’ll Blow Your Brains Out,” 1911. 182

Figure 35. Frank E. Schoonover, Treasure Island, 1920. 183

Figure 36. Howard Pyle, Marooned, 1909. 184

Figure 37. Howard Pyle, The Flying Dutchman, 1900. 185

Figure 38. Frank E. Schoonover, Blackbeard in Smoke and Flame, 1922. 186

Figure 39. N. C. Wyeth, Captain Blood, 1922. 187

Figure 40. Howard Pyle, Headpiece for Ghost of Captain Brand, 1896. 187

Figure 41. Howard Pyle, Buried Treasure, 1902. 188

Figure 42. Howard Pyle, Blackbeard’s Last Fight, 1895. 189

Figure 43. Frank E. Schoonover. Blackbeard Buccaneer, 1921. 190

Figure 44. B. Cole, Captain Bartho. Roberts, c. 1724 190

Figure 45. Francois Lolonois, c. 1678. 191

Figure 46. Bartholomeus de Portugues, c. 1678. 191

Figure 47. B. Cole, Anne Bonny, c. 1724. 192

Figure 48. B. Cole, Mary Read, c. 1724. 192

Figure 49. N. C. Wyeth, The Boy’s King Arthur, cover, 1917. 193

Figure 50. Howard Pyle, Washington and Steuben at Valley Forge, 1896. 194

Figure 51. Howard Pyle, “They Used to Drill Every Evening,” 1892. 194

Figure 52. B. Pole, Black-Beard the Pyrate, c. 1724. 195

Figure 53. Howard Pyle, Stout Robin Hath a Narrow Escape, 1883. 196

Figure 54. N. C. Wyeth, Robin Hood, cover, 1917. 196

Figure 55. Howard Pyle, “Captain Malyoe Shot Captain Brand through the Head,” 1896. 197

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Figure 56. Howard Pyle, Marooned, 1887. 198

Figure 57. Howard Pyle, To Have and To Hold, c. 1900. 199

Figure 58. Howard Pyle, Henry Morgan Recruiting for the Attack, 1887. 199

Figure 59. N. C. Wyeth, Tapping Up and Down the Road in a Frenzy and Groping and Calling for his Comrades, 1911. 200

Figure 60. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, title page, 1911. 201

Figure 61. N. C. Wyeth, Loaded Pistols Were Served Out to All the Sure Men, 1911. 202

Figure 62. Frank E. Schoonover. Pirates Coming Through Charleston, 1922. 203

Figure 63. N. C. Wyeth, The Duel on the Beach, 1926. 204

Figure 64. Howard Pyle, How the Buccaneers Kept Christmas, 1899. 205

Figure 65. Howard Pyle, Headband with Title for “Tom Chist and the Treasure Box,” 1896. 206

Figure 66. Frank E. Schoonover, And So the Treasure Was Buried, 1916. 206

Figure 67. Frank E. Schoonover, They Were Filled with Blackbeard’s Own Pirates, 1922. 207

Figure 68. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, cover, 1911. 208

Figure 69. Howard Pyle, The Pirate Captain Looked Impassively On, 1896. 208

Figure 70. J. Keppler, The Pirate Publisher – An International Burlesque that Has Had the Longest Run on Record, 1886. 209

Figure 71. Howard Pyle, Avery Sells His Jewels, 1887. 209

Figure 72. Howard Pyle, Headpiece with Title and Illustrated Initial “T” for “The Sea Robbers of New York,” 1894. 210

Figure 73. Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed, 1951. 211

Figure 74. History Repeats Itself – The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages, and the Robber Barons of To-Day, 1889. 212

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Figure 75. In the Robber’s Den. Jay Gould Surprises – Even the Hardened Monopolists, c. 1880s. 212

Figure 76. Howard Pyle, Morgan at Porto Bello, 1888. 213

Figure 77. Howard Pyle, Dead Men Tell No Tales, 1899. 214

Figure 78. Howard Pyle, “Pirates Used to Do That to Their Captains Now and Then,” 1894. 214

Figure 79. Howard Pyle, Colonel Rhett and Pirate Stede Bonnet, 1901. 215

Figure 80. Thomas Nast, A Popular View of the Commissioner’s Victory over the Spoils System, 1889. 216

Figure 81. Rough Rider Charge, 1898. 216

Figure 82. William Allen Rogers, Vice-Presidential Possibilities: The Rough Rider, 1900. 216

Figure 83. Frederic Remington, The Texas Type of Cowboy, 1888. 217

Figure 84. Howard Pyle, Kidd on the Deck of the “Adventure Galley,” 1902. 218

Figure 85. Theodore Roosevelt as a cowboy in the Dakota Territory, c. 1885. 219

Figure 86. N. C. Wyeth as a cowboy, 1904. 219

Figure 87. Frederic Remington, The Cowboy, 1902. 220

Figure 88. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirates With Skull and Crossbones, 1922. 220

Figure 89. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirates Hide and Watch, 1922. 221

Figure 90. Howard Pyle, Ye Pirate Bold, 1911. 221

Figure 91. Frank E. Schoonover, Kidnapped – Pirate with Sword, 1922. 222

Figure 92. Frank E. Schoonover, Man Waving Cutlass, 1923. 222

Figure 93. N. C. Wyeth, Black Spot or About Halfway Down the Slope to the Stockade, They Were Collected in a Group, 1911. 223

Figure 94. Frank E. Schoonover, Ned Rackham Espied the Derelict Scene, 1922. 224

Figure 95. Sailor with Initial “T,” 1894. 225

Figure 96. In Sight of the Enemy – The Challenge, 1894. 226

Figure 97. Howard Pyle, Captain Keitt, 1907. 227

Figure 98. Howard Pyle, On the Tortugas, 1887. 228

Figure 99. Frederic Remington, Paleolithic Man, 1906. 229

Figure 100. Harry Humphrey Moore, Spanish Gypsies of Granada, 1871. 230

Figure 101. William Turner Dannat, Contrebandier aragonais, 1883. 230

Figure 102. Howard Pyle, Blackbeard Buries his Treasure, 1887. 231

Figure 103. Charles Stanley Reinhart, The Serenaders, 1882. 232

Figure 104. Charles Stanley Reinhart, A Professional Beggar, 1882. 233

Figure 105. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Difficult for Foreigners, 1882. 233

Figure 106. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Street Barbers, 1882. 234

Figure 107. N. C. Wyeth, “Oh, Morgan’s Men are Out For You; And Blackbeard – Buccaneer!” 1917. 235

Figure 108. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate with Spy-Glass, 1915. 235

Figure 109. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Gypsies, 1882. 236

Figure 110. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Gypsy Dance, 1882. 236

Figure 111. Film still of Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003. 237

Figure 112. John Sloan, Tailpiece for “Mehitabel,” 1908. 238

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Figure 114. John Sloan, Doting Pirates Sat in the Nice Red Rocking-Chairs and Watched the Tender Infant Busily Sliding Checkers Off the Domelike Cranium of Their Baldest Comrade, 1922. 239

Figure 116. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate with Flintlock, 1922. 241

Figure 117. John Sloan, Red Whisker, One Hand on the Rail and Captain Kidd in the Other, Had Bounded Lightly over the Bulwarks, 1922. 241

Figure 118. Norman Rockwell, Cousin Reginald Plays Pirate, 1917. 242

Figure 119. Norman Rockwell, Land of Enchantment, 1934. 242

Figure 120. Norman Rockwell, Family Tree, 1959. 243

Figure 121. Norman Rockwell, Dreaming of Adventure, 1924. 244

Figure 122. Norman Rockwell, Dreaming of Home, 1924. 244

Figure 123. Normal Rockwell, Gary Cooper as Texan, 1930. 245

Figure 124. “Marooned,” film still from The Black Pirate, 1926. 246

Figure 125. Poster advertising Captain Blood, 1935. 247

Figure 126. Film still from The Sea Hawk, 1940. 247

Figure 127. Film still of Captain Hook from Peter Pan, 1953. 248

Figure 128. Howard Pyle, “And Twenty One and Twenty Two,” 1896. 248

Figure 129. Film still of Captain Hook in Hook, 1991. 249

Figure 130. Film still of Captain Shakespeare in Stardust, 2007. 249

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Chapter One

From Reality to Fantasy: Introduction to the Pirates of Illustration’s Golden Age

On November 1, 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Harper’s Weekly published

an image of a ship and a description that reads,

We publish on page 689 a faithful portrait of the new PIRATE “ALABAMA” alias “290,” which was built by the British a few months since to prey upon our merchant navy, and which has already taken and burned fourteen vessels of various sizes.

Captain Hagar of the Brilliant, one of the fourteen burned ships, provided further,

unpleasant insight: “She is engaged to destroy, fight, or run, as the character of her

opponent may be.”1 The following April, Harper’s Weekly featured The Approach of the

British Pirate [Ship] “Alabama” by Winslow Homer (fig. 1). Homer placed at center

stage not the pirate ship, but several seamen, women, and children who look out intently

upon a mysterious shape at the horizon. The women anxiously wait as the sailor’s clear

image through the telescope confirms their biggest fear – a pirate attack. Much like the

Brilliant, their sturdy vessel may end up in flames. As these two illustrations attest,

piracy created a horrifying choice of “destroy, fight, or run.”

“And what a life of adventure is his to be sure!” the artist-illustrator and author

Howard Pyle famously exclaimed 30 years later, “A life of constant alertness, constant

danger, constant escape!”2 Remarkably, especially in light of the Harper’s Weekly illustrations, Pyle was extolling the pirate. Not long before this tribute, he created an image that paints a similar pirate tale (fig. 2). In the image, a tall, blindfolded man

1. “The Pirate ‘Alabama,’” Harper’s Weekly, November 1, 1862, 699. 2. Howard Pyle, introduction to The Buccaneers and Marooners of America, by A. O. Exquemelin, ed. Howard Pyle (1678; New York: MacMillan and Company, 1891), 2.

balances precariously on the end of a wooden board while a rag-tag group of men stare, smile, and jeer from a ship’s deck. The taut posture of the pirates’ victim creates a palpable tension moments before the crew jostles their prey from his perch. The image, titled Walking the Plank (1887), is one of Howard Pyle’s first illustrations of piracy, and it accompanies his article “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main.” Essentially

Pyle’s rewriting of Alexander Exquemelin’s historical tome Bucaniers of America from the late seventeenth century, the essay details the lives of the notorious pirates who roamed the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy (1680-1720). Like Homer’s Civil

War illustration, Pyle’s artwork accompanies a true-to-life account of piracy, though during a much earlier time period. Despite the atmosphere of verisimilitude, however,

Pyle’s artwork reflects his laudatory words, veering away from pirate history and becoming instead a fantasy of “constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape!”

Howard Pyle shaped this new, fantastical icon during a burgeoning time for magazine and book illustration production. As a celebrity illustrator and author, Pyle initiated another Golden Age – the Golden Age of Illustration (1880-1920) – teaching first at the Drexel Institute in 1894 and moving to Chadds Ford in 1898 as the titular head of the so-called Brandywine School. Beginning with Walking the Plank, Pyle created a realm of vicarious adventure, immersing his heroes –and therefore his fin-de-siècle readers – in exotic, violent fantasy. From this first pirate illustration to his last, Pyle’s dangerous buccaneers are easily identified, being remarkably consistent in appearance; wiry and unkempt, they wear headscarves and sashes over their tattered clothing while their captain sports a tri-cornered hat and long coat. N. C. Wyeth and Frank E.

Schoonover, Pyle’s students, followed in their teacher’s iconographical footsteps even as

they developed individual styles, adding other identifying features – from a peg leg to a pet parrot – to the pirate icon along the way. So powerful was the iconic pirate’s appeal that he continued to generate excitement and profits decades after the Golden Age, in illustrations by Norman Rockwell and others as well as in lucrative Hollywood productions such as The Black Pirate (1926). Even today, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (2003, 2006, 2007) testifies to the hold the iconic pirate maintains over the popular imagination.

How did the illustrated pirate steal his way into the hearts of turn-of-the- twentieth-century audiences? What changed between Homer’s anxious Civil War illustration and Pyle’s adventurous images? In other words, how could a dangerous figure, one that murders and pillages, claim heroic status at the century’s end? And finally, why were U.S. illustrators and readers – and why are we still – so fascinated by the pirate? The aim of this project is to understand the behavior and appearance of the newly crafted, fantastical pirate, to expose the reasons behind his prevalence at the turn of the century, and to understand how he has maintained his popularity, despite – or perhaps because of – his ambiguous status as hero and villain.

In order to investigate these questions, this project connects the fantasy produced by Golden Age illustrators to the gender, race, and class systems that influenced pirate illustration. It relies upon the intersection of several disciplines, including art history,

American studies, visual culture studies, social history, and literature. Using an art historical approach that emphasizes iconography and style, I undertake a close visual analysis of original paintings and reproductions to determine the elements of the pirates’ appearance and behavior that are either exaggerated or ignored, thereby reinforcing the

pirate’s fantastical qualities. For instance, pirates are most often pictured in the midst of

lively (usually violent) action, such as dueling, stealing, or killing, while the more

mundane aspects of the job, i.e., navigating or repairing sails, are omitted. Examining

correspondence and other documents, I use a social historical approach to elucidate the

illustrators’ class, education, and careers, and I investigate the relationship between these

personal influences and larger social forces, including the development of mass-

circulation technology and a growing “popular” culture.

I also analyze historical and literary sources to expose the precise point at which

the historical pirate and his fantastical doppelganger parted company. Characteristically,

Pyle and his followers meticulously researched their subjects, dismissing contemporary

literature in favor of Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America (1684) and Daniel Defoe’s

General History of the Pyrates (1724) as primary, authoritative sources.3 Exquemelin and

Defoe’s descriptions, however, contrast in certain critical respects with the resulting pictorial examples contained in turn-of-the-century magazines, such as Harper’s,

Collier’s, and St. Nicholas, and in the illustrations accompanying the novels Treasure

Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Johnston’s To Have and To Hold (1900), and Ralph D. Paine’s Blackbeard Buccaneer (1922). Examining where Pyle and his protégés allude to and diverge from historical accounts, I demonstrate how they constructed fantastical pirates selectively and specifically for turn-of-the-century audiences. For instance, primary sources describe the female pirates Anne Bonny and

Mary Read, but no Golden Age illustrator depicted piratical women. Additionally, these illustrators overlooked Defoe’s sexually explicit tales of Blackbeard, choosing instead to

3. A. O. Exquemelin first released his historical account of early Caribbean piracy in the Netherlands in 1678 with the title De Americaensche Zeerovers. Editions in Spanish, French, and English soon followed, with the publication of Bucaniers of America first appearing in London in 1684.

portray his imposing stature and violent nature. Most tellingly, Walking the Plank epitomizes the illustrator’s concoction of pure fantasy: no historical records confirm that walking the plank was a customary practice, yet Pyle shows his pirates engaged in this sadistic activity.

To shed light on the reasons behind such deviations, I incorporate insights from

American Studies and visual culture studies, specifically in the works of scholars Peter G.

Filene, E. Anthony Rotundo, and John F. Kasson, all of whom describe the cultural changes that so profoundly affected ideas of manliness, whiteness, and social class at the turn of the twentieth century. I especially build upon the model suggested by Kasson in

Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man (2001), in particular his contention that any study of turn-of-the-century masculinity must account for newly burgeoning anxieties about sexuality and race. These anxieties fed the desire for maintaining dominance through the new cult of the “Revitalized Man,” which was marked by an increased attention to the physically fit, virile, and specifically white body.

Augmenting Kasson’s approach, I argue that the pirate’s role as hero and anti- hero complicates this formula. These pirates are always men, participating in adventure, and representing the vigorous, but also potentially homoerotic, male fantasies in an era of a growing bachelor culture as well as gay subcultures. Pirates are also outlaws, stealing what is not theirs and giving rise to fantasies of wealth and even murder among middle- class, neurasthenic office-workers in an era of big business and robber barons. Finally, the illustrated pirates are the racial “other,” intimidating fellow seafarers with violence and conjuring up exoticized fantasies in an era whose contentious race relations are exemplified by immigration laws, imperialist expansion in the Caribbean, and Theodore

Roosevelt’s fear of “race suicide.” That the pirate could represent vigor and

homoeroticism, business savvy and savagery, heroism and racialized “otherness”

indicates a complicated iconicity beyond the cult of the “Revitalized Man.”

The Golden Age of Illustration, the name that has since been given to the era that

spanned from 1880 to 1920, received its moniker for significant technological and artistic

advances in the world of book and magazine illustration.4 Government policy, urban living, and the talents of prolific artist-illustrators coincided at this time to produce a

Golden Age. The passage of the International Copyright bill in 1891 favored American artists over foreign ones, providing incentives to publishers who used U.S. imagery. The late 1880s to early 1890s, furthermore, witnessed an exponential growth of newspapers and periodicals, including Ladies’ Home Journal, which began in 1884, Collier’s Weekly, which joined the ranks in 1888, along with McClure’s in 1893 and The Saturday Evening

Post in 1897. All magazines, both new and old, benefited from the half-tone print, a technological feat patented by Frederic Eugene Ives in 1881 that revolutionized illustration. Eliminating the need for an engraver, this innovation allowed for a more direct transfer of the brushstroke to the printed page. Finally, a large literate public – mostly comprising urban readers who frequented newsstands – reaped the benefits of an

1879 Congressional act, which called for a discounted rate on periodicals.5

Howard Pyle (1853-1911) stands out among artist-illustrators as a progenitor of

this Golden Age. “I sometimes think,” he said in 1901, “that we are upon the edge of

4. Each of the artist-illustrators featured in this project has had a catalogue raisonné published in the last six years. The first was Howard Pyle: His Life – His work from 2004, then N. C. Wyeth: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings from 2008, and finally Frank E. Schoonover Catalogue Raisonné in 2009. These volumes attest to the recent investment in and acknowledgment of the Golden Age of Illustration and its place in academic scholarship. 5. Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19-22; Chris Fauver and others, Stories to Tell: Masterworks from the Kelly Collection of American Illustration (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art, 2006), 14.

some new era in which the art of beautifying books with pictures shall be uplifted into a

higher and a different plane of excellence.”6 Born into a Quaker family in Wilmington,

Delaware, Pyle began painting intriguing characters even as a young boy. He later recalls,

“I had an original picture, drawn by myself and tinted with water-color (I was eight years old when I made it), representing a bandy-legged zouave waving a flag and brandishing a sword as he threatened a wretched Confederate with annihilation.”7 Unlike many of his

contemporaries, Pyle never studied in Europe. Instead, he learned his craft in

Philadelphia under an Antwerp-trained artist named Van der Weilen. As a young man, he

moved to New York, eventually working alongside the artists Edwin Austin Abbey and

Charles Reinhart under the editor Charles Parsons at Harper and Brothers. Preferring life

in his hometown, Pyle returned to Wilmington in 1879 and continued as illustrator there,

sending his work out to book and magazine editors while keeping his family, studio – and

in time, his students – nearby.8

Pyle’s illustrations of pirates came at a time when fictional tales of these

swashbuckling men began to infiltrate popular culture. Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic

opera Pirates of Penzance, for example, met with commercial success in 1880-1881. At

the same time, Robert Louis Stevenson released Treasure Island as a series, and his pirate

story appealed to an even wider audience when it was distributed in book form in 1883.

At the beginning of the new century, J. M. Barrie’s play of a boy battling Captain Hook

took center stage in 1904 and could be found seven years later in the pages of Peter and

6. Howard Pyle, “Concerning the Art of Illustration,” excerpt from First Year Book, The Bibliophile Society, 1901, Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection, Box 1, Folder 17, Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware (hereafter cited as Pyle MS Collection). 7. Howard Pyle, “When I was a Little Boy: An Autobiographical Sketch by Howard Pyle,” Woman’s Home Companion, April 1912, 5. 8. Charles D. Abbott, Howard Pyle: A Chronicle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 11, 45, 67.

Wendy. International interest in these British tales spurred U.S. authors to produce pirate

stories, including several by Howard Pyle himself. From 1887 to 1909, Pyle created

almost five-dozen pirate illustrations for his own stories as well as for those of fellow

pirate enthusiasts. Swept up in this mania, Pyle surrendered himself to their appeal,

confessing that pirates “are hardly of the pacific nature one would expect of a boy with

two hundred years of pure Quaker blood in his veins, but I have always had a strong

liking for pirates and for highwaymen, for gunpowder smoke and for good hard blows.”9

Pyle promulgated his belief in the “art of beautifying books” – and also spread his

“liking for pirates” – by teaching the next generation of innovative illustrators. Those

who benefitted from his teachings include the aforementioned N. C. Wyeth and Frank E.

Schoonover, as well as Elizabeth Shippen Green, Stanley Arthurs, and Jessie Wilcox

Smith. And, Pyle’s legacy continued with the illustrators who themselves passed along

Pyle’s teachings to the next generation. These students-cum-teachers include Walter

Everett, Thornton Oakley, George Harding, and Harvey Dunn.10 The Golden Age was not limited to Pyle’s family of illustrators, however. Other still-familiar and still-famous illustrator-artists that made this era “Golden” were Maxfield Parrish, F.X. and J.C.

Leyendecker, and Charles Dana Gibson.

Pyle’s students shared an ability to create entertaining, realistic, multisensory, and widely popular images because they followed their teacher’s many tenets of illustration, tenets that freed the illustrator from the strict interpretation of the author’s text.

Importantly, pirate stories at this time followed a rather formulaic structure in which an outsider joins a pirate crew by force or by necessity or because he is lured into the exotic

9. Howard Pyle to Miss Edith Robinson, 26 March 1895, Pyle MS Collection, Box 1, Folder 7. 10. Henry C. Pitz, Howard Pyle - Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School (New York: C.N. Potter, 1975), 220-3.

lifestyle of piracy. In writing Treasure Island, Stevenson sets this formula as Jim

Hawkins acts as the outsider, first attracted to Long John Silver and his life on the high

seas and then repelled by his duplicity and thievery. In this and many other fin-de-siècle

pirate tales, such as Pyle’s Jack Ballister’s Fortunes and Paine’s Blackbeard Buccaneer,

the reader identifies with a sympathetic protagonist that is among the pirates, but is not

one of them. Allegiances shift, however, in the accompanying, compelling images as the

pirate becomes the protagonist, drawing the viewer into his topsy-turvy world.

What you see and what you read are intentionally different because of Pyle’s

well-articulated philosophy of illustration. Pyle told his students, “It’s utterly impossible for you to go to all the newsstands and explain your pictures,” encouraging them to make their work comprehensible and feeling that a picture would fail if the reader had to read

the text in order to understand it.11 Furthermore, he believed that images should not just supplement the text, but instead should “transcend [it] and be independent statements that could stand on their own.”12 N. C. Wyeth followed this nugget of his teacher’s wisdom in the image of Hawkins’s departure in Treasure Island. He turns Stevenson’s brief description – “I said Good-bye to Mother and the cove where I had lived since I was born” – into a heart-wrenching scene of separation as a young man tentatively walks away from his sobbing mother (fig. 3).13 Finally, Pyle and his students were successful at

11. qtd. in Walt Reed, “The Brandywine School,” in Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists, ed. John Edward Dell (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000), 23. 12. Ibid. 13. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883; repr. with new introduction by R. H. W. Dillard, New York: Signet Classic, 1998), 44. Alexander Nemerov vividly describes N. C. Wyeth’s version of the departure scene, believing that Wyeth’s interpretation – unlike the original text –illuminates the static life Hawkins is leaving behind, and the new, dynamic one he is entering: “In one of his illustrations for Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins, the young hero of Stevenson’s story, leaves home as his mother cries. As Jim marches resolutely toward us, ready to start on the path of life, his staff and bundle in his right hand and his hat in his left, his mother lifts her apron to her face, unable to watch. Her inward, enclosed, and (as Wyeth would have it) unadventurous spirit is represented by the railing that spirals inward in a repetition of

producing images that stood on their own because they provided a sensory experience,

creating lively pictures that appealed to the five senses as well as to the sense of

imagination. As Pyle himself admits in an 1890 letter, “my characters” are “somewhat

true to humanity” but are also “seen obscurely through my green glass spectacles of

fancy.”14

Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972) was the most prolific of any Pyle student, seeing through his own “spectacles of fancy” a variety of subjects that ranged from romantic trysts to frontier life and piratical adventure. Most of his work, though, can be characterized as masculine and outdoorsy.15 As a young man, Schoonover was bound not

for artistic endeavor but the ministry. However, upon seeing an ad for Pyle’s illustration

classes at Drexel in September of 1896, he changed his course and told his parents, “I

think I’d like to go down and study with Mr. Pyle and be an illustrator.”16 He first audited

Pyle’s drawing classes, eventually becoming one of his teacher’s most beloved students

at the Drexel Institute and the Brandywine School, and later, a successful commercial

artist.17 Following Pyle’s advice to capture reality, a young Schoonover took two

extended trips to Hudson Bay in 1903 and ’04, trips which were instrumental in his

ability to produce seemingly authentic images of American Indians and frontiersmen.18 In his long career, Schoonover worked for most of the major periodicals of the era,

the bun of her hair. As the line of that railing leads her nowhere, turning in on itself as an ever-inward circling of energies, so the implied continuation of that line – Jim’s walking stick, extending outward in the direction in which it would have gone – is the noble indicator of a path of progress outward and onward, away from home.” Alexander Nemerov, “The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth’s Wreck of the ‘Covenant,’” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (2006): 9. 14. Howard Pyle to Mr. Pratt, 3 May 1890, Pyle MS Collection, Box 1, Folder 7. 15. Pitz, Howard Pyle, 217. 16. Frank E. Schoonover, interview by Richard K. Doud, 6 April 1966, transcript, p. 3, Special Collections, Hugh Martin Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark. 17. Pitz, Howard Pyle, 138. 18. Karon A. Schmiegel, Louise Schoonover Smith, and Nancy Lynch Steele, “Frank Earle Schoonover: The Man and His Art,” in Frank E. Schoonover: Catalogue Raisonné, ed. John R Schoonover and others, vol. 1 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009), 19.

including Collier’s Weekly, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, with

his most productive period falling between 1911 and 1920, during which time he

produced illustrations for more than 140 articles.19

Schoonover also created The Pirate, an 1899 sketch from his days as a Drexel student and the first among his many pirate illustrations. He then traveled to Jamaica with

Pyle in 1906, later admitting that this sea voyage, especially the island’s vivid colors and history, filled his mind with romantic ideas about the pirate life. In his letter to John

LaGorce, he explains, “We [Schoonover and Pyle] had a most thrilling time, especially in

Spanish Town, where we pictured Morgan and his band. It wasn’t so difficult with the ideal setting and I could easily visualize the merry cut-throats roaming about town.”20

Afterward, Schoonover put his ideas to canvas, creating imagery of pirate heroes for

Harper’s Monthly in the 1910’s. He later illustrated pirate novels, including a 1920 publication of Stevenson’s Treasure Island as well as Ralph D. Paine’s Privateers of ’76 from 1923. Some of Schoonover’s most compelling imagery accompanies both the magazine story and the later novelized version of Paine’s “Blackbeard, the Buccaneer” from 1922.

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945) was another favorite Pyle student with an impressive portfolio of pirate imagery. Perhaps because he himself became the paterfamilias to a lineage of famous American artists including his daughter Henriette

Wyeth Hurd, son Andrew, and grandson Jamie Wyeth, much more attention has been given to Wyeth than Schoonover. Unlike Schoonover, Wyeth was bound for the artistic life from early on, studying at the Eric Pape School of Art before traveling to Pyle’s

19. Ibid., 29. 20. Frank E. Schoonover to John Oliver La Gorce, 9 March 1926, Frank E. Schoonover Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

studios in Wilmington in 1902.21 Like Schoonover, however, Wyeth did not limit himself

to any one subject, painting with equal éclat cowboys, knights, soldiers, American

Indians, frontiersman, and pirates, as well as King Arthur and Robin Hood. Wyeth also

focused on the more purely artistic pursuits of landscape painting and muralism. Wyeth

saw early success by creating illustrations for advertisers and magazines such as Frank

Leslie’s Popular Monthly and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1904, he began a

longstanding collaboration with the publishing company, Charles Scribner’s Sons.22

Wyeth came into his own after Pyle’s death in 1911, the same year that his illustrated edition of Stevenson’s Treasure Island was released. This edition was one of

Wyeth’s greatest successes in pirate portrayal, and it represented an important stylistic innovation in Wyeth’s oeuvre as well. As his biographer David Michaelis reveals, “Paget

[who illustrated an 1899 version of Island] treated Treasure Island as spectacle….

Wyeth’s great leap forward was to make us Jim.” Michaelis continues, “Painting from

Jim’s ‘sight seen,’ as Wyeth called it, he conceived Treasure Island so that ‘the reader is actually the boy at all times.’”23 After 1911, he continued to produce a series of illustrated classic novels for Scribner’s, including The Boy’s King Arthur, but ventured again into pirate lore. He provided illustrations for pirate stories in Scribner’s as well as cover images for Ladies’ Home Journal and Life in 1921 and for Rafael Sabatini’s novel

Captain Blood in 1922.

Unlike the 1862 Harper’s Weekly image of the Alabama, or even Homer’s more dramatic Approach of the British Pirate [Ship] “Alabama,” Pyle and his fellow pirate

21. Christine B. Podmaniczky, “N. C. Wyeth,” in N. C.Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, ed. Christine B. Podmaniczky, vol. 1 ([Wilmington, DE]: Wyeth Foundation for American Art, 2008), 19, 22. 22. Ibid., 25. 23. David Michaelis, N. C. Wyeth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 201.

illustrators were not reporting on contemporary events, but setting out to create

fantastical men far removed in time and place. I use the terms “fantasy” and “fantastical”

here to refer specifically to escapism, or regression into an unfamiliar world. As the many

Golden Age illustrations attest, pirates exist in an invented, exoticized, and fantastic

world, a world that made it safe for the reader/viewer to indulge vicariously in the realm

of adventure and return unscathed to his own more familiar one of law and order. Here I

follow Patrick Brantlinger’s argument in Rule of Darkness (1990). This study analyzes

the safe escapism in fanciful adventure stories, from Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836) to The

Settlers of Canada (1844), created by the early nineteenth-century English novelist

Frederick Marryat. Brantlinger claims,

Both because he admires Indian ways and because of his ultimate faith in the blessings of civilization and the truths of Christianity, Marryat can treat ‘going native’ or reverse conversion as a romantic adventure, daydream more than nightmare, uniting … civilized and savage.24

Similarly, turn-of-the-twentieth-century viewers admired pirates and their adventurous lifestyle, but ultimately returned to the structures of middle-class society.

Pyle’s own words in his conclusion to his article “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main” (the article, incidentally, in which Walking the Plank appears) exemplify this pattern of unifying civilized and savage worlds. In his parting words, Pyle says, “He who chooses may read betwixt the lines of history this great truth: Evil itself is an instrument toward the shaping of good. Therefore the history of evil as well as the history of good should be read, considered, and digested.”25 In this respect, Pyle justifies

his and his reader’s foray into lawlessness only to return in the end to capitalist and

24. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 66. 25. Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 512.

religious social structures, or “the history of good.” Pyle, Schoonover, and Wyeth created intriguing pirate pictures by providing this specific brand of fantasy.

Figure four features a fantastical man as well –Theodore Roosevelt, specifically – and this example illuminates the manner in which turn-of-the-century artists compartmentalized the fantastic and the mundane and typifies the ways that the pirate did his cultural work. “As he is” or “As he isn’t,” Theodore Roosevelt nonetheless was a highly visible, often outspoken politician during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a career that culminated with his turn as the 26th President of the United States from 1901-09. Roosevelt understood a thing or two about public persona, consciously shaping his own in order to conform to an ideal of masculine achievement. In the cartoon’s “as he isn’t” view, Roosevelt sports the markers of the cowboy, in his chaps, boots and spurs, neckerchief, and pistol. He is also a hunter, as evidenced by the multiple swords, guns, and rifles and the prominently displayed pelt on the wall behind his desk.

Several references to war – the Mars bust and the foregrounded cannon – reference his popular catch phrase, “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.” This figure is savage, manly, and pugnacious; on the other hand, in the “as he is” image, the cartoonist presents

Roosevelt as less than the masculine ideal to which he lays claim. He is, instead, a refined, gentlemanly brainworker. Dressed impeccably in a topcoat and tails, the

President looks over a public affairs document as the smell of roses wafts in the air. His mostly unadorned walls do not hint at much of a life beyond this presidential desk. In this clever dichotomy between the “fanciful” Roosevelt and the president’s day-to-day reality, the cartoonist gives us a checklist of what was valued – i.e., cowboy, hunter, soldier – and what was banal – the well-dressed brainworker – in Roosevelt’s eyes as well as in the

eyes of a U.S. public. As he bites down on his sword, Roosevelt’s affected persona clenches turn-of-the-century values in his teeth as well.

The sword-in-teeth pirate, too, belonged to a cultural milieu that valued manliness, aggression, and violence. In the fanciful world of figure five, for instance, a pirate hides behind the initial letter “I” and shoots out at the reader. “Don’t get too close,” the confrontational figure seems to say in this particular fantasy, “I have easy access to the sword between my teeth as well!” The pirate as aggressive, powerful protagonist made sense in turn-of-the-century America, as illustrators provided a character desirable to their target audience of white, middle-class men and boys. Like the “as he isn’t”

President, the pirate represented an escape – what its adherents wished to be as they languished with the “as he is” President in less adventurous surroundings.

These seemingly duller environs were, in reality, swirling with new gender, race, and class issues, and the fantastical pirate accommodated his viewers’ various needs, providing different escapes to different people. Sometimes the victorious athlete, at other times the rich man luxuriating in his bags of money, and at still other times the swarthy

Spanish type, the pirate took on a variety of roles. How these many escapes intertwine with social history goes far toward explaining why the pirate icon was so popular. For instance, masculinity, which Theodore Roosevelt attempted to embody, was an unstable state due to shifting social and sexual roles for women and men; simultaneously, the pirate became the heroic strongman. Furthermore, the “problems” of office work, neurasthenia, and big business monopolies affected day-to-day class struggles, and in contemporaneous pirate imagery, the pirate freely stole his money outside of this repressive system. Finally, Darwinism, colonialism, and U.S. interest in the Caribbean

point to changing racial politics at this time, and the dark-skinned pirate was a rootless traveler upon this contested Caribbean terrain. My dissertation is organized around fin- de-siècle anxieties, and the ways in which the pirate addresses, alleviates, and at times, avoids these issues.

In chapter two, I examine why turn-of-the-twentieth-century pirate illustrators ignored women and who and what they chose to picture instead. Illustrations like She

Was Bound to Go and She Punched the Dude King (figs. 6 and 7) began appearing in magazines around this time and featured women dragging men by their heels or punching them square in the jowls. Along with these physical attacks, fin-de-siècle women participated in other attacks on male superiority as they fought for female suffrage, more jobs in the workforce, and – later – sexual freedom. Overall, women asserted their presence with more frequency into the public sphere, and the women of Puck magazine – though certainly appearing in hyperbolic scenarios – documented uneasy male-female relationships at the turn-of-the-century. These cartoons suggest an anxious readership fixated upon a topsy-turvy world in which women dominate while men become the weaker sex.

The female pirates Bonny and Read, who resembled athletic women like the

“Dude King” puncher, challenged male dominance as well and needed to be managed.

Excising these female pirates, illustrators provided iconic images of male prowess, enriching fantasy lives while ignoring history and the contested arena of contemporary male-female relationships. In fact, for the most part, illustrators removed women altogether. Their pirates are men that wrestle, brandish, kill, and even lounge around with their fellow male pirates. Despite the reputation proliferated by historical accounts of

pirates raping as well as pillaging, or as Exquemelin puts it, “freely gratify[ing] their lusts; for which they find more women than they can use,”26 Golden Age pirate illustration ignores these activities, choosing instead to showcase an all-male world.

Powerful images of men’s bodies splashed the pages of male magazines like The

National Police Gazette. John L. Sullivan, half naked to the waist, stands high upon the stage of a boxing ring, receiving the praise of soberly clad crowds who admire his body as well as his feats of physical strength (fig. 8). Baseball, football, boxing, and even bicycling became wildly popular as a way to prove valor and vigor. Although they did not appear at the local arena or fair grounds, pirates became the pseudo-historical equivalent of the modern-day athlete. Deviating from strictly historical accounts, illustrators delved into their imaginations, linking athleticism to masculinity and the athletic masculine ideal to pirate adventure. Pirates wrestle with scabbards to determine who will be captain; they brandish their rapiers amidst throngs of onlookers; a bloodstained man walks away from a victim lying at his feet; a blindfolded man, by sheer force of will, does not teeter from his perilous position on a thin plank. In Golden Age illustration, fantastical pirates take action.

This all-male world featured illustrated pirates as manly boys or boyish men, a blurring of maturity levels not uncommon at the turn of the century. Middle-class men eschewed marriage until a later age than their fathers, preferring the bachelor life of extended adolescence. At the same time, fin-de-siècle boys joined more organized activities like the Knights of King Arthur or the Sons of Daniel Boone even as their informal play became more aggressive and competitive. The pirate life imagined by Pyle,

Schoonover, and Wyeth paralleled the active lives of bachelors and boys in their shared

26. Exquemelin, Buccaneers and Marooners, 72.

‘no women/girls allowed’ stance. For example, boys embody the dreams of men in

Johnny’s Ambitions, a Puck cartoon from 1887 (fig. 9). Johnny dreams himself a pirate

hero alongside other imagined icons, like a firefighter, a boxer, and a cowboy. Pirates are

athletic adventurers as well in Pyle’s Which Shall be Captain? and Schoonover’s The

Brawn of These Lads (figs. 10 and 11). As Schoonover’s title makes particularly clear,

pirates are youthful sorts who, like bachelors, parade their prowess alongside other men;

women do not factor into their conscious minds or on the illustrated page.

Pirates are also money-earners, a topic that occupies the third chapter. Their

earnings, importantly, are ill gotten. Unlike the soldier or cowboy, the pirate is an anti-

hero, stealing his way through the open seas and leaving chaos in his wake. It seems odd,

then, that Johnny and the daydreaming readers to whom he appeals would imagine such a

bad man alongside venerable icons. It is not so surprising, however, when considering the

middle-class office workers who read Puck or perused pirate literature. So-called

“brainworkers,” or those who sat at desks for their wages, increased during this era.

Faced with a lifestyle that did not allow for outdoor or physically taxing activities,

brainworkers contracted nervous diseases, mental fatigue, and other ailments that made

them feel emasculated. Athletics and adventures – and vicarious adventures through

pirate literature – became the antidote to these real or imagined nervous disorders.

The “ill-gotten” aspect of pirate’s wealth held particular significance with respect to the questionable earnings of late-nineteenth-century monopolists such as Jay Gould or

John Rockefeller. Referred to in magazines and newspapers as thieves, and even pirates, these men represented wealth, fame, and also infamy. Their success was desirable, but also despicable, since at the end of the century big business and excessive wealth

coexisted with and contributed to severe dips in the economy. Many middle-class office

workers were forced to reconcile or at least reevaluate the admiration and distaste they

felt for the financially successful.

To help ease this dichotomy between veneration and condemnation, the illustrated

pirate appeared in magazines and novels as a free-wheeling, booty-taking hero. Greed, yes: the pirates were rich and greedy men who displayed their wealth in the form of bags of money, treasure chests, and shining jewelry. Thieves, also: the word “pirate” became synonymous with “thief” in contemporaneous newspaper headlines, and pirate-thieves

took what was not theirs. Most likely in response to their own more mundane lifestyle,

office workers preferred to fantasize about the financial boons of piracy presented in

illustrations such as The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow (fig. 12). However, the

pirate was not simply an anti-hero that allowed for guilt-ridden – if vicarious – pleasures.

Eighteenth-century piracy, or the Caribbean piracy that Pyle and his students most

often referenced in their work, conjured up a free and egalitarian way of life. These

pirates stole from the wealthy and distributed their booty systematically and fairly; they

had agency in choosing this life, in choosing their captain, and in getting rid of him if he

proved unworthy of leadership. Referencing these historical aspects of eighteenth-century

piracy, illustrators represented the pirate’s socio-economic freedom in images such as

Extorting Tribute from the Citizens, So the Treasure was Divided, and The Golden

Galleon – Tailpiece (figs. 13-15). The pirate fantasy brought together – however

paradoxically – greed, thievery, and egalitarianism, a lifestyle that had the potential to

relieve the stresses of a strained middle-class brainworker striving for more money as

well as more adventure.

Race, discussed in chapter four, factored into the Golden Age illustrators’ pirate fantasy as well. The fact that the pirate and the cowboy appeared next to each other in

Johnny’s cartoon is no coincidence. Like cowboys, pirates ventured into frontiers. While cowboys galloped into the West, spurred on by fantasies of Manifest Destiny, pirates glided upon Caribbean waters, a destination for a newly imperialist United States.

Significantly, the pirate did not become the iconic white cowboy of the sea. He did not even emulate the white, modern, and heroic U.S. Navy man touted at the time by

Theodore Roosevelt. Instead, the fantastic pirate became something darker, both literally and figuratively. His darker skin, his unkempt and at times wild appearance, and his resemblance to contemporary Spanish genre paintings suggest the pirate’s affiliation with lowly Spanish types.

It is not surprising that pirate illustrators had Spain on their minds. At century’s end, the Spanish tourist industry capitalized on its unique types, such as its gypsies and wine smugglers, who acted both as Spain’s national symbols and its exoticized “others.”

In this manner, Spain drew international artists and writers who popularized the nation’s

“otherness” in Salon paintings and tourist guidebooks. Golden Age illustrators also referred to this uniqueness in their pirate icon, further exemplifying the popularity of

Spanish “otherness,” but also highlighting the complex relationship between the U.S. and

Spain. The older imperial power – with its shrunken empire and contemporaneous

“exotic” status – represented both an exemplar and warning. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the U.S. pursued an interest in and eventually attacked the Caribbean islands. In creating a fantastical pirate who sailed the Caribbean Sea looking for wealth,

illustrators – whether inadvertently or intentionally – fashioned a Spanish-looking pirate who hinted at contemporary political conflict in contested Spanish territory.

The pirate’s racially-charged appearance also connects him to regression fantasy.

Darwinism, and more specifically Social Darwinism, created an epidemic fear of racial

backsliding at the turn of the century. If it was possible for humans to develop from

primitive creatures – the popular thought went – then it was also possible for humans to

degenerate once again to this primal state. The rise in immigration and imperialist

journeys into “exotic” nations contributed to this fear of backsliding. Interaction with

immigrants and “exotics” could potentially lead to miscegenation, a racial mixing that

threatened white racial dominance. With this objectionable admixture in mind, Roosevelt

railed against race suicide, encouraging the white, middle-class to redouble their

procreative efforts. Pirates, in images such as Wyeth’s Borders and his Treasure Island

Endpapers, look like apes (figs. 16 and 17). The low brow ridges, darkened skin, and

boorish behavior of turn-of-the-century pirates refer unequivocally to the degenerate,

subhuman primate. As entertaining, fantastical, and exotic men whose appearance and

behavior drew a sharp contrast to their viewers’ own experience, pirates allowed white,

middle-class audiences to confront their racial fears in the easily contained, two-

dimensional medium of magazine and book illustration.

As my concluding chapter makes plain, the pirate is an enduring cultural icon, the

interest in which has continued into the twenty-first century thanks mainly to the icon’s

transition to Hollywood in the early twentieth century. From the silent film era and the

heroic swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to the quintessential privateer played many

times by Errol Flynn, the pirate icon moved easily from illustration’s pages to the silver

screen. Several stars have followed, notably Robert Newton, who introduced the viewing

public to “Arr!” – a now-ubiquitous piratical cry – in the 1950 version of Treasure

Island. And, even in more recent years, famous Hollywood actors have kept alive the

fantastical pirate tradition, including critic and fan favorites such as Dustin Hoffman, who

plays the eponymous character in 1991’s Hook, Robert de Niro, acting as the pirate

captain Shakespeare in Stardust from 2007, and perhaps most familiar, Johnny Depp

taking on the charming character of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean

trilogy. While Hollywood has veered into new territory with its twentieth and twenty-first

century pirates, they all have taken their cue from illustration’s Golden Age and the

desire to live vicariously through the fantastical pirate character. A glitch to the fantasy

comes with twenty-first century Somali piracy, and the recent newspaper accounts of

their exploits. The fantasy/reality dichotomy reemerges: should we return once again to

Homer’s style of reportage or will we continue to promote Pyle’s fantastical legacy?

The question is an important one. In The Goonies – a pirate film from 1985 – a treasure map warns, “Ye intruders beware;” used here, the expression suggests that this project intrudes into the pirate’s world, looking beneath its frivolity to expose a deeper understanding of the pirate icon, the illustrators that conceived him, and the audiences that embraced him at the turn of the twentieth century and continue to cherish him today.

For instance, Frederick Remington gushes to Pyle, “I think that pirate duel is the most terrific thing I ever saw,” referencing Pyle’s Which Shall be Captain? “Oh if I were only

[able] I’d have that in the middle of my shack and when I wanted to be lifted out of the dreary run of existence I would take a look.”27 While Remington makes it clear that the

27. Frederic Remington to Howard Pyle, 13 November 1908, Pyle MS Collection, Box 19, Folder 2.

pirate takes part in an entertaining escape, this project examines not only the extent of his appeal, but also the reasons behind it. It elucidates the changes, anxieties, and banalities that belong to Remington’s and other turn-of-the twentieth-century viewers’ “dreary run of existence” from which they felt they needed lifting. And finally, the project aims is to discover how the “terrific” turn-of-the-twentieth-century hero and anti-hero has affected our own contemporary notion of this cultural icon and the “dreary run of existence” from which we, too, seem to be fleeing.

Chapter Two

The “Lurid Glamour of the Heroical” for Bachelors and Boys

Pirates duel to the death in figure 18. Their myriad footprints, stirring the otherwise inert sand, attest to a lengthy, harrowing battle while the nondescript landscape foretells a somber conclusion. This unremarkable setting could not be more different from its alluring main characters. Their hatless and coatless frames reveal tensed forearms, clenched fists, tousled hair, and bared teeth. Dramatic splashes of crimson dot the landscape: a red sash, a red kerchief, and a trail of blood. This last detail especially adds a mortal weight to the tableau. Desire, athleticism, fear, and fame (or infamy) converge in this glamorous vision of piratical life.

Figure six, by contrast, depicts an emasculated protagonist. This Puck cartoon encourages readers to laugh at the cowering husband whose larger-than-life wife looms over him. The accompanying caption reads “James Bennie of Gloucester, Massachusetts, tries to persuade his wife not to elope and she wipes the station floor with him.” The furrow-browed Bennie struggles to regain his footing while another husband looks on in horror. This man even attempts to come to Bennie’s aid, but is impotent in his efforts as his own wife raises her arm in restraint. In these two images, the dueling and henpecked men, respectively, exist in separate imaginative worlds and within the pages of very different magazines. However, they share an essential quality: a sense of violence; but they have something more significant in common as well. These leading men represent the fears and fantasies of turn-of-the-century men who seek to find their footing in a world of shifting gender expectations.

Both illustrations relate directly to the anxieties of an era that carried with it a series of changes regarding the perception of female and male sexuality, interactions between men and women, and interactions among men. These perceptions changed because of a variety of societal shifts. Among these are the introduction of women into the workforce, the concept of the New Woman that challenged the notion of male dominance in the public sphere, the larger presence of an urban bachelor culture that postponed men’s entrance into married life, an increased awareness and fear of homosexuality, and the institutionalization of boyhood, which guided development from early life to adolescence through organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America and the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association).

This chapter explores the ways in which these gender fluctuations inform the look and appeal of the fin-de-siècle pirate. For instance, unlike the Puck cartoon, “Why Don’t

You End It” (fig. 18) includes no women, portrays an athletic and competitive sensibility, and attracts its viewer through its palpable energy. Pyle’s duelers, and Golden Age fantastical pirates more generally, are bachelors spurning their need or love of women in favor of all-male social bonding. These manly connections may hint at, but ultimately avoid homosexual connotation, replacing it instead with multisensory, glamorous adventures that the pirates’ viewers could enjoy vicariously.

The best way to deal with women like James Bennie’s wife is to avoid them completely, and that’s just what Golden Age illustrators did. The trend began with

Howard Pyle. In his entire pirate oeuvre, he included only two images in which women directly interact with pirates: Morgan at Porto Bello from 1888 and another published 11 years later titled How the Buccaneers Kept Christmas. During illustration’s Golden Age,

Schoonover depicted just one woman in an unpublished image titled They Considered the

Treasure Together, and Wyeth included just one as well: a crew of Chinese pirates

traumatize a lady aristocrat in “One Wing ‘f His Battle Axe” from 1914. A few women

accompany pirates in illustrations by Wyeth in the 1920s and Schoonover in the 1930s,

but again, only sparsely.28

Pyle, Wyeth, and Schoonover instead ignored the female protagonists that appeared in earlier and oft-viewed illustrations. Defoe’s General History includes a chapter on Captain John Rackham and his encounter with the famous and infamous female pirates Mary Reed and Anne Bonny. And yet, although Defoe provides source material for much of Pyle’s own writing and imagery, Pyle makes no mention of either

Bonny or Read. Pyle even wrote a two-part article on Jamaica, where these two women were tried and convicted, and although he elaborates the stories of Blackbeard, Captain

Walker and Captain Morgan, the two women are absent in written and visual accounts.

And his students followed suit: neither creates an image of Reed, Bonny, or a fictional version of any female pirate.29

These illustrators also ignored mid-nineteenth century magazine articles in which women are decidedly present in pirate imagery. One such sample can be found in the

28. N. C.Wyeth did illustrate a woman among his Treasure Island imagery; however, I do not include it as an example here because it pictures Jim Hawkins’s mother as Jim leaves home to join Squire Trelawney on his journey. Standing in front of her home, weeping into her apron, she is certainly not mistaken for a female pirate or for a woman who interacts with pirates (see fig. 3). In the 1920s, Wyeth created three illustrations with women interacting with pirates: Salvation Yeo Finds His Little Maid Again, which accompanies a 1920 seafaring novel titled Westward Ho! which is borderline piratical; “I Seek Him Called ‘Splinters’” from a Ladies’ Home Journal story called “Surf” from 1922; and the commissioned painting, The Duel on the Beach (1926). In the 1930s, Schoonover also had three pirate images with women: Sleepily She Caught Up the Flag and Offered It from “My Brother the Buccaneer,” a story featured in the girls’ magazine American Girl in 1930; A Few Made a Dash for the Poop from a 1931 edition of Johnston’s To Have and To Hold, and the commissioned painting, Pirates Picnic Ashore (1934). 29. Howard Pyle, “Jamaica – New and Old,” pts. 1 and 2, Harper’s Monthly, January 1890, 169- 87; February 1890, 378-97.

1859 illustrated article titled “Morgan the Buccaneer.”30 In the image Prisoners Pleading

(fig. 19), it is clear that piracy was not an all-male affair: four women dominate half the

composition, leaning expectantly toward the protagonist Morgan, pleading for mercy, or

at the very least, begging for his attentions. He even seems to pose for them. And,

although illustration itself is rare in mid-century pirate tales, the depiction of women is

not rare where images are provided. Another article from 1858 includes ten illustrations,

three of which depict women interacting with the filibusters, a type of pirate active at

mid-century. In Lussan’s Prisoner and Parting with the Prisoners (fig. 20), the

eponymous characters are women, and the images depict the interactions between lovers:

flirting, embracing, and crying at separation. Though hardly pirates themselves, women

appeared in mid-century pirate illustration. These women do not show up in Golden Age

pirate imagery.

However, although they could not be pirates, powerful and physically dominant

women – like Bennie’s unhappy wife – did take center stage in other fin-de-siècle

illustrations. The headline “She Punched the Dude King” accompanies an image that

shows a “pretty, red-headed actress” deal a winning blow straight to her male victim’s

chin (fig. 7). The Gazette almost fetishistically recounted these assaults upon men and

included stories, sometimes on a weekly basis, about women who physically abused men,

including examples of spankings, beatings, and even murder.31

Verbal attacks on men occurred as well. “Idleness and luxury are making men flabby,” asserts Sarah Grand in her 1894 article titled “The Man of the Moment.” She continues, “The best thing to cure men of their effeminacy would be to deprive all the

30. “Morgan the Buccaneer,” Harper’s Monthly, June 1859, 20-37. 31. Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 198.

idle and luxurious ones of their incomes. Give them the choice of starvation and work;

either would answer the purpose.”32 Women were beginning to invade the public sphere – heretofore the sole purview of men – in these new, sometimes aggressive ways. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, new family and professional roles for women necessitated a revision of accepted and expected roles for men. John F. Kasson, in his book on fin-de-siècle masculinity, specifically addresses this fin-de-siècle dynamic in which the New Woman became a male counterpart. The New Woman type was independent and assertive, exhibiting new consumerist power in a growing capitalist economy and participating in previously male-exclusive activities that ranged from those of personal pleasure such as playing sports, smoking in public, and acknowledging sexual desire to the more public ventures of pursuing suffrage, receiving higher degrees, and entering the work force.33

Charles Dana Gibson’s illustration “The Weaker Sex” from 1903 depicts the

iconic Gibson Girl, and she epitomizes this feared New Woman (fig. 21). Looming large

amidst her sisters, a woman looks down her nose through a microscope, poking or

prodding the tiny male creature. Like the essayist Sarah Grand or even the ‘Women

Behaving Badly’ from The National Police Gazette, the Gibson Girls suggest that man –

not woman – is the weaker sex.

Other cartoons imply that remaining unmarried was preferable to life with a

potential New Woman. As Lyndon Orr asserts in his 1905 article, “There is something

mentally enervating in feminine companionship after a while;” and the best solution is to

“go off and be alone or with other men, out in the open air, as it were, roughing it among

32. Sarah Grand, "The Man of the Moment," North American Review, May 1894, 626. 33. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 13.

the rough, as a mental tonic.”34 An earlier Life magazine cartoon corroborates Orr’s words, humorously describing the harmful effects of interacting with women, in this case, through marriage (fig. 22). The “gay” (and might I add, erect) bachelor exclaims, “Do you think there is anything in the theory that married men live longer than unmarried ones?” to which the “henpecked” and impotent husband “warily” replies, “Oh, I don’t know – seems longer.” The repartee reveals a comical but poignant lesson about women’s company: if time flies when you’re having fun, then being married is its antidote. Along with the verbal message, furthermore, are the visual clues to differing lifestyles. While the bachelor stands tall with a crisp suit and pleasant facial expression, his woman-laden counterpart is downcast, seeking solace from his predicament through male companionship and in a plush chair with bottles of alcohol.35 In other words, women seem to be the cause of male distress, and men’s best bet for happiness is to create a club or an “open air” activity where the female sex is not welcomed.

The pirate imagery of Pyle, Wyeth, and Schoonover is almost exclusively all- male as pirates literally “go off and be alone or with other men, out in the open air … roughing it among the rough”36 as in Pyle’s Kidd at Gardiner’s Island or Wyeth’s “Stand

34. Lyndon Orr, "Men Who Marry and Men Who Do Not," Cosmopolitan, March 1905, 545. 35. Less than a year later, Robert Grant penned an article titled “The Reflections of a Married Man.” It alludes again to the quite strident difference between wary husbands accepting the realities of life with a woman and the potential for adventure still endemic to bachelorhood. He writes, “Analogously, he [the eponymous married man] has dismissed as impracticable certain picturesque visions regarding his future which he had long entertained and kept in reserve in the secret places of his soul, to be acted upon under stress of circumstances. How often had he comforted himself, in moments of desolation, with the consciousness that if matter went too much awry he had merely to pack his portmanteau and start east, west, north or south in search of glory and adventure! He has jubilantly pictured himself a cow-boy snatching a splendid bride from the awful waves of a prairie fire; a Thleader into the light of countless hordes, fascinated at first by the swathe of his sword, and later by his counsel; or a primitive forest-dweller, unhampered by clothes or codes, rearing a dusky race cheek by jowl with nature.… But these are bygone fancies… he has reconciled himself to the idea of plodding along in a rut at home, unillumined even by the hope of stopping a run-away horse.” Robert Grant, “The Reflections of a Married Man,” Scribner’s, March 1892, 365. 36. Orr, “Men Who Marry,” 545.

and Deliver!” (figs. 23 and 24). In these images, pirates are men who dig for treasure on

desolate beaches or stand before a billowing Jolly Roger with uplifted swords and open

mouths. Even in haunting images like Cap’n Goldsack (fig. 25), in which a pirate is not

accompanied by this fellow man, at least he is alone, “in the open air” (or in this case, on

the ocean floor), and unburdened by female companionship. The pirate’s booty is

adventure, not women.

Focusing upon adventure avoided new sexual mores at the end of the century as

well. Grand’s fin-de-siècle “Man of the Moment” exemplifies these changes as he is

forced to reform his bedroom behavior: “Nothing used to be expected of him in the way

of virtue and self-denial. It is shameful to think how he was neglected and allowed to act

on his own worst impulses until the new woman came to correct him.”37 While perhaps rewarding the New Woman a bit too much influence, Grand recognizes a shift at the turn of the century. Throughout the nineteenth century, women were thought to be devoid of sexual feeling, which subsequently assigned wives the burden of restraining male desires and lusts.38 By the first few decades of the new century, however, sexual mores transformed to allow for women’s active participation in pleasure. As the social historian

Steven Seidman reveals, “femininity was being redefined by these [turn-of-the-century] women to include the hitherto more exclusively masculine prerogative of claiming erotic desire.”39 The revolutionary discovery of female sexual pleasure forced a new dynamic in

which men had to learn to patrol themselves.

37. Grand, “Man of the Moment,” 622. 38. Kevin J. Mumford, "'Lost Manhood' Found: Male Sexual Impotence and Victorian Culture in the United States," Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (1992): 55. 39. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 70.

Changes in the way both women and men viewed female sexuality brought about a ripple effect that pitted men’s social roles against their sexual ones. Sexual restraint was seen as a proper Victorian and masculine virtue. However, restraint also came to be associated with man’s reduced sexual power, an ailment that even led to male impotency.

As a remedy to this weakness, ads for impotency remedies promoted vigor, describing sexuality as “giant strength and power,” “enlarged organs,” and “sexual power.” By the

1920s, sexual release – not restraint – became widely accepted as the remedy for male sexual problems, and restraint itself was almost exclusively associated with the cause rather than a remedy for weakened masculinity.40 During the forty years that straddled the twentieth century, therefore, notions of restraint, release, and male sexuality – and how each defined masculinity – flip-flopped to a dizzying degree.

Pyle shrewdly skirted uncomfortable issues around male sexuality. He censors, for instance, Blackbeard’s erotic exploits in “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish

Main.” Accompanied by the images Walking the Plank, Blackbeard Buries his Treasure, and Marooned, Pyle’s article authenticates Blackbeard as a “real, ranting, raging, roaming pirate per se.”41 To establish historical accuracy in his written account, Pyle references Daniel Defoe’s tome, and therefore, both authors end up describing the pirate captain’s new young wife. Pyle states that Blackbeard “settl[ed] quietly down into the routine of old colonial life, with a young wife of sixteen at his side, who made the fourteenth that he had in various ports here and there in the world.”42 While this

40. Mumford, “‘Lost Manhood’ Found,” 48, 50. It is important to note here that central to Mumford’s argument is neurasthenia, and the connection between neurasthenia and male sexual performance issues. I will return to Mumford’s argument and discuss neurasthenia in the next chapter when I highlight the class issues embedded within pirate illustration. 41. Howard Pyle, "Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main," pt. 2, Harper's Monthly, September 1887, 506. 42. Ibid., 507.

statement indicates a certain level of promiscuity, Defoe, on the other hand, obviously

revels in Blackbeard’s sexual immorality:

Before he sailed upon his Adventures, he married a young Creature of about sixteen Years of Age, … and this, I have been informed made Teach’s fourteenth Wife, whereof, about a dozen might be still living. His Behaviour in this State, was something extraordinary; for while his Sloop lay in Okerecock [Ocracoke] Inlet, and he ashore at a Plantation, where his Wife lived, with whom after he had lain all Night, it was his Custom to invite five or six of his brutal Companions to come ashore, and he would force her to prostitute her self to them all, one after another, before his Face.43

Pyle certainly tones down Blackbeard’s sexual depravity. Even more tellingly, he omits

the child bride from his accompanying illustrations. This self-censorship is most likely

due to his readership, or the proper, middle-class viewers for whom sex was an anxious,

if not taboo, subject.

Without women as powerful figures or even as sex objects, pirate illustration

instead dealt safely in the male terrains of athletics and adventure. Pyle’s “He Lay Silent

and Still, with His Face Half Buried in the Sand” (fig. 26) and Which Shall Be Captain?

(fig. 10) are one-on-one battles with daggers. In the former illustration, the unlucky – and

therefore perhaps less manly – loser lies dead at the feet of the victor; in the latter image,

the one who shall not be captain will meet a similar fate. Pirates also clash – with their

pistols and their fists – in Schoonover’s Pirate Fight (fig. 27). Two of Wyeth’s pirates

struggle in hand-to-hand combat in the small room below deck in figure 28. With its

broken windows, fallen furniture, and abandoned liquor bottle, Wyeth’s tableau in

particular illustrates a boxing match gone dangerously awry.

Boxing, notably, was one of several competitive sports whose popularity

flourished in this era. The Cincinnati Reds became the first professional baseball team in

43. Daniel Defoe [Captain Charles Johnson, pseud.], A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1724; Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 76.

1869; then, in 1876, the National League of Professional Baseball was established, and

Harvard and Yale Universities began to play each other in intercollegiate rugby matches.

By 1890, baseball had become America’s pastime and simultaneously, football, baseball, and track were at the center of intercollegiate rivalries. The hunger for competition also led many men to pursue club sports such as bowling in respectable establishments as well as pool and billiards – and therefore gambling – in morally questionable ones. In 1901, the educator Johann F. Herbart wrote, “manly social games, like football, basket-ball, base-ball, are our best resources in developing … self-control, sense of power and efficiency, courage, and almost every characteristic of virility.”44

Figures 8 and 29 from The National Police Gazette display these newly brutish bodies that resulted from the primacy of sport. As the examples attest, this popular, turn- of-the-century bachelor magazine duly chronicles in story and image a changing outlook on what constituted manliness.45 John L. Sullivan, for instance, stands on the pedestal of the boxing ring, towering above his adoring fans. His exposed muscular torso contrasts with the clothed men who are, literally, beneath him and are also beneath him in terms of

44. Roberta J. Park, “Biological Thought, Athletics and the Formation of a ‘Man of Character’: 1830-1900,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940, eds. J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin Press, 1987), 21-23; Chudacoff, Age of the Bachelor, 155; Johann F. Herbart, Outlines of Educational Doctrine, trans. Alexis F. Lange (New York: MacMillan Company, 1901), 189. Self-control, power, efficiency, courage and virility are defining characteristics of masculinity, according to Herbart. However, some turn-of-the-century sources, i.e., the impotency ads mentioned above, pit these characteristics against each other in describing masculinity. Self- control, for instance, can be seen to detract from virility. Herbart’s assertions, therefore, represent one perspective amidst many, attesting to the changing social and sexual expectations associated with masculinity during this time period. 45. Chudacoff explains the popularity of The National Police Gazette: “The National Police Gazette could arguably proclaim to have been one of the country’s most sensational – and influential – journals of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. By the 1880s and 1890s, just a few decades after its founding, the Police Gazette’s subscriptions exceeded 150,000, and a few special issues required printings of 400,000. More importantly, the Police Gazette’s regular readership included an estimated half million or more men. On sale at most urban newsstands and available to be read gratis in almost every barbershop, hotel, pool hall, fire company, and street-corner saloon, each issue passed through dozens of hands, virtually all of them male. The National Police Gazette appealed to such a large number of men because it catered to all of the idiosyncrasies of working-class and middle-class culture and made special overtures to the bachelor subculture.” Chudacoff, Age of the Bachelor, 187.

their physical development and social stature. While flipping through the pages of a

National Police Gazette, a reader would also notice the difference between these heroic portraits and the emasculated men being beaten by women in She was Bound to Go and

She Punched the Dude King.

Tellingly, Wyeth and Schoonover’s pirates, perhaps more than Pyle’s, display the rising interest in physical culture that transformed people’s perception of the ideal, turn- of-the-century masculine body. Wyeth emphasizes athleticism in his figures, especially in

Long John Silver’s overpowering frame, muscular hands, and square jaw in figure 30.

Schoonover also draws upon physical culture in figure 31. In the image, Blackbeard’s large body weighs down and takes over the left half of the composition as his upturned shirtsleeves reveal large arms holding deadly pistols. With his bulky frame and muscular fists, this pirate resembles the idolized John L. Sullivan from Police Gazette cartoons.

Playing college football, cheering on professional baseball players, admiring the buffed-up bodies of Sullivan and Silver – these are activities that related directly to a new and growing fin-de-siècle phenomenon, namely, bachelor culture. According to the 1890

U.S. Census, 41.7 percent of American males over 15 years of age were single, which was the highest national average to that date. Furthermore, 67 percent of men aged 15 to

34 were unmarried, and the median age for marriage was 26.1. This last statistic was an historic high, which remained in place into the twentieth century and only dropped to

24.3 in 1930.46 Characterized by their sophomoric behavior, however, Gilded Age bachelors went beyond mere rejection of marriage. Kasson explains that bachelor culture embraced not civic or social virtue, but a love for competition, aggression, and in some instances, vice. From Teddy Roosevelt and Sullivan to the strong man Eugen Sandow,

46. Ibid., 48.

athletic heroes abounded in bachelor culture, but so did less laudable activities like heavy

drinking, swearing, and participating in casual sex.47 At the turn-of-the-century, this male

behavior spread rapidly through the urban areas of the United States, becoming a

subculture all its own.

Kasson explains, “In boisterous play and aggressive competition, bachelors could

enjoy a continuity between boyhood and manhood.”48 Earlier in the century, male and female roles were more clearly defined, and manhood had been judged as the antipode to boyhood: girls left girlishness behind to become women; boys left boyishness behind to become men. However, as women’s roles crept into the public (or traditionally masculine) sphere, manhood had to distinguish itself more consciously from womanhood.49 Bachelor culture, therefore, with its all-male exclusive clubs and intercollegiate sports, reinforced the masculinity/femininity distinction while it also dissolved the manhood/boyhood one.

Paralleling this phenomenon of bachelor culture, therefore, was another phenomenon that had many of the same trappings: boy culture. Coined by E. Anthony

Rotundo, “boy culture” acknowledged that shifts in social, sexual, and developmental changes affected boys as well as men. Boys within this new culture were judged along standards separate from the female domestic world and also from the restrained man’s world of Victorian propriety. The importance of aggression and adventure, in particular, defined boy culture while winter games like sledding and skating took on new significance. Boys’ games such as marbles, tag, blindman’s bluff, leapfrog, and tug-of-

47. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, 13. 48. Ibid. 49. Peter G. Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 99.

war were also popular because each “demanded physical skill, and … involved exercise and competition as well.”50

Along with these informal games, several organizations developed at the turn of the century in an attempt to appeal to, but also organize, the physical activities of boys.

These youth-oriented institutions included the Knights of King Arthur, the Sons of Daniel

Boone, the Woodcraft Indians, and the Boy Scouts of America, which was founded in

1912. Even the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) guided older youths into manhood, creating a bridge between boy culture and bachelor culture, with its gymnasia, social activities, and sleeping areas for new urbanites. Boy culture promoted the adventurous, manly sphere that valued “weight, height, ‘pluck,’ spirit, appearance, and all sorts of athletic skills.”51

This new culture also gave boys a “space for expressive play and a sense of freedom.52 It is no surprise, then, that in this era Scottish playwright J. M. Barrie imagined Never-Neverland, a utopia in which Peter Pan would battle Captain Hook and never grow up. Written in 1904, Peter Pan found an enthusiastic audience in the U.S. as well as Britain, especially when it was released in book form in 1911.53 However, Barrie

50. E. Anthony Rotundo, “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, eds. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 36. 51. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 258; Rotundo, “Boy Culture,” 21. Howard Chudacoff devotes a section of his book to the YMCA and its uses by new urbanites. Please see pp. 156-66. 52. Rotundo, “Boy Culture,” 19. 53. The character of Peter Pan actually appeared first in the United States in 1901 in a serialized story titled The Little White Bird, or Adventures at Kensington Gardens. In this manifestation, Peter Pan is a magical figure who, at infancy, escapes mortality, and therefore is represented as an infant cavorting with fairies. He is next seen in the play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, first produced in London in 1904. Given the growing fear that boys would become “sissies” because of their primarily female caregivers, it is also interesting to note here that Barrie flirted with naming his story Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Hated Mothers. Never growing up and hating mothers are two fears that stem from the same origin, i.e. changing masculine ideals. For a more detailed history of J. M. Barrie and the Peter Pan stories, please

was not the only author to comingle pirates and childlike adventure. He followed in the

footsteps of fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson who, twenty years earlier, dreamed up

the story of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. First released as a serialized story titled

Treasure Island, or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola. By Captain George North, this

adventure tale of pirate abduction was later revised and released as a book with the

truncated title Treasure Island (1883).54

Gender-specific magazines full of Pan-like adventure stories increased at this

time, eventually garnering a proper place in the literary industry. From Young Folks, in

which Stevenson’s Long John Silver first appeared, to St. Nicholas, Harper’s Young

People, and later, Boy’s Life, boy-focused magazines flourished as publishers became

aware that they could translate boy culture into commercial success. One contemporary

editorial speaks rather cheekily to this phenomenon, stating, “The dime novel is more

plentiful than the sands of a reasonably large sea.”55 Taking for granted that schoolboys are the target audience, the author ironically goes on to laud the educational value of adventure stories:

Under this new system of education the pupil is made to love his studies, and it is rare that an intelligent boy who has passed through a full course of dime novel instruction in murder feels toward that useful study the active dislike of cold indifference which the schoolboy too often feels toward the multiplication or spelling-book when forced upon him in accordance with old-fashioned theories of teaching.56

Though writing several years earlier, this critic could be picturing the schoolboy lost in reverie from Wyeth’s Ladies’ Home Journal cover (fig. 32). Of course, his sardonic tone

see Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 54. David Angus, "Youth on the Prow: The First Publication of Treasure Island," Studies in Scottish Literature 25 (1990): 83. Stevenson first released his tale in the Victorian children’s magazine Young Folks in monthly installments between October 1, 1881 and January 28, 1882 (Ibid.). 55. New York Times, “Juvenile Education,” July 25, 1882. 56. Ibid.

is absent in Wyeth’s depiction because by the beginning of the new century, adventure stories had finally earned praise rather than calumny. A 1901 editorial asserts that while

“still breathlessly entertaining of speech and full of swing and dash,” “the dime novel, after years of struggle, had at last gotten into good society.”57

Several U.S. authors took notice of this growing youthful audience, catering to the boy-readers’ desire for treasure troves and Never-Neverlands. Mary Johnston – an anomalous female presence in this culture of manliness – wrote To Have and To Hold in

1900, and Howard Pyle created several serialized stories and books such as Rose of

Paradise (1888), “Jack Ballister’s Fortune” (1894), and “Ruby of Kishmoor” (1908). The desire for pirate stories in this era did not wane, and U.S. and British authors alike continued to provide tales even after 1911’s Peter and Wendy. A new version of Treasure

Island was released that same year, and others followed such as Black Buccaneer by

Stephen W. Meader in 1920, Blackbeard Buccaneer by Ralph D. Paine and Rafael

Sabatini’s Captain Blood, both from 1922, and Privateers of ’76 by Frank E. Schoonover in 1923. Even as late as the 1930s, audiences craved tales such as Sabatini’s “Duel on the

Beach” and Black Swan.

The pirate illustrations accompanying these stories became an integral part of boy culture. Readers could easily identify, for instance, with Jim Hawkins in For All the

World, I was Led Like a Dancing Bear (fig. 33). Although he looks positively diminutive next to the towering figure of Long John Silver, he is still a physical match for his captor, pulling his restraints forcefully against Silver’s diagonal thrust forward. Furthermore, in

“One More Step,” Hawkins again is smaller than the sword-wielding pirate, but he outmatches his opponent, adroitly balancing and discharging his firearms (fig. 34). As he

57. New York Times, “The Polite Dime Novel,” October 12, 1901.

“stand[s] up squarely in a give and take conflict,” Hawkins embodies the ideal man-boy

whose adventure “teaches a wholesome sense of responsibility and also gives a heart

man-making type of courage.”58 G. Stanley Hall, a respected turn-of-the-century

psychologist and proponent of boy culture, used these words to describe the importance

of anger and aggression to childhood development; however, he could have just as easily

been describing N. C. Wyeth’s widely popular illustrations.

Pirate stories, and their illustrations, however, appealed not only to young men,

but to mature ones as well. Representing yet another ripple effect in the era’s expanding

all-male, “boisterous” culture, men and boys’ tastes in reading converged. Howard Pyle,

for instance, was difficult to categorize. He himself asserted that his “writings are

essentially for children” in which he made it a point to include both wit and “a small

lesson.”59 However, he wrote this early in his career in reference to his work as a whole.

Judgments later shifted, specifically in reference to Pyle’s pirate stories. According to one

critic, Rose of Paradise is a book “that boys will be apt to read with eagerness, and …

which will not be despised by the grown-up men who have not outgrown their liking for

the kind of literature which they best enjoyed when boys.”60 In other words, Pyle’s pirate tales were meant for all ages, at least all ages of the male gender. According to Henry C.

Pitz’s biography on Pyle, critics most often classified Pyle’s pirate books as adult fiction, but sometimes wrote of their appeal to an adolescent audience as well.61

58. G. Stanley Hall, “A Study of Anger,” American Journal of Psychology 10, no. 4 (1899): 579. 59. Howard Pyle to Mrs. William Pyle (mother), 20 November 1867, qtd. in Charles D. Abbot, Howard Pyle: A Chronicle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 35-6. 60. This criticism is from the November 1887 edition of Literary News. “Newspaper Clippings (Photocopies),” Howard Pyle Manuscript Collection, Box 19, Folder 4, Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. 61. Henry C. Pitz, Howard Pyle – Writer, Illustrator, Founder of the Brandywine School (New York: C. N. Potter, 1975), 96.

Stevenson’s work, too, is difficult to classify. His Treasure Island story originally appeared in a Victorian magazine geared toward children. However, David Angus asserts that his tale did not become a sensation until it reached an adult audience in its book form, and only then because it blurred the boyishness and manliness of the protagonist.

“In Young Folks,” Angus argues, “we find a Jim Hawkins … who is unexpectedly nervous, unheroic, and given to a rather hollow bombastic swagger … All these instances of Jim Hawkins’ very natural boyish reactions are excised from the book version.” 62 As divisions between men and women increased, the distinction between men and boy characters plummeted. Accordingly, Stevenson recast Hawkins from a boy into man-boy, a character more like the aggressive, self-assured sportsmen of bachelor culture idealism.

In this revised state, Stevenson’s pirate tale reached a willing fin-de-siècle audience comprised of men and boys torn between bachelor and boy culture.

Stevenson’s new and improved Hawkins led to a long line of boy, man, and man- boy protagonists, to the point where pirate heroes were exclusively male. From Hawkins to the adult colonist Ralph Percy in To Have and To Hold and from the eponymous boy in Peter Pan to the orphaned adolescent Stephen Claghorn in Privateers of ’76, adventure is a male prerogative. And, save the prominent role of Wendy in Peter Pan, women and girls rarely make an appearance. Peter Pan is the captain of a group of young men who call themselves the Lost Boys. Hawkins and Claghorn have widowed mothers who appear at the beginning of Treasure Island and Privateers of ’76, respectively, but they stay behind while their adolescent sons go on their adventures.63 Women are not

62. Angus, “Youth,” 83. 63. According to Alexander Nemerov, N. C. Wyeth’s image Jim Hawkins Leaves Home from the 1911 edition of Treasure Island makes explicit a world divided between the mundane and adventure. (See ch. 1, fn 13.) Additionally, Wyeth creates a division between boyhood and manhood, or the ambiguous

members of pirate crews or those battling pirate crews in To Have and To Hold,

Blackbeard Buccaneer, or Rose of Paradise. According to Captain Hook, "Never was

luck on a pirate ship wi' a woman on board. We'll right the ship when she's gone."64 The

authors of pirate tales seem to have agreed with this sentiment. Leaving out the sexual

confusion associated with interacting with women, they favored instead all-male

adventures akin to playing collegiate sports, watching boxing matches, or hanging out at

men’s clubs.

This is not to suggest that women and girls did not read the stories of Barrie,

Stevenson and their contemporaries; on the contrary, they must surely have done so.

During the four decades of the fin-de-siècle period, pirate tales appeared most often in

gender-neutral magazines like Harper’s Monthly and Scribner’s or children’s magazines

like St. Nicholas and Young Folks. In the years following this era, stories even began to

appear in women’s magazines, like, Ladies’ Home Journal in which the above-mentioned

Sabatini story appeared. Therefore, women and girls would have had ready access to

them. However, given the all-male casts of most pirate stories, the assumed audience is

most certainly male. A contemporaneous instance of assumed audience can be used for

comparison. Justifying the commercial potential for his fishing and hunting scenes,

Winslow Homer wrote, “You will find that the men of Pittsburgh will like these things

space of the bachelor. In the background is Jim’s young life: the inn in which he grew up and his mother weeping into her aprons. Jim travels toward the viewer on the gravel path, his back to his mother, as he steps into his new world of adult responsibility. Wyeth chooses to depict this particular instant, a scene that represents the liminal space between Jim’s youth and manhood. Noticeably, a woman must be left behind in order for Jim to grow up, and Nemerov describes this moment as “between adventurous imagination and maternal confinement.” Nemerov, “The Boy in the Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth’s Wreck of the ‘Covenant,’” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (2006): 12. 64. J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 224.

and the women will be curious to know what the men are liking and the first thing you

know you will have an audience.”65

The illustrators, such as the man-boy N. C. Wyeth, looked to their own desires in

order to craft a suitable pirate for their intended audience. Wyeth’s biographer David

Michaelis draws parallels between the Silver-Hawkins relationship and Wyeth’s own

relationship with his teacher and mentor Howard Pyle. Michaelis states, “Tall, strong,

with a ‘great, smooth, blond face,’ Silver not only evokes Pyle physically but shares with

Pyle … the trait of grandiosity.”66 His images for Treasure Island, then, were Wyeth’s

way of growing up. He worked through his disillusionment about his own Long John

Silver and ultimately found success as an illustrator and independence from his

adolescent hero. Simultaneously, however, Wyeth suffered from the turn-of-the-century

desire to never grow up, a familiar expression from another pirate story protagonist. At

the time he was creating images for Treasure Island, Wyeth writes, “They [Wyeth’s

neighbors] treat me now as a man of affairs and judgment, and I dislike it. I would rather

always be the boy, more or less irresponsible and dependent.”67 Wyeth’s Dancing Bear

image acts as a visual representation of these contradictory sentiments. While indeed

Hawkins holds his own by pulling forcefully against Silver’s restraints, he is nonetheless

still attached to him by what Michaelis describes as an “umbilical cord.”68

Looking at and reading about Jim Hawkins’s adventures (or the adventures of

characters like him) helped prevent a boy or his illustrator from becoming, in the words

65. Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (undated), Scrapbook, Winslow Homer and Homer Family Papers, microfilm roll no. 2932, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For more information about Winslow Homer and the popularity of his outdoor scenes, please see Sarah Burns, "Revitalizing the 'Painted-out' North: Winslow Homer, Manly Health, and New England Regionalism in Turn-of-the-Century America," American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 32. 66. David Michaelis, N. C. Wyeth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 204. 67. N. C. Wyeth to Henriette Wyeth (mother), 6 June 1911, qtd. in Michaelis, N. C. Wyeth, 204. 68. Ibid., 205.

of G. Stanley Hall, a “milk sop, a lady-boy, or a sneak.”69 Given the childhood development standards of the time, though, the illustrator should not have been allowed into this boys’ club. Hall asserts that during adolescence, “those who up to that time seem like their father begin to show maternal traits” and again that “woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does.”70 In his many psychological works, such as “On

Specialization” from 1897, Adolescence from 1904, and later in “Feminization in School and Home” from 1908, Hall presents adolescence as an ambiguous space not just between boyhood and manhood, but also between femininity and masculinity. It was a stage in development that males had to experience, but ultimately go beyond in order to become men. Wyeth, therefore, should have been well passed such boyish interests.

Perhaps this is why, despite the promotional material discussed above, bachelor culture also faced its share of criticism. In an article titled “A Successful Bachelor,” Leon

H. Vincent critiques, “Bachelorhood is a normal condition up to a certain period in a man’s life, and after that it is abnormal.” He goes on to describe unmarried men as if they were underdeveloped creatures: “This country is crying for help in taking care of its timid bachelors, help in marrying them off; and if they will not marry, help in getting them well housed and neatly mended.”71 In an earlier book titled A Bachelor’s Talks about

Marriage and Things Adjacent (1884), the unwed author expresses his sense of inferiority. He laments his own state of singlehood, while also validating his ability to speak on marriage. He asserts,

69. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), 216- 7. 70. G. Stanley Hall, “On Specialization” (address at the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of Union College, June, 1895; printed by the College, New York, 1897), 239; Hall, Adolescence, vol. 2, 624. 71. Leon H. Vincent, “A Successful Bachelor,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1898, 805.

It is a great mistake to suppose we bachelors do not know anything about home or children. Because I do not have a wife and do not keep house and have no children that I can call my own, it by no means implies that I have not some very excellent ideas about wives and homes and children. Ah me! if I had not had some ideas, perhaps I might have had them all! But let that pass.72

While bachelorhood spelled potential for adventure and youthfulness, its espousal of

immaturity could just as easily become disastrous. Or, as George Ade explained in 1922,

“the bachelor, as a type, has become fictionalized into a fascinating combination of

Romeo and Mephistopheles.”73 It was acceptable for boys and adolescents to embrace boy culture, but what about turn-of-the-century men, who espoused bachelor culture rather than marriage? They strode a fine line between femininized arrested development and maturity.

This line spelled the difference between acceptable and degenerate behavior.

Feminized arrested development is one step away from homosexuality, and the homosexual, according to nineteenth-century doctors and psychologists, was a degenerate, an invert, or a woman in a man’s body. He participated in sexual behavior with – or expressed romantic feelings toward – other men.74 By contrast, other intimate interactions between men, like friendship, patronage, and mentoring, were socially acceptable and even encouraged. 75 Activities associated with bachelor culture, including

intercollegiate sports, or even drinking and swearing in men’s clubs, promoted

homosociality, a term used more recently by sociologists to distinguish homosexual from

72. William Aikman, A Bachelor’s Talks about Married Life and Things Adjacent (New York: Fowler C. Wells, 1884), 14. 73. George Ade, Single Blessedness and Other Observations (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1922), 16. 74. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 83. The interest in categorizing behavior as homosexual was a late- nineteenth century invention, paralleling and further revealing the anxieties that arose around the blurring of female and male spheres. 75. Anthea Callen, "Double and Desire: Anatomies of Masculinity in the Later Nineteenth Century," Art History 26, no. 5 (2003): 672.

heterosexual behavior. To “be a man” in this era, one had to learn what constituted appropriate homosocial bonding and what ventured into homosexual degeneracy.

Pirates are problematic role models for those learning to “be a man,” especially given that pirate histories venture into the taboo territory of homosexuality. Before they took to sea, buccaneers were French hunters on Hispaniola who hunted and cured wild- bull and cow meat, selling it on Tortuga in order to procure guns and other hunting supplies. Exquemelin describes these buccaneers much in the same way as he describes the sea pirates that soon followed; they are men who spend their money on “all manner of vices and debauchery, particularly to drunkenness,” and who “freely gratify their lusts; for which they find more women than they can use.”76 However, an almost unequivocal suggestion of homosexuality, tantamount to a marriage, can be found in Exquemelin’s account of the first buccaneers:

It is a constant custom amongst them all, to seek out a comrade or companion, whom we may call partner in their fortunes, with whom they join the whole stock of what they possess towards a common gain. This is done by articles agreed to, and reciprocally signed. Some constitute their surviving companion absolute heir to what is left by the death of the first.77

Howard Pyle’s historical recounting in “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main” describes this union in even more explicit terms. Using Exquemelin as his example, he also explains this contract, but calls it a “strange union” that is “so near, so close, that it can scarce be compared to any other than that of husband and wife.” He goes on to state that upon this union, “thenceforth they were as one man; they lived together by day, they

76. A. O. Exquemelin, The Buccaneers and Marooners of America, ed. Howard Pyle (1678; New York: MacMillan and Company, 1891), 72. 77. Ibid., 71.

slept together by night.”78 In written accounts, even from Pyle himself in a fin-de-siècle

magazine, homosexuality and pirates are linked. How, then, could pirates have become

heroes for a sexually anxious male audience?

The answer is glamour. “The pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid

glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about,”79 Pyle gushes in 1891. Glamour

creates desire for an object in the mind of the viewer, but it also establishes a distance

between the object and the viewer, in this case, between the pirate and the magazine or

book reader. Peter Bailey, who writes about glamour and its relationship to Victorian

culture, explains the importance of this distance, saying that it “sustains and protects the

magical property that is commonly recognised [sic] in glamour.” Distance also

“heightens desire through the tensions generated by the separation of the glamour object

and the beholder.”80 By mythologizing the pirate and replacing his history with multisensory experiences that beg for vicarious enjoyment, Golden Age illustrators created a glamorous figure, an icon so far removed from any turn-of-the-century reality that his questionable sexuality gets sublimated into a fantastical life of homosocial bachelorhood.

Beginning with his first pirate image Walking the Plank, Howard Pyle transforms from pirate historian to pirate fantasy-creator. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century pirate enthusiasts such as Pyle had access to historical accounts of piracy by the likes of

Alexander Exquemelin and Daniel Defoe. Though first published in the 16th and 17th centuries, respectively, both accounts showed continued success with editions published

78. Howard Pyle, "Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main," pt 1, Harper's Monthly, August 1887, 358. 79. Howard Pyle, introduction to Buccaneers and Marooners, 15. 80. Peter Bailey, “Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype,” Gender and History 2 (1990): 152.

throughout the nineteenth century. 81 Pyle himself even had a 1724 edition of Defoe’s popular tome in his personal library, and he edited an edition of Exquemelin’s

Buccaneers in America in 1891. But, despite this historical inventory, Pyle veered into fiction. There are no accounts in Pyle’s references, ie., Defoe or Exquemelin, of buccaneers forcing victims to walk the plank.82 It is pure fantasy. The myth probably grew out of Defoe’s historical depiction of the Cilicians (Ancient Roman pirates) from first century B.C. Referencing Plutarch, Defoe states,

But was most barbarous, was a Custom they had when they took any Ship, of enquiring of the Persons on board, concerning their Names and Country; if any of them said he was a Roman, they fell down upon their Knees, as if in a Fright at

81. Howard Pyle himself draws attention to the ubiquity of these works in his introduction to Exquemelin’s text. He says, “As in the case of [Exqeumelin’s] “The History of the Buccaneers,” Johnson’s [a.k.a., Defoe’s] works have gone through numberless editions, so that if by the quantity of books we measure the popular regard, Black-beard and Kidd and Avery … have a very dear place in the hearts of the people.” Howard Pyle, introduction to Exquemelin, Buccaneers and Marooners, 41. Pyle refers to Daniel Defoe as Johnson in his introduction because Captain Charles Johnson is the name that appears on several volumes of the historical pirate tome now ascribed to Defoe. Some scholars suggest that Defoe adopted this moniker in order to give credibility to his descriptions. Others, however, contend that Captain Johnson is not an alias assumed by Daniel Defoe, but an historical author in his own right. For a more detailed discussion of this disagreement, please see David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995), xix-xx. 82. Jan Rogozinski, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pirates (Hardfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997), 359. Pyle describes plank-walking as an action taken by the pirate Captain Edward Low during the attack on the Greyhoud. This is Defoe’s full account of Low’s Greyhoud incident, and there is no mention of plank-walking: “The Rovers looking out for Prey, soon saw, and gave Chase to the Man of War, which was called the Greyhound, a Ship of 20 Guns and 120 Men, rather inferior in Force to the two Pyrate Vessels: The Greyhound finding them so eager, was in no doubt what they should be, and therefore tack’d and stood from them, giving the Pyrates an Opportunity to chase her for two Hours, till all Things were in Readiness for an Engagement, and the Pyrates about Gun-Shot off; then, the Greyhound tack’d again, and stood towards the two Sloops, one of them called the Fancy, commanded by Low himself, and the other the Ranger, commanded by Harris, both which hoisted their piratical Colours, and fired each a Gun. When the Greyhound came within Musquet-Shot, she hauled up her Main-Sail, and clapp’d close upon a Wind, to keep the Pyrates from running to Leeward, and then engaged: But when the Rogues found who they had to deal with, they edg’d away under the Man of War’s stern, and she standing after them, they made a running Fight for about two Hours; but little Wind happening, the Sloops gained from her, by the help of their Oars; upon which the Greyhound left off firing, turned all Hands to her own Oars, and at three in the Afternoon came up with them. The Pyrates haul’d upon a Wind to receive the Man of War, and the Fight was immediately renewed, with a brisk Fire on both Sides, till the Ranger’s Main-Yard was shot down, and the Greyhound pressing close upon the disabled Sloop, Low, in the other, thought fit to bear away, and leave his Consort a Sacrifice to his Enemy, who (seeing the Cowardice and Treachery of his Commadore and Leader, having ten or twelve Men killed and wounded, and that there was no Possibility of escaping), called out for Quarters, and surrender’d themselves to Justice, which proved severe enough to them a-while afterwards.” Daniel Dafoe, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. M. Schonhorn (1724; Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1972), 328-329.

the Greatness of that Name, and begg’d Pardon for what they had done, and imploring his Mercy, they used to perform the Offices of Servants about his Person, and when they found they had deceived him into a Belief of their being sincere, they hung out the Ladder of the Ship, and coming with a Shew of Courtesy, told him, he had his Liberty, desiring him to walk out of the Ship, and this in the Middle of the Sea, and when they observed him in surprise, as was natural, they used to throw him overboard with mighty Shouts of Laughter; so wanton they were in their Cruelty.83

As Rogozinski speculates in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Pirates, a late nineteenth- century pirate enthusiast read this particularly exciting story in Defoe’s accounts and confused ancient Roman pirates with Caribbean buccaneers.

A late eighteenth century source is more likely the culprit in this mix-up. Titled A

Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, this volume defines “walking the plank” as a

“mode of defstroying devoted perfons or officers in a mutiny on fhip-board, by blindfolding them, and obliging them to walk on a plank laid over the fhip's fide; by this means, as the mutineers fuppofe, avoiding the penalty of murder.”84 The phrase, therefore, was available for nineteenth-century readers. However, only a handful of accounts exist in which pirates confessed to forced plank walking, and these accounts came after the Golden Age of Piracy. Late nineteenth century lovers of pirate lore – Pyle among them – did not invent this piratical activity, but instead focused upon an obscure, but fanciful, punishment and made it synonymous with piracy. As Rogozinski elaborates,

“the plank and the blindfold was a stroke of inspired fancy and vicarious sadism.”85

Pyle’s students got in on the myth-making as well. Wyeth’s Dancing Bear (fig.

33) depicts the infamous Long John Silver, whose body becomes another familiar

83. Ibid., 29. 84. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for S. Hooper, 1788) unnumbered pages, therefore this entry appears in alphabetical order under the title “Walking the Plank,” 251 pages from the title page. 85. Rogozinski, Dictionary, 359.

example of pirate fantasy. Wyeth creates Silver replete with peg leg and parrot, and his

depiction draws accurately from Stevenson’s description, which reads, “His left leg was

cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he

managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird.”86 Later, the reader learns that Silver’s parrot repeatedly shrieks “pieces of eight.”87 However, Stevenson’s

creation, and therefore Wyeth’s dissemination, of these attributes are based on fiction, not

fact. While perhaps displaying a subliminal connection to post-Civil War amputees, peg

legs were rare in historical accounts of pirates, and parrots are not even mentioned in

contemporary documents.88 But, in the creation of pirate fantasy, these attributes that

stray from historical accuracy became synonymous with pirates, and examples began to

pop up after Treasure Island’s publication. Schoonover imagined his own version of

Long John Silver in 1920 (fig 35). Though the peg leg is conspicuously absent, a large,

squawking bird flaps on the pirate’s shoulder. By the dawning of the pirate film era, peg

legs and parrots became among the most recognizable of the pirate’s props, a fact that

will be discussed further in chapter five.

If illustrators steered their pirates away from historical truth, at least they were

dead-on in creating multisensory, powerful scenes. “Project your mind into your subject

until you actually live in it,” Howard Pyle instructed his students; “throw your heart into

86. Stevenson, Treasure Island, 46. 87. Ibid., 58-9. “And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ till you wondered that it was not out of breath, or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage” (ibid.). 88. Rogoziński , Dictionary, 250-1. “Parrots flourished in the Caribbean islands and Central America. Although they are not mentioned in contemporary documents, it is possible that some buccaneers kept them for pets” (ibid.). For information on post-Civil War American culture and its reaction to Civil War casualties (both the living and the dead), please see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008); Mark S. Shantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Larry M. Logue and Michael Barton, eds., The Civil War Veteran: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

the picture then jump in after it.”89 With this philosophy in mind, Walking the Plank (fig.

2) – despite its historical inaccuracies – is successful for creating sights, textures, and feelings through its realistic portrayals. The smiling faces of the pirates on deck are clearly visible, and the viewer can almost hear their laughter or grumblings of pleasure. A salty wave crashes against the side of the ship, and rivulets trickle back down into the ocean. The taut posture of the victim creates a noticeable tension moments before he will crash into the sea. Pyle follows his own advice. His imagery creates desirous looking, or as Pyle puts it, “the lurid glamour of the heroical.”

For Golden Age pirate illustrators, their glamorous imaginings do not just supplement the text, but create a palpable storyline all on their own. “Art is not a transcript nor a copy,” Pyle explained to his students. “Art is the expression of those beauties and emotions that stir the human soul.”90 Marooned, although one of the quietest of Pyle’s images, is also one of his most stirring (fig. 36).91 With his slumped shoulders, rejected bottle of rum, and the expanse of nothingness surrounding him, the marooned pirate demands sympathy. His crew has abandoned him, he must fend for himself, and the viewer empathizes with this man in his struggle against nature.

Several images even create a “lurid glamour” by acknowledging the viewer’s presence. Pirates sometimes invite the viewer into the adventure or else castigate him for his intrusion. In Pyle’s The Flying Dutchman, for instance, the captain’s red-rimmed eyes

89. Allan Tupper True recorded these words after one of Howard Pyle’s lectures. According to Pyle’s biographer, “Quite a number of the students tried to capture the words and phrases that moved them deeply. Allan Tupper True often tried to set down the actual words immediately after class, before his memory played tricks.” Pitz, Howard Pyle, 160. For True’s notes, see “Excerpts from the Notebook of Alan Tupper True,” Pyle MS Collection, Box 18a, Folder 5 (hereafter referred to as True Notebook). 90. True Notebook. 91. Pyle created three versions of Marooned. This 1909 painting, along with another from the same year, remained unpublished, while the first version from 1887 accompanied his article “The Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main.”

are partially obscured by his hat, but they stare directly out (fig. 37). His cursed crew looks out as well, but their gazes betray their desperation. Poised unsteadily on the ship’s deck, the viewer is the stability they seek. A red-eyed, desperate pirate from Blackbeard’s crew similarly seeks asylum with the viewer in Schoonover’s Blackbeard in Smoke and

Flame (fig. 38). The eyes of two pirate captains, in figures 39 and 40, however, portray no fear, instead staring directly out, confronting the viewer’s gaze. Captain Kidd issues a similar challenge in figure 41. As he observes his crew digging in the sand for his spoils,

Kidd turns conspicuously towards the viewer, glaring menacingly as if this uninvited guest might dare to steal his loot.

In some instances, the pirates not only look out at the viewer, but involve him in the illustration’s violent action. Case in point is the first illustration in Pyle’s article

“Jamaica, New and Old” (fig. 5). A frightening pirate uses the “I” as a barrier as he takes aim at the viewer/enemy and holds up another, smoking pistol. He is clearly not afraid to shoot. Also in Blackbeard’s Last Fight, amidst the chaos of fallen, falling, and dueling men, a pirate in the background involves the viewer in the violence by pointing his pistol directly at him (fig. 42). Schoonover follows this technique as well in his cover to

Blackbeard Buccaneer (fig. 43). As the pirate captain scrambles onto the ship’s deck brandishing his sword, a crew member focuses his gaze and the barrel of his gun at the viewer. In this manner, Pyle and his students rely upon a device familiar to their contemporaries, a style which Alan C. Braddock describes as “gun vision.” A gun vision image “invites and returns our gaze, incorporating us into the drama” and gives us an

“emphatic sense of ‘being there.’”92

92. Alan C. Braddock, “Shooting the Beholder: Charles Schreyvogel and the Spectacle of Gun Vision,” American Art 20, no. 1 (2006): 45, 46. Braddock’s argument is particularly helpful in explaining

This sense of “being there” is decidedly absent from images prior to illustration’s

Golden Age. Fin-de-siècle images stand as adventure fictions, but the earlier images

function as portraits. Captain Roberts (fig. 44) from Defoe’s General History, for

instance, stands prominently displaying his sword in his right hand while he cocks his left

elbow and rests his left hand on his hip. He stands in close proximity to the viewer,

towering over the seascape behind him. To his left is a fleet of ships, and the viewer

assumes he has command of these myriad vessels. The caption to the piece even sounds

like a portrait description: “Captain Bartho. Roberts with his ship Royal Fortune and her

consort Ranger in Whydah Road on the coast of Guinea, 11th January 1722.” The details

of time and place emphasize Defoe’s interest in historical precision. The earlier history of

pirates by Exquemelin includes even more stylized portraiture. These portraits stop at the

waist, provide a title and short description in a plate beneath the image, and suggest, like

Defoe’s, the action in the far distance. Furthermore, with the focus on the upper half of

the body, there is greater attempt to identify these portraits by facial features rather than

by the trappings of pirate life. Francois Lolonois and Bartholomeus de Portugues, for

instance, both hold swords, but the swords lead the eye to their very different faces (figs.

45 and 46)93 Turn-of-the-century examples shift quite dramatically by inviting the viewer to empathize with the pirates or perhaps even to “be there” with them.

the importance of a new way of seeing, which arose at the turn of the century through innovations such as spectacles and motion pictures. Furthermore, Braddock asserts that gun vision adds an extra-narrative that is not specifically explained by the story within the painting itself. I would contest, however, that Pyle and his students employed gun vision techniques in order to draw the viewer even further into the narratives that their illustrations accompanied. 93. To be sure, some fin-de-siècle fantastical pirates align more closely with the traditional portrait imagery laid out in Defoe and Exquemelin’s histories. An example is Captain Keitt, which Pyle created for his story “The Ruby of Kishmoor” and which appeared in Harper’s Monthly in August of 1907. In it, Captain Keitt’s pose resembles Captain Roberts’s. However, despite this seemingly traditional portrayal, it is important to take into consideration the nature of the accompanying story. “The Ruby of Kishmoor,” according to Abbot, is “the crowning triumph of the sensational, fantastical pirate vein,” and “it is both

However, simultaneously and paradoxically, these illustrations create a distance

between image and reader. Never is this phenomenon made more glaringly clear than

when glamorous fiction butts up against reality. An 1892 newspaper headline, for

example, exclaims, “Six Young Pirates. Six Frisky Freebooters who have been living like

Oriental Princes.”94 Another article tells a similar sad tale of “Pirates Bold. Young Lads

Indulge in a Brief and Inglorious Career.”95 A final example reports, “Cities Near Home.

A Gang of Youthful Land Pirates.”96 In each of these instances, a group of boys – no doubt enthralled by fantastical pirate lore and indoctrinated into boy culture to boot – were caught stealing money and/or jewelry from the homes of wealthy men.

Several adventurous boys in 1895 Philadelphia attempted to live the pirate life in a more extreme example. “It was the story of four precocious youths,” the article states,

“who, finding life ashore flat and insipid, captured a yacht, bought two boxes of beer, and then set out to sea with befuddled brains and a determination to re-enact the deed of the redoubtable Capt. Kidd.” One of the boys interviewed by the police even confessed that they had organized themselves into a club called the “Playful Pirates” with a mission to

“sweep… the North Atlantic and mak[e] innumerable seamen walk the plank.”97 For the younger members of the reading audience, glamorous Golden Age illustration blurred the

lively and droll, deliciously hyperbolical and at the same time straightforwardly simple” (149-50). Given the story’s over-the-top style, a technique that seems to poke fun at historical pirate tales, it is my conjecture that Pyle may have purposely referred back to Defoe’s history in his illustrations as well. Captain Keitt, his over-the-top qualities, and his relationship to pirate movies are discussed further in chapter five. Another example of a portrait-like portrayal is in “Stand and Deliver!” an N. C. Wyeth color illustration for the cover of Life (September, 22 1921). Although the figures are not betraying any direct action, the billowing Jolly Roger creates a sense of movement, and the pirates’ uplifted swords and open mouths indicate imminent action. 94. Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), “Six Young Pirates,” June 9, 1892. 95. St. Paul Daily News, “Pirates Bold,” March 31, 1892. 96. Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR), “Cities Near Home,” January 17, 1892. 97. Boston Daily Advertiser, “Bold Pirates These,” August 7, 1895.

line between vicarious adventure and real-life mistakes. Their youthful blunders go far to point out the sheer distance between buccaneer and boy.

Palpable imagery – pirate myths that even spurred young boys to “turn pirate” – still had to deal with the “problem” of sex. Giving the viewer a glimpse or even the sensation of sexual pleasure is a key component of glamour. And, unlike walking the plank or peg legs, sexual titillation can be found in earlier pirate imagery. Defoe, for instance, incorporates the stories – and several volumes also include portraits – of Mary

Read and Anne Bonny. Like their male counterparts, these female pirates are portrayed along with accoutrements of their chosen profession: swords, pistols, and axes.

Furthermore, they stand in front of distant ships, which iconographically identify them as seafarers. There is little doubt that Defoe included Bonny and Read as a sexual fantasy so he could create a topsy-turvy world in which women wore pants, murdered men, lived by their own laws, and formed heterosexual attachments to the virile Captain Rackham.98

The heterosexual male fantasy, however, is made even more explicit in the way Bonny and Read are painted (figs. 47 and 48). They bare their breasts, revealing the secret of their sex, a fact that the historical women hid in order to join piratical crews.

Turn-of-the-century images remove this exhibitionism, but they also remove women almost entirely. This mythologizing suggests a pre-adolescent fantasy of male, homosocial bonding akin to the pleasures of bachelor and boy cultures. It is true, though, that the sexual element cannot be removed altogether as all-male casts – not unlike John

L. Sullivan or myriad ballplayers – become the objects of a desirous gaze. However, distance, and its importance to glamour, reasserts itself in respect to this issue of sex.

While suggesting illicit pleasure (i.e., the homosexual pleasure of a man viewing another

98. Defoe, General History, 153-65.

man’s body), glamour paradoxically helps to prevent illicit behavior. Going back to

“Why Don’t You End It?” (fig. 18), Pyle creates a sexually charged scene. There is a

sense of heightened emotion at the center of the image as the two players lunge at each

other with their phallic swords upraised. Furthermore, the intent gazes of the onlookers

make the duelers’ display a scopophilic one. The emotional fight-to-the-death scene,

combined with the absence of women as their prize, implies that the duelers themselves

are the objects of homosexual desire. Pyle is not alone; his students have a few images

that drift toward forbidden waters as well. Israel Hands and his companion are “locked

together” in figure 28 as the two combatants clasp hands, lunge toward each other, and

tear at clothing that already exposes their muscular flesh. The overlapping bodies in

Schoonover’s Fight! (fig. 11) also features exposed flesh, a sword skewering its victim,

and a rigid spear, pointing at another victim’s neck and creating a dramatic diagonal

across the picture plane.

However, the desire that these images create is not forbidden, but instead

parasexual, a balancing act between release and containment. Glamour is not only

exhibited through distance from the desired object, but a distance coupled with

parasexuality, which Bailey describes as “an inoculation in which a little sexuality is

encouraged as an antidote to its subversive properties.”99 The undeniable sexual charge

is, therefore, offset by “convention, idealisation [sic] and displacement.”100 The illustrator displaces sexuality onto inanimate objects, i.e., the pirates’ swords in Pyle’s image or the thrusting spear in Schoonover’s. Furthermore, the subject of dueling gentlemen swordsmen preys on a convention rich with familiar illustrative samples from Pyle’s The

99. Bailey, “Parasexuality,” 148. 100. Ibid., 153.

Duel, which accompanies S. Weir Mitchells’s story Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker to

Wyeth’s medieval swordplay in The Boy’s King Arthur (fig. 49). Similarly, the hand-to- hand combat in Wyeth’s illustration may be a boxing match gone awry, but it relies on the convention of man-versus-man struggles nonetheless. Finally, all three illustrators idealize their pirates. Like John L. Sullivan looking down on his adoring crowds, the illustrated pirate lives far above real-life, turn-of-the-century concerns; he is mythic, fantastical, and the epitome of adventure and bachelorhood. In an era replete with men escaping women through sporting and club activities, illustrators sublimate the glamorized pirate’s sexual energy into homosocial – not homosexual – desire.

The pirate transforms into a new icon at century’s end. He signifies a male adventurer among fellow male adventurers. Manipulated into this category through the imaginations of Pyle, Wyeth and Schoonover, the pirate becomes a glamorous character for men seeking the comforts of bachelor culture and also for boys adding their boisterousness to boy culture. Fin-de-siècle pirate illustration reveals and relieves the gender issues facing Victorian men. Pyle himself is an excellent example of his target audience. While he was a family man, devout Quaker, and Victorian gentleman, his words and his imagery suggest an inner imaginative world in which the pirate’s “lurid glamour” is “heroical.” In a fantastical place, running rampant with plank walkers, chirping parrots, pirates taking aim at your head, and duels to the death, the befuddled male viewer – not to mention the illustrator himself – was allowed to escape into fantasy, but return to Victorian restraint unharmed.

Chapter Three

An Outlaw Hero for Brainworkers, Neurasthenics, and Captains of Industry

Fantasies pervade fin-de-siècle illustration. A young lad strives for heroics, for

instance, in the cartoon titled Johnny’s Ambitions, and How They Were Not Realized (fig.

9). A lively Johnny totes a gun against the Indians and wields a sword amidst

Revolutionary infantrymen. He also rescues a woman from a fire, knocks out his boxing

opponent, and rallies his pirate crew. Johnny indulges his schoolboy fantasies, and

physicality is the defining attribute.

The lower right hand corner, however, shows Johnny’s real life of office-work.

No longer the proud boy of his daydreams, Johnny frowns, looking much smaller next to an imposing boss and his office accoutrements. The caption reinforces the degradation that Johnny must suffer: “Humiliating circumstances, over which he has no control, however, have obliged him to accept a position as Office-Boy at a dollar-and-a-half per week.” Johnny is “humiliated” and “has no control” – these are the realities associated with white-collar work.

This Puck illustration commiserates with men struggling at the turn of the century

to maintain mental and physical acuity in an era of an increased need for office laborers.

The Puck artist also pessimistically highlights the humiliation of mental work, explicitly

stressing the growing gulf between the fantasy of physical action and the reality of paid

employment for a fin-de-siècle middle class. Interestingly, this tale, which applies more

readily to grown men, is related through the experiences of a child, perhaps to make the

protagonist more empathetic since a boy, more than a man, is allowed to be a dreamer.

Also, though, it could indicate that this is a growing trend affecting not only this generation of workers, but probably the next generation as well: Johnny could easily be enrolled into office work by his early teens. Office jobs take men and their younger counterparts away from dreams of physical action and heroism. Luckily, Golden Age illustrators indulge these fantasies, providing a vicarious escape as soldiers, cowboys, and even as pirates.

As Johnny’s daydreams attest, all kinds of heroes proliferated in book and magazine illustration. Charles D. Abbot, for example, in his biography on Howard Pyle, dedicates an entire chapter to Pyle’s Revolutionary and colonial heroes and another to his medieval knights. Among myriad examples, Pyle’s depictions include Revolutionary War history in Washington and Steuben at Valley Forge (fig. 50) as well as several others for

Woodrow Wilson’s essay “George Washington” from Harper’s Monthly (July 1896).

Pyle also educates young magazine readers in military history, for example, with his illustrations for “The Soldiering of Beniah Stidham” for St. Nicholas (fig. 51).

The line between appropriate and inappropriate hero begins to blur, however, with the pirate character. Wyeth and Schoonover, who worked primarily after the turn of the century, created not boy-pirates in their images, but instead pirates who resemble the strongman Eugen Sandow or the fictional Tarzan, King of the Jungle. For example,

Schoonover’s Blackbeard in Smoke and Flame epitomizes brute strength (fig. 38).

Schoonover places Blackbeard in the center of the composition, in close proximity to the viewer, and comparatively tall and bulky among his cowering crew. This impressive body connects directly back to the advent of physical culture. Describing this era, E.

Anthony Rotundo states, “As men felt their own sense of masculinity eroding, they

turned to fantasies that embodied heroic physical action, reading novels of the Wild West

and cheering the exploits of baseball and football players.”101 I would add the pirate to

Rotundo’s lineage of strong men. Like Johnny’s boxer, fireman, and cowboy fantasies,

Blackbeard was another surrogate of “heroic physical action.”

Blackbeard’s body is imposing. However, his image is frightful, and even evil.

“He looked like the Belial Whom He was So Fond of Claiming as His Mentor,” reads the illustration’s accompanying caption. Latching onto this comparison to the demon Belial,

Schoonover stresses his pirate’s underworld-liness as Blackbeard’s unusually large frame seems to rise out of the fiery cauldrons at his feet. Schoonover’s dangerous character develops from Howard Pyle’s Blackbeard (fig. 42), and this is most evident in

Blackbeard’s trademark, his braided beard. His physical stature is more pronounced in

Schoonover’s imagining; however, in both conceptions, Blackbeard is strong and spirited, but also sinister.

Edward Teach, alias Blackbeard, is a particularly salient example of where hero and anti-hero intertwine. Beginning as early as Defoe’s history, Blackbeard was an easy figure to romanticize and vilify. The debauchery mentioned in the previous chapter is one example of his outlaw behavior, but his appearance was also well documented and enticing. Defoe almost rapturously describes his villainous persona:

This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small Tails, after the Manner of our Ramilies Wiggs, and turn them about his Ears: In Time of Action, he wore a Sling over his Shoulders, with three Braces of Pistols, hanging in holsters like Bandaliers[sic]; and stuck lighted Matches under his Hat, which appearing on each Side of his Face, his Eyes naturally looking

101. E. Anthony Rotundo, "Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920," Journal of Social History 16, no. 4 (1983): 32.

fierce and wild, made him altogether such a Figure, the Imagination cannot form an Idea of Fury, from Hell, to look more frightful.102

The static portrait of Blackbeard that accompanies Defoe’s account does not yet convey

this drama (fig. 52), but the written description sets the stage for the possibility of

fantastical creations. Pyle’s and – even more so – Schoonover’s imaginative illustrations

emphasize strength and vigor, but also rage and wickedness.

Outlaw heroes – Blackbeard among them – were just as prevalent as cowboys and

soldiers, shaking up the category of heroic types by inserting a sense of ambiguity. More

popularly recognized by scholars and schoolchildren alike, Robin Hood, for instance, is

an outlaw and a hero. Robin carries a bow and arrow, and attacks and robs people in the

woods; however, he only steals from the rich in order to give to the poor. Ever since the

death of Robert of Locksley in c. 1247, the quasi-historical figure of Robin Hood has

been transformed into a fantasy of grass roots justice in stories such as The Gest of Robyn

Hode (late 14th-early 15th c.), Robin Hood and Little John (mid-17th c.), and Robin Hood

and the Golden Arrow (18th c.).103

With the dawning of the Golden Age of Illustration, his role took on new, mass-

circulated significance. Howard Pyle recreated the tales in his book The Merry

Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), but Pyle also established a new visual type for this

eponymous hero (fig. 53). With his leotards, short tunic, and feathered cap, the Robin

Hood Pyle visualized has flourished. Wyeth, again following his mentor, reiterated these

recognizable traits for his book Robin Hood from 1917 (fig. 54). In fact, Pyle’s imagining

102. Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (1724; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 84-5. 103. Mike Dixon-Kennedy, The Robin Hood Handbook: The Outlaw in History, Myth and Legend (Stroud: Sutton Publishing: 2006) 229-403.

has become so universal that viewers still identify Robin Hood by his tunic and cap most famously in Walt Disney’s 1973 animated feature.

Robin Hood is a thief with a caveat. His unlawful activity harms only the wealthy, and furthermore, helps the impoverished. Therefore, he is an ambiguous hero. He is not an antagonist, but not necessarily a role model either. According to Sarah Beach, an outlaw hero’s ambiguity questions contemporary social values:

The act of stepping outside the law of a society is inherently an act of criticism of that society. To celebrate an outlaw figure is to celebrate a criticism of a society. This, then, is the nature of an outlaw hero legend: the hero represents some criticism of the society that he comes from (for we can hardly say that an outcast belongs to the society). He is displaced socially, but he does not disappear. He is, as it were, an irritant in the course of events, because he criticizes and because he is unaccountable. Someone who plays by his own rules and not the rules of the surrounding society is an awkward and dangerous force.104

While the popular imagery of soldiers and knights upholds virtues like bravery and honor, the imagery of outlaw heroes questions the status quo. The viewer finds pleasure and fancy in unsavory characters, a dichotomy that forces the query, what exactly do we value?

Pyle, Schoonover, and Wyeth imagined an outlaw hero in the figure of the unsavory pirate. With his treasure-stealing, marooning, and plank-walking, the Gilded

Age pirate does not fit easily into the lineage of fin-de-siècle heroes. And tellingly, illustrators exaggerated the pirate’s objectionable side and also freely reconstructed history in order to concoct a fantasy aimed at turn-of-the-twentieth-century readers.

Piracy had in fact been rife in U.S. history, exposing the pirate sometimes as a villain and sometimes as a hero. During the era of the Revolutionary War, privateers thwarted

104. Sarah Beach, “Robin Hood and Green Arrow: Outlaw Bowmen in the Modern Urban Landscape,” in Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice, ed. Thomas Hahn (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 22.

English naval attacks against the colonies; on the other hand, at the turn of the nineteenth

century, Mediterranean corsairs aggravated U.S-African relations, leading directly to

American involvement in the Barbary Wars. Then, in the War of 1812, the freebooters

Jean and Pierre LaFitte saved the Mississippi Delta from English control. At mid-century, during the time of the Mexican-American War, filibusters helped U.S. expansionist efforts into neighboring Mexico, which represented a somewhat ironic role since the term filibuster generally is reserved to describe pirates who incite revolution, not promote imperialism. Finally, real-life piracy, from government-sanctioned privateering to expansionist-hungry filibustering, saw its last vestiges reappear for the final time in the

U.S. during the Civil War as the divided nation turned inward to solve its domestic crisis.

Notably, fantastical pirates were rarely privateers, corsairs, or filibusters. More often, they cruised through the Caribbean, drank rum, purloined treasure, and killed without conscience. This construction of the piratical character was derived from the

Golden Age of Piracy (1680s-1720s) described in Exquemelin (1684) and Defoe (1724).

In looking to these models, popular illustrators from the Golden Age of Illustration separated the pirate from U.S. history, setting him adrift in the their imaginations where he became a multifaceted hero and anti-hero.

Like Robin Hood, the pirate exists outside of society – often removed from

American history, in fact. He therefore questions what is on the inside. Also like Robin

Hood, who rebels through robbery, the pirate’s thievery identifies him as an outlaw. This role as outlaw hero, then, makes him an outsider particularly qualified to criticize the economic and class systems in the U.S. at the turn-of-the-century. The pirate “plays by

his own rules” and helps us to determine “the rules of surrounding society.”105 He invites the reader to follow him vicariously into this escape, and in this role, answers the questions, why was he so popular at the turn-of-the-century? And, against what did he allow contemporary America to rebel?

The pirate, with his physical strength, links him to other turn-of-the-century heroes. In his very first piratical image, Walking the Plank, Pyle exaggerates the pirates’ physical characteristics (fig. 2). The large, clenched fists of the victim, along with his broad shoulders and square jaw, suggest a sturdy, physically able body matched only by the square jaw and broad shoulders of his nemesis, the ship’s captain. This insistence on physicality is repeated in other violent images such as “Captain Malyoe Shot Captain

Brand Through the Head” and even in the quiet image Marooned, as the marooned man with large hands, forearms, and shoulders survives despite his imposing surroundings

(figs. 55 and 56). Furthermore, Blackbeard’s physical presence is undeniable, even if he is hidden behind several combatants (fig. 42). However, Pyle’s pirates do not always exhibit such physical strength. His To Have and To Hold lithograph, for instance, exchanges fitness for finesse while his image of Henry Morgan displays the captain as outright languid (figs. 57 and 58).

But it is the physically powerful type that takes hold. Wyeth and Schoonover’s pirates seem to emulate Pyle’s stronger characters. Treasure Island consists almost entirely of oversized men. For instance, in figure 30, Wyeth’s Long John Silver barely fits into his chair, crowding most of the room. Even in Wyeth’s image of Old Pew (fig.

59), the aging, sightless pirate with a walking stick and blindfold, does not look decrepit, but instead exhibits the large hands, bulging calf muscles, and broad shoulders of

105. Beach, “Robin Hood,” 22.

Wyeth’s other pirate types. In image after image, Wyeth’s characters show off large

muscles that peek out of falling stockings (figs. 59 and 33) or pushed-up shirt sleeves

(figs. 60, 61, and 28). And, even though the eponymous character from Rafael Sabatini’s

Captain Blood (1922) has a more elaborate costume (fig. 39), he still maintains the strong

jaw, large hands, and broad shoulders evident in Wyeth’s figures for Stevenson’s novel.

This emphasis on physicality is found in Schoonover’s illustrations as well. For

the story and subsequent book Blackbeard Buccaneer, Schoonover appears to copy

Wyeth’s composition as well as his predilection for strong men in Pirates Coming

Through Charleston (fig. 62). His line of rifle-carrying men resembles Wyeth’s pirates in

Treasure Island’s endpaper (fig. 17) with their large bodies that swell within the tight

picture-plane. Particularly emphasized are primordial characteristics such as bulging

forearms and biceps, clenched, muscular jaws, and prominent brow ridges.

Compositionally, the characters in both Wyeth’s and Schoonover’s illustrations stride

dramatically and diagonally to the left as they carry rifles and pistols towards an unseen

goal. Schoonover, furthermore, follows this muscular model for his book covers, one of

Long John Silver for the 1921 publication of Treasure Island and another for Paine’s

story of Blackbeard (figs. 35 and 43).

Such strong bodies proliferated because they represented a fantasy of health and

well-being for the middle class audience to whom they were meant to appeal. At the end of the century, and into the new one, physical culture became associated less with respectable work and more with recreation. This came about due to the changing face of

labor. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the “new” middle-class, comprising salaried

and unpropertied workers, expanded eightfold from 1870 to 1910. This represented an

increase of 33%, or from 33 to 66% of the entire middle class. Therefore, the majority of

the middle class became white collar, and furthermore, of the total male labor force in

1910, 20% was white collar.106 Gone was the physical labor associated previously with

work, replaced now by brainwork (i.e., reading, doing office work) carried out by 20% of

the entire work force.

Able bodies personified both physical and mental health, especially for male

office workers. Illnesses, such as mental fatigue, correlated particularly to the rise in

cerebral work and the accompanying decrease in physical labor. Concomitantly, a new

nervous disease emerged. Dubbed neurasthenia in 1869 by George Beard, the disease was

characterized by a variety of symptoms, including restlessness, backache, headache,

insomnia, tension, depression, and fatigue. By the 1880s, neurasthenia was epidemic,

affecting well-known elites such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Jr., John

LaFarge, Louis Sullivan, and Woodrow Wilson.107 Researchers and physicians connected

overwork to neurasthenic health problems. Furthermore, since it was believed that

brainwork was the “most notorious drain on the system,” they believed that the disease

most often affected those in occupations that required complex thought processes.

Accordingly, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a leading authority on neurasthenia, found that

businessmen were the most likely victims of this new disorder. Weir, who popularized

the rest cure, along with other health care professionals promoted a range of bodily health

practices from relaxation to exercise as a way to treat mental woes like neurasthenia.108

106. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC, 1960), 74. 107. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 186. 108. Rotundo, American Manhood 187. Nuerasthenia and its association with brainwork even indicated an advancement in human production, according to its analysts: “George Beard and other doctors who studied neurasthenia did not denigrate its victims or view it with alarm. Rather, they saw it as a

As one 1891 doctor prescribed, the cure for male sufferers included “sufficient rest and exercise during the twenty-four hours to offset the amount of work done.”109

As it was filtered into popular culture and literature, physical prowess became a source of escape and entertainment at the turn-of-the-century. A muscular body was a mark of prestige, and it became an ideal especially among mentally taxed, middle-class workers. The Masculine Primitive, a term coined by the social historian E. Anthony

Rotundo, developed idol status. This new type “stressed the belief that all males – civilised [sic] or not – shared in the same primordial instincts for survival … [with] a special respect – and concern – for a man’s physical strength and energy.”110 Popular culture latched on to this savage ideal as evidenced by the popularity of Sandow in the

1890s as well as a decade later with the eponymous character in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s

Tarzan of the Apes.111

Burroughs, importantly, represents the ultimate urban brainworker in need of revitalization in the wilderness. Burroughs wrote Tarzan when he was a thirty-six year old urbanite, husband, and father of two stuck in a white-collar job that he detested. The

symptom of progress. In this medical view, the human race had developed more complex societies in the course of evolution, and these societies moved at a faster pace. The human nervous system pressed to keep up with its own external creations, and some men who worked at the pinnacle of social evolution (that is, in professional and executive work) broke down from the strain” (ibid., 187). See also Sarah Burns, "Revitalizing the 'Painted-out' North: Winslow Homer, Manly Health, and New England Regionalism in Turn-of-the-Century America," American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 28; and E. Anthony Rotundo, "Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920," Journal of Social History 16, no. 4 (1983): 29. 109. Dr. Rufus Thurston to Martha Eaton, October 29, 1891, Eaton Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Archives. 110. E. Anthony Rotundo, "Learning About Manhood: Gender Ideals and the Middle-Class Family in Nineteenth Century America," in Manliness and Morality, eds. J.A. Mangen and James Walvin (New York St. Martin's Press, 1987), 40. “The language of the Masculine Primitive and the metaphors that dominated it – man as master animal, the world as harsh wilderness, life as a competitive struggle for survival – all reflect the impact of Darwinian thought as it filtered through to middle-class men.” (ibid., 46.) The race issues raised by the Masculine Primitive and Darwinism are addressed further in chapter four. 111. For a more detailed analysis of Eugen Sandow and Tarzan, and their relationship to turn-of- the-century masculinity, please see John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

author himself admits Tarzan presented an escape from the city, from brainwork, and from civilization for himself and his reader:

We wish to escape not alone the narrow confines of city streets for the freedom of the wilderness, but the restrictions of man made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us. We like to picture ourselves roaming free, the lords of ourselves and of our world; in other words, we would each like to be Tarzan. At least I would; I admit it.112

This admission is similar to N. C. Wyeth’s acknowledgment, cited in the previous chapter, that he wished to remain a boy. Like the relationship between Wyeth’s words and his Treasure Island images, Burroughs’s description here informs his art and gives insight into the desires of his audience as well.

Howard Pyle’s visual and written pirate depictions connect him to Burroughs,

Wyeth, and other middle-class men seeking revitalization. Similar to his protégé Wyeth,

Pyle regresses back to childhood when he asks, “To make my meaning more clear, would not every boy, for instance – that is, every boy of any account – rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament?” His distinction between pirates and government officials pinpoints the divide between adventurers and contemporary “brainworkers” susceptible to neurasthenia. Pyle makes it a point to answer his own question: “It is to be apprehended that to the ungenerated nature of most of us there can be but one answer to such a query” [my emphasis].113 Pirate stories and illustrations, according to Pyle,

112. Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Tarzan Theme,” Writer’s Digest (June 1932): 31. 113. Howard Pyle, introduction to The Buccaneers and Marooners of America, by A.O. Exquemelin, ed. Howard Pyle (1678; New York: MacMillan and Company, 1891), 15-16. Pyle is not the first to create the dichotomy between civilized life and the life of maritime adventure. The distinction is made even more clearly in an earlier story by Frederick Marryat who exclaims, “Every high-spirited boy wishes to go to sea … but if the most of them were to speak the truth, it is not that they so much want to go to sea, as that they want to go from school or from home.” Again, like Pyle’s use of “Parliament,” Marryat’s “school” and “home” symbolize nineteenth-century culture that stands in counter distinction to adventure. It is also notable that both authors mention boys, tapping into their readers’ memories of their own childhoods farther removed from the daily grind of labor. Frederick Marryat, Masterman Ready (1841; reprint, London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1896), 22.

provide much-needed adventure to male and young male readers and specifically to those

who face mental exhaustion and who idolize the Masculine Primitive, namely middle

class men and boys.

The Chicago cartoonist John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) imagined himself a

pirate – as Johnny does in Puck – but fulfilled his desires on his own island! In his

autobiography, McCutcheon explains that his “early ambition to be a pirate” began in

boyhood: “I looked wistfully down the dusty road to where a fringe of maple trees

marked the limits of my travels, a spirit of unrest stirred which I am afraid I have never

outgrown.”114 He first took a “Pirate Cruise,” traveling to Tortuga and Haiti and

“determined to fare forth and lay a tardy wreath on the shrine of Captain Kidd and his long-honored crew.”115 In 1916, an even more ambitious McCutcheon bought a

Caribbean Island, located near Nassau, which “had all the necessary requirements as to

location, climate and piratical antecedents.”116 On his own piratical land, nicknamed

“Treasure Island,” McCutcheon dug for buried treasure, and with “an ancient pistol and a cutlass or ‘snickersnee,’” dressed up in a costume that “was correct in every detail, from the tricorne hat, the pigtailed wig, the black patch and dropping mustachios to the skirted gold-buttoned coat, baggy red breeches and boots with flaring turned-down tops.”117

114. John T. McCutcheon, Drawn from Memory: Containing Many of the Author’s Famous Cartoons and Sketches (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950), 247-8. 115. Ibid., 248. 116. Ibid., 307. 117. Ibid., 341-3, 398. McCutcheon explains his forays into treasure hunting: “One of the greatest charms of the Island for me was that it lay in the heart of the old pirate belt. Along with Tortuga near Haiti and Port Royal in Jamaica, New Providence was one of the three great rendezvous of those gloriously inglorious Brethren of the Coast. My Island, providing a safe anchorage outside the range of the guns of the forts guarding either end of Nassau harbor, became their headquarters when negotiating with the governor or doing business ashore. Certainly it is within the bounds of possibility that the pirates may have buried some treasure here. We could not help keeping a weather eye out … Howard Shaw, always restless and constructive, approached this matter of treasure hunting in another way. Putting himself as it were in the boots of the pirates, he went about triangulating the higher fixed points of the Island and its nearer neighbors, landmarks that might not have changed appreciably with time, and where these lines converged,

Inspired by pirate stories and Pyle’s illustrations since his childhood, McCutcheon

provides a salient example of a middle-class man striving for excitement through piracy.

Though unable to buy their own island, at least businessmen James Allison,

President of Allison Motors, and the National Geographic Society’s John Oliver LaGorce got to play pirate in an unlikely portrait. In Wyeth’s The Duel on the Beach, commissioned by the entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, the two men watch the eponymous fight at center stage: Wyeth places them in the background between the two duelers (fig.

63). As letters from the National Geographic Society make plain, LaGorce provided the artist with photographs of Fisher and his friends so that Wyeth could use them as source material in creating his group portrait.118 LaGorce, in particular, with his crossed,

muscular arms and wide smile, is clearly enjoying his turn as piratical adventurer.

The pirate crew in Blackbeard in Smoke and Flame (fig. 38) does not participate

in McCutcheon’s or LaGorce’s fun and excitement, but is, rather, quite fearful of

Blackbeard’s wickedness and rage. Essential to admiring this pirate captain as hero was

the admiration of his physical body; however, another fundamental ingredient to his

success as fantasy was something anti-heroic: his lawlessness. Blackbeard adorns his

body with decoration. The gold loop in his ear attests not only to the beauty of his body

but also suggests his successful thievery. This inclusion of gold jewelry is one way of

referencing piratical misbehavior. A smattering of images by Pyle included gold

embellishments, for example, in The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow or another

he marked an X. We had a season of enthusiastic digging, but it is evident we made some slight error, for no ironbound chest rewarded our efforts” (ibid.). 118. Christine B. Podmaniczky, N. C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, vol. 1 ([Wilmington, DE]: Wyeth Foundation for American Art, 2008), 492. Incidentally, this is the same John Oliver LaGorce to whom Schoonover wrote his letter remembering his experiences in Jamaica, which was referenced in chapter one. LaGorce seems to have been quite the pirate enthusiast.

image titled How the Buccaneers Kept Christmas (figs. 12 and 64). By the beginning of the twentieth century, gold jewelry became a standard feature of the pirate type. These ornaments, along with activities such as digging for buried treasure (see figs. 41, 65, and

66) or capturing prisoners, act as easy referents to their thievery, or the behavior for which pirates are most well known. And while looting and robbing are characteristics that quickly separate the pirate from heroic types, the fantasy of this very behavior made him appealing to a middle class who struggled to gain and preserve status within a fluctuating, turn-of-the-century social system.

The American class system prides itself on its fluidity, which allows for the ‘self- made’ man to increase his wealth as well as his social stature. However, this system is a double-edge sword. That self-same, self-made man could find himself falling downward into poverty and social ruin. The upside and downside of the class system was in full swing during this economically unstable era, which saw the rise of big business and the subsequent need for salaried office workers. These economic changes created new, but also risky, opportunities for social advancement. With the growing extremes of wealth and poverty, the majority of Americans who fit within neither category strove for acceptance into the former and feared joining the ranks of the latter. Consequently, these

Americans came to identify with each other, based not solely upon monetary structures, i.e., having more money than the poor and less money than the rich, but also upon less tangible, social qualities like character and virtue. Middle-class men could feel stable among other middle-class men as they shared moral superiority.

This was especially touted in literature. “The crown and glory of life,” Samuel

Smiles asserts, “is character.”119 His book, along with myriad others in the self-help genre, flourished at this time precisely because it provided a solution within a volatile economy.120 Urban office-workers, and more especially, the men living in smaller towns throughout the United States who wanted entrée into the middle class, examined self-help books to learn that character “is the noblest possession of man, constituting a rank in itself.”121 And, these books provided very clear guidelines to gain “character” and therefore middle-class status. “Young man, two ways are open before you in life,” asserts

Harry A. Lewis. “One points to degradation and want, the other to usefulness and wealth.”122 Thus, self-made men achieved “usefulness and wealth” through

“unselfishness, kindness, justness, and generosity.”123 On the other hand, unsavory personal habits led to “degradation and want.” As Russell H. Conwell explains, “Strong drink of all kinds, highly seasoned food, late hours in entertainment weaken all the forces needed for the best achievement and need to be turned down or avoided with a will of steel.”124 Some self-help books even dictated the proper sartorial virtues, or keeping “neat and clean” instead of “shabby” or “flashy.”125 Character separated the middle-class from either extreme of wealth, or as the social historian Judy Hilkey puts it, “the overzealous,

119. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), 396. 120. For a more complete survey of the self-help genre and its proliferation in this era, please see Judy Hilkey, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 121. Smiles, Self-Help, 396. 122. Harry A. Lewis, Hidden Treasures, or Why Some Succeed While Others Fail (New York: A. W. Richardson and Co., 1887), 481. 123. William C. King, ed., Portraits and Principles of the World’s Great Men and Women, with Practical Lessons on Successful Life by over Fifty Leading Thinkers (Springfield, MA: King, Richardson, and Co., 1895), 386. 124. Russell H. Conwell, The New Day, or Fresh Opportunities: A Book for Young Men (Philadelphia: Griffith and Roland, 1904), 89. 125. Edward William Bok, Successward: A Young Man’s Book for Young Men (New York: Fleming H. Revell, Co., 1895), 115, 67.

ostentatious capitalists on the one hand and the unrestrained, unacculturated, immigrant

underclass on the other.”126 In other words, rather than focusing upon conduits to monetary gain, self-help manuals provided a path to class stability by clearly delineating appropriate personal habits.

With this in mind, the fantastical pirate is in a real sense a characterless character.

When enjoying images such as Schoonover’s They Were Filled with Blackbeard’s Own

Pirates, Wyeth’s cover to Treasure Island, or Pyle’s The Pirate Captain Looked

Impassively On (figs. 67 to 69), the viewer is not reminded of “kindness” or “generosity”.

Instead, the pirate’s strength, violence, and sense of adventure allude to damning vices like drinking, carousing, and leading a “highly seasoned” life. Trapped in a fluctuating class system over which they had tenuous control, turn-of-the-century writers, illustrators, and consumers could indulge their desires for freedom by viewing an outlaw hero happily devoid of “character.”

A barrage of newspaper articles equates the pirate to one of these vices in particular: theft. Headlines describe river pirates, land pirates, celestial (or Chinese) pirates, political pirates, dramatic pirates, railroad pirates, sand pirates, oyster pirates,

Pullman pirates, and literary pirates. A particularly sizeable number of articles in the early 1880s describe this last group of pirates, with reference to one incident involving an opera by William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Their release of Pirates of Penzance in 1881 brought Gilbert and Sullivan instant success in Great Britain and the United

States, and the interest in producing the play throughout America quickly followed.

However, the authors had not yet released a libretto or released their rights to the opera, and consequently mounted an attack against the literary pirates who were illegally

126. Hilkey, Character is Capital, 127-8.

appropriating their work. It seems particularly poignant that the issue of literary piracy arose at this time around U.S. production companies who were pirating, among other literary works, an opera about pirates.

These literary pirates were documented pictorially as well. For example, the title character in The Pirate Publisher dominates a two-page cartoon from Puck (fig. 70). The pirate publisher stands accused of piracy by English, German, and French authors, and

Gilbert, who is identified by the name on his cap, points his accusations among the other

English authors. In the accompanying poem, the publisher pirate “steal[s] our [English] brains for Yankee-land,” “takes our [French] novels and plays,” and “ravages Norway and Germanee.” American authors participate as well, claiming that they are “pillaged across the sea.” Like the pirates in newspaper headlines, Puck’s pirate is associated with outlawry as he “steals,” “takes,” “ravages,” and “pillages.” Paradoxically, the pirate stands upon a book titled “Law” and draws his accusers’ attention to this book, indicating to them that his thievery is legal. However, although he stands upon law, he personifies greed. He grabs at bags of money. He is also dressed quite lavishly with his gold watch fob, a diamond in the center of his chest, and an ostentatious coat the tails of which are bills demanding further payment. His wealth appears to be overflowing: he has a large belly and a coat bursting at the seams while coins fall to the ground between his legs. The literary pirate, then, does not have middle-class character. He looks instead like one of the “overzealous, ostentatious capitalists” denounced by self-help books.

Tellingly, the publisher pirate does not necessarily resemble the fantastical pirate heroes imagined contemporaneously by Pyle or later by Wyeth or Schoonover. He is not robustly muscular nor does he wear tattered clothing or brandish a weapon. The

fantastical pirate’s characteristic strength and sense of adventure are removed, leaving

behind only his vices. However, sartorially, the publisher pirate carries some of the same

signifiers of greed. He dons a long buttoned (if more bejeweled) coat similar to those

worn by Pyle’s pirate captains in Avary Sells His Jewels and the headpiece for “The Sea

Robbers of New York” (figs. 71 and 72). He wears swashbuckling boots that connect him

iconographically to the outlaw in many of Pyle’s pirate illustrations (see, for example

figs. 5, 26, 64, and 65). In fact, large brown boots that can be folded over at the knee are

integral to Pyle’s pirate images. Significantly, he passed these studio props to his student

N. C. Wyeth, who used them in The Duel on the Beach (fig. 63).127 Therefore, the iconography of the boots tenuously connects literary pirate to fantastical pirate. However, there is no ambiguity in Puck’s representation: the literary pirate is a despicable robber even as he stands upon the law to justify his thievery.

Perhaps even more significant than literary pirates, business piracy was in full swing at the turn of the century. Increased mechanization and innovation of industry brought with it a new and unstable economic system. Big business allowed for economic growth as well as new urban markets and increased per capita wealth, but at a cost. A

“great depression” characterized by “chronic overproduction and dramatically falling prices” marred the years 1873 to 1896. Furthermore, the last twenty years of the century produced a litany of problems, which Alan Trachtenberg describes as

constant market uncertainties and stiffening competition at home and abroad for business; inexplicable surpluses and declining world prices, together with

127. As an interesting side note, the life of Pyle’s prop boots continued in the art world beyond pirate illustration. This pair of French cavalier boots passed from N. C. Wyeth to his son, the painter Andrew Wyeth. The boots appear prominently in Andrew Wyeth’s 1951 self-portrait painting, Trodden Weed (fig 73).

tightening credit for farmers; wage cuts, extended layoffs and irregular employment, and worsening conditions, even starvation, for industrial workers.128

Considering the economic changes at the new century, the economic side of piracy assumes fresh significance.

And it was certainly an influence as the trope of the modern pirate outlaw appeared in newspaper headlines. Fin-de-siècle audiences embraced the comparisons between buccaneers of the past and the business pirates who stole money in the name of capitalism. Nowhere is this more obvious than in newspaper stories and illustrations. In one probably fictional conversation, a boy and his father discuss the boy’s future.129 The boy asks, “Pa, Charley Jenkins wants me to go off with him and be a pirate; may I go, pa?” The father responds, “No, there’s nothing in it my son. I am sorry to see you take such romantic views of life. Wait till you grow up, and then if you feel like becoming a pirate organize a trust.” With this brief and humorous interaction, it is clear that a new form of thievery – capitalism – has replaced the looting and robbing of eras passed. As the father indicates, organizing a trust is now a more profitable avenue to piracy.

This association was most damning in late nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper articles that launched accusations of piracy at the so-called captains of industry. Personified by the larger-than-life figures of Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie, among others, the captains of industry represented the consummate “self-made” American men who lifted themselves from the fray to fame and extreme wealth. However, they also garnered infamy through their less flattering moniker the “robber barons,” so-called because they produced wealth by creating trusts in

128. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 39. 129. Galveston Daily News (Houston, TX), “A New Field for Pirates,” February 25, 1889.

industries such as railroads, oil, and steel. As captains of industry or robber barons, these

men controlled U.S. economic interest in the fin-de-siècle period.

As early as 1867, articles began to equate piracy with the business practices of

these famous and infamous men. In an article titled “The Railroad Despotism,” the author

claims that Mr. Edwin A Stevens and Mr. Woolcott Jackson, men in control of the New

Jersey railroads, are “allied pirates.”130 The incendiary language ramps up in an 1876

article titled “The Wall Street Pirates.” In it, the author denounces “the notorious Jay

Gould and other equally ill-omened birds of prey” for victimizing “small capitalist from

outside, who persist in believing, against the evidence of their senses, that financial

contests in Wall street are conducted on principles of fair play.” The article names

Vanderbilt, Drew, Fisk, and Gould and accuses them of “swindling” and “robbing” and

“privateering,” all of which are piratical activities receiving a particularly negative, anti-

heroic connotation. The author even goes so far as to say that “Jay Gould ought long ago

to have been studying arithmetic in a jail, but he is still at liberty to enjoy the reputation

of a ‘brilliant financier.’”131

The accusatory rhetoric continues into the 1880s. The Chicago Daily Tribune headlines “Jay Gould as a Water-Pirate” in 1883. According to the accompanying article,

“… having wrecked pretty nearly everything he can lay his hands to on land, [Gould] has now commenced wrecking operations on the water with his new tug Atalanta, and selected as the first victim the tugboat Edwin Hawley.”132 As the hatred for big

businesses increased, the pirate analogy continues. “Standard Oil Pirates” is an

130. “The Railroad Despotism,” Round Table. A Saturday Review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society, and Art, February 9, 1867, 84. 131. Bangor (ME) Daily Whig and Courier, “The Wall Street Pirates,” November 27, 1872. 132. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Jay Gould as Water Pirate,” September 9, 1883.

accusation launched at the Rockefellers from a headline in 1899.133 In some cases, this metaphor becomes even more provocative. In another Chicago Daily Tribune article, the headline reads, “Flying the Black Flag. Jay Gould Drops the Pretenses and Formally

Turns Pirate.”134 Piracy comparisons create vitriol – not praise – for contemporary

financiers.

The new century brought various government interventions to control big

business, beginning with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890; however, nostalgic articles

continued to connect pirates and the captains of industry. In 1910, the New York Times

published “Daniel Drew’s Story of the Pirates of Erie,” which, accompanied by their

portraits, elaborates the stories of Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, and Boss

Tweed taken from the diary of the financier Daniel Drew.135 The article’s subtitle even goes so far as call these men “Great Buccaneers,” showing a predilection for the

Caribbean pirates fancied by Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. In the Times three years later, a headline tells how “Gary Says He Ended Steel Trust Piracy. But It Took Some

Time for His Policy to Stop Carnegie Methods, He Testifies.”136 In this last example, the business pirate is an outlaw whose “methods” led, the reader assumes, to instances of

“swindling,” “robbing,” and “wrecking” prevalent in other accusatory articles. However, this headline goes even further. Not only is the pirate the anti-hero, but the real hero is

E.H. Gary, the Chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, who has helped to bring these business pirates to justice.

133. Weekly Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), “Standard Oil Pirates,” December 21, 1899. 134. Chicago Daily Tribune, “Flying the Black Flag,” September 27, 1891: 1. 135. New York Times, “Daniel Drew’s Story of the Pirates of Erie,” April 10, 1910. 136. New York Times, “Gary Says He Ended Steel Trust Piracy,” June 10, 1913.

Images as well as newspaper headlines about the captains of industry exaggerate their greed and their thievery, or in other words, their piracy. Another image from Puck,

History Repeats Itself, draws the parallel between the medieval lords who demanded tolls for traveling the Rhine River and contemporary trust owners and monopolists who demand wages from the spectrum of U.S. citizenry, including farmers, factory workers, and middle-class gentlemen (fig. 74). While the cartoon does not actually refer to pirates, the robber barons possess characteristics associated with other Puck cartoons of pirates.

Their full bellies and bags of money symbolize their wealth and greed. Furthermore, like the literary pirate who stands on the book of Law, the robber barons hold swords marked

“Legislation,” inferring that their robbery uses law as a weapon against their victims.

Finally, the high boots that fold over at the knee are swashbuckler boots that connect these robber barons with other unsavory characters such as the literary pirate. The boots visually associate these barons with another image from Puck from 1880s titled In the

Robber’s Den (fig. 75). Though much thinner in this rendering, Gould plays robber as he collects skeletons in his “Victim’s Closet” and sits on bags of stocks and bonds. The scabbard in his belt and the long, swashbuckling boots reference again not just a robber’s costume, but the pirate’s sartorial choices.

Despite unflattering comparisons, the captains of industry did not necessarily shy away from such nasty associations. Instead, in at least one instance, the “captain” embraced the metaphor. J.P. Morgan, an investment banker who lived from 1847-1913, shares his surname with one of the most famous pirates recorded by Exquemelin, Defoe, and many authors thereafter: Captain Henry Morgan. According to Ferdinand Lundberg in 1937, Morgan enjoyed indulging association with his piratical namesake as he was

known “ jestingly to trace his ancestry back to Henry Morgan.” Furthermore, he named his yacht the Corsair and painted it “an anarchistic” black.137 In her biography of

Morgan, Jean Strouse recounts how Morgan’s actions further this comparison between businessman and pirate. In 1883, he organized a group of six – later, twelve – businessman whom he collectively called the Corsair Club. The purpose of the club was not piratical behavior; rather, the men took part in licit behavior such as sailing together in warm weather and meeting for dinners during wintertime.138

In many aspects of popular culture – from Puck cartoons to news reports to professional sports – there was an increased, albeit ambiguous, interest in pirates as outlaws in the fin-de-siècle era. Nowhere do we find a better example than in the story of

Honus Wagner. Wagner was a shortstop for Major League Baseball, and he played the game professionally between 1897 and 1917. He was a famous and talented sportsman who became one of the first 26 members to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at its inception in 1936. Furthermore and most importantly here, Wagner played for the

Pittsburgh Pirates, and he was nicknamed “The Flying Dutchman,” a piratical designation used also by Pyle.139 Players and fans gave him this nickname because of his German

137. Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families (New York: Vanguard Press, 1937), 5. 138. Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 207. 139. The legend of the Flying Dutchman existed in popular culture before the fin-de-siècle period as a maritime – not a pirate – tale. Wagner’s 1843 opera Der Fliegande Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), for instance, tells the story of a Dutch ship doomed to sail for all eternity, searching for a way around the Cape of Good Hope. Wagner based his work upon Heinrich Hein’s earlier satire Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski from 1833. Other adaptations of this myth include Washington Irving’s 1856 story “The Flying Dutchman of Tappan Sea” and the novel The Phantom Ship by Frederick Marryat (1839). Howard Pyle created Flying Dutchman in 1900, and although there is no specific reference to piracy (it does not accompany a pirate story or any story), the sailors on board the Flying Dutchman resemble Pyle’s other pirate types with tattered clothing, wide sashes, and dark faces. In more recent history, and most likely due to Pyle’s influence, the legend of the Flying Dutchman has become synonymous with piracy. The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy features a pirate ship with this name. Also, a pirate captain named the Flying Dutchman shows up in several episodes of the children’s animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. The Delaware Art Museum, even today, houses Pyle’s original painting alongside his more obviously piratical images in a room affectionately referred to as Pyle’s Pirate Gallery.

(Deutsch) heritage and also for his speed. The fact that he played for the Pirates made his

moniker particularly apt. Furthermore, while Wagner was known for his swiftness, his

fans most admired his base-running prowess: he stole – or pirated? – a record-setting 722

bases in his career.140 The blurring of pirate as hero and anti-hero thus occurred on the

baseball diamond. Wagner’s muscular, active body made him a hero to physically and

psychologically depleted men. He was a “Flying Dutchman” and a “pirate,” most famous

for his ability to “steal” bases. That an entire baseball franchise was named for the pirate,

indeed, indicates that this villainous and thieving figure held heroic sway.

Why was this the case? One way of negotiating these murky fin-de-siècle

characters is to examine piracy at the time when Blackbeard or Captain Morgan sailed the

seas. As evident in fin-de-siècle examples, piracy arose as a reaction to economic change,

and the pirate consistently was defined by his thievery. This is true of other eras as well.

In his investigation of the eighteenth-century maritime world, for instance, Marcus

Rediker states, “piracy represented ‘crime’ on a massive scale.” However, he highlights

crime in quotation marks because pirates’ “crime” goes beyond mere thievery. Instead, it

is an entire way of life free from the class structure endemic to other maritime vessels

like merchant or naval ships. Historical pirates, such as Blackbeard and Morgan, enjoyed

choice and rebellion: “It was a way of life voluntarily chosen, for the most part, by large

numbers of men who directly challenged the ways of society from which they excepted

140. Arthur D. Hittner, Honus Wagner: The Life of Baseball’s “Flying Dutchman” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 1996), 3. Of the 26 men inducted into the Hall of Fame on January 29, 1936, Wagner garnered 215 votes, which was the same number of votes Babe Ruth received and which was second only to Ty Cobb who earned 222 votes. In sum, he was a talented and popular athlete (ibid., 250).

themselves.”141 These pirates embody Beach’s criteria for an outlaw hero as they questioned and then rejected their class position, taking back control of their own affairs.

Fin-de-siècle audiences, therefore, could find something admirable as well as fiendish in this tradition.

Pirate life, arguably, was the most sensible maritime system during the Golden

Age of Piracy (late 1600s-early 1700s) for reasons that went beyond mere greed and bloodlust. “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail,” according to the famous eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson, “for being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned … A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”142 The merchant ship was a prison as merchantmen and military sailors during this time were grossly mistreated.

Pirate ships, by contrast, were democratic. Unlike the hierarchy of merchant ships, whose severe corporeal punishment contributed to the sailors’ distaste for sea life, pirate ship organization was a “world turned upside down.” Pirates organized an egalitarian social system as a compact was drawn up and signed by all crewmembers. Moreover, it was a contract that took into account the men’s views on such matters as how they chose their captain as well as how they fairly distributed food, booty, and disciplinary actions.

Sailors had rational needs, which were provided more readily when they became pirates.

Rediker explains, “Facing such natural and man-made dangers, which included a chronic

141. Marcus Buford Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 255. 142. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: J. Davis, 1871), 161.

scarcity of food and drink and a galling system of hierarchy and privilege, the sailor

learned the importance of equality.”143

Precisely because of this rebellion against the social system, historical pirates earned their heroic reputation. In their own day, pirates were lauded for being rebels, hence the popularity of tomes such as Exquemelin’s Buccaneers and Defoe’s History.

Defoe calls pirates “Marine Heroes, the Scourge of Tyrants and Avarice, and the Brave

Asserters of Liberty.” Although Defoe may have spoken these words sarcastically, their very presence in his work suggests that many of his readers certainly believed it to be true.144 Rediker even goes so far as to call Henry Avery the “maritime Robin Hood” based on Defoe’s romantic account of him: Avery “was likely to be the Founder of a new

Monarchy; having, as it was said, taken immense Riches,” and “was Master of a stout

Squadron of Ships, mann’d with able and desperate Fellows of all Nations; … and was acknowledged by them as their Prince.”145 This description suggests that Avery’s decision to “turn pirate” was to steal, but to do so honorably, or as a way to take money from the rich merchants on behalf of the “desperate Fellows of all Nations” that worked for them. Avery’s nickname, an allusion to another famous outlaw hero, implies that the pirate’s popularity grew precisely because his greed questioned and rebelled against an unfair social system.

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century illustrators maintained and even enhanced their pirates’ heroic status, popularizing the pirate as rebel, or as the lowly seaman who became wealthy by overturning the social system. The fin-de-siècle pirate had a surplus

143. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 25, 61, 65. 144. Ibid., 173. 145. Ibid., 38, 173; Defoe, General History, 49.

of money. And, even if, or perhaps because, he received it unfairly, there is no doubt that

many viewers envied his wealth. Howard Pyle makes it pointedly clear that he and his

readers were attracted first and foremost to the pirate’s treasure:

But it is not altogether courage and daring that endears him to our hearts. There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth that makes one’s fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the division of treasure in the pirate’s island retreat, the hiding of his godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to remain hidden until the time should come to rake the dubloons up again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most thrilling tales of his wonderful escapes from commissioned cruisers through tortuous channels between the coral-reefs.146

In an era of extreme wealth and extreme poverty and of the slippery slope between the

two, the greedy pirate provided a fantasy of abundance.

If he were merely greedy, the pirate would not have maintained hero status in his

own era and certainly not into the twentieth century. However, the fantastical pirate, with

his physicality and propensity for thievery, maintained his popularity precisely because of

his lawlessness. First, his body resembled not the “fat cat” businessman, but the athlete,

an important distinction in a society that promoted team sports as an antidote to the

“dangerous tendencies in modern life which tends to produce neurotic and luxury-loving

individuals.”147 Furthermore, piracy turns a class system upside down. For instance, in

Extorting Tribute from the Citizens, The Golden Galleon – Tailpiece, and Morgan at

Porto Bello, the citizenry – representing office workers’ bosses, perhaps – must kneel

before the pirates, who are now in command (figs. 13, 15 and 76).

146. Pyle, introduction to Buccaneers, 16-17. 147. Henry D. Sheldon, Student Life and Customs (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901), 250.

The pirate’s independent thinking captivated Howard Pyle. Pyle asserts that a pirate “was a man who knew his own mind and what he wanted.”148 Pyle was not far off in his assessment. According to the historian Kris E. Lane, Golden Age pirates were

“self-governing, near egalitarian, conscientious of the welfare of their fellow … they actively rejected the rigid class biases then entrenched in Europe and self-consciously mimicked on the colonies.”149 While it might be difficult to render an egalitarian social system through illustration, Pyle did follow his written praise with visual examples. For instance, Pyle created Which Shall be Captain? depicting one democratic way of choosing a leader: whoever shows more physical strength is the victor (fig. 10).

Furthermore, in So the Treasure was Divided, Pyle brings to vivid life the pirates’ excessive wealth and the manner in which is it harmoniously divided among the crew

(fig. 14). Finally, captain cruelty sometimes takes center stage, as with Dead Men Tell No

Tales (fig. 77). Such behavior, however, is not without its consequences, for instance, in

“Pirates Used to Do That to Their Captains Now and Then” (fig. 78). “That” translates to “kill and leave the deceitful captain unburied.” The fantastical pirate chased and captured what he wanted, i.e., money and power, a lifestyle certainly desirable to struggling middle-class workers.

Pirates appealed to their audiences because they existed outside the structure (and stricture) of class-consciousness. However, their mobility actually reflects at least one middle-class value, namely rising above one’s background. The popularity of self-help books in this era suggests there were many readers of this genre looking for instruction

148. Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, comp. Merle Johnson (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1921) from an unnumbered page two pages before the frontispiece. 149. Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 200.

on how to gain and maintain character. Self-help books depended upon a lofty belief in a

flexible social system, in which one’s own behavior helps determine wealth and status.

While these books proselytized good moral behavior as the key to success, fantastical

pirates embody its opposite, or illicit, side.

Reading about the pirate version of independence was certainly more entertaining.

Thus, Pyle, Schoonover and Wyeth, along with their viewers, chose to delve into a fantasy society that rejected “character” while embracing autonomy. Pyle’s account of plank-walking is the ultimate example of subverting nineteenth-century law systems,

plunging the reader into piratical lawlessness. Pyle’s written account of Captain Low

creates a clear distinction between Low’s lawless style and the rules that governed more

civilized society:

Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloop of war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low was glad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him, as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worse fate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage around the blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken, and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as pretty a bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.150

Unlike Low, whose victims – whether innocent or guilty – were forced to walk the plank,

the English captain captured Low’s crew and sent them to trial.

It is interesting to note that Pyle’s account, while adapted from the pirate story

found in Defoe’s General History, slightly alters Low’s character to exaggerate his

fantastical qualities. Pyle’s tale creates the impression that Low’s selfish act was typical

of the lawless pirate; however, Defoe holds him accountable for this act of desertion.

Defoe states, “The Conduct of Low was surprizing [sic] in this Adventure, because his

150. Howard Pyle, "Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main," pt. 2, Harper's Monthly, September 1887, 510.

reputed Courage and Boldness had, hitherto, so possess’d the Minds of People, that he

became a Terror, even to his own Men.”151 Defoe highlights, and perhaps feels a bit

cheated by, Low’s uncharacteristic behavior. In contrast, Pyle takes for granted that Low

has no character.

There were, in fact, several distinct types of historical pirates defined by their

relative connection to law and order. In his introduction to Exquemelin’s text, Pyle

describes piracy as an “evolution from semi-lawful buccaneering of the sixteenth

century” to the “savage outlawry of the marooners” in the early eighteenth century (i.e.,

Blackbeard, Captain Kidd).152 Furthermore, the adventures of Sir Francis Drake constituted a first step in this evolution. While his actions were “not recognized officially by the Government” and “overstepped again and again the bounds of international law,” he was “commended” for his efforts.153 For Pyle and his readers, the act of piracy is associated with taking increasingly large steps away from a familiar society of law and order; therefore, the most piratical pirates were the last. Tellingly, the pirates from the eighteenth century, whom Pyle describes as “roaring,” “ranting,” and “raving,”154 are the

same men described later by Rediker as rebel-pirates.

Fin-de-siècle illustrators and authors often chose to imagine a fantastical – and

also the most rebellious – pirate from this specific time period, i.e., the Golden Age of

Piracy. Pyle recreates only the pirates from the Golden Age and their semi-lawful

predecessors, most likely because the Golden Age pirates comprise Exquemelin’s history.

However, illustrators ignored pirates from other times in history who maintained their

151. Defoe, General History, 329. 152. Pyle, introduction to Buccaneers, 17-18, 38. 153. Ibid., 18. 154. Ibid., 39.

social and moral ties. Privateer ships patrolled the U.S. East Coast during the American

Revolution and prevented the replenishment of supplies for English soldiers fighting the

American rebels. Jean LaFitte, a famous corsair of French origin, helped the floundering

U.S. Navy against English troops attempting to overtake the Mississippi Delta during the

War of 1812 and became a war hero. The pirates in the stories and images from the fin de

siècle are not usually privateers working for governments or U.S. war heroes, but are the

most piratical pirates: robbers, greedy men, and independents working solely for

themselves.155

However, while the fantastical pirate icon is often heroicized for his lawlessness,

the accompanying tales at least (re)assert the authority of a system of law and order.

Pyle’s image Colonel Rhett and Pirate Stede Bonnet (fig. 79) is a rare example that

illustrates a pirate’s capture. Other images, such as or Schoonover’s Fight! and Pirate

Fight or Pyle’s Blackbeard’s Last Fight (figs. 11, 27, and 42), show battles that

potentially lead up to this capture, but the violent action – not its results – are the focus.

Texts reveal, however, that pirates are not the heroes, but the antagonists. For instance, in

Treasure Island, while Jim Hawkins, and most likely the reader, are fooled into believing

Long John Silver is a romantic figure, Jim ultimately discovers Silver’s unsavory,

piratical ways. Jim must learn the hard way: he is captured by Silver’s crew, and as

Wyeth’s image highlights, is humiliated and “led like a dancing bear.” In the end, Jim

returns to the world of law and order represented by Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey.

155. There are a few exceptions. For instance, among his many stories of outlaw pirates, Howard Pyle did write Within the Capes, a story of privateering during the War of 1812, and he illustrated the rather violent images for Thomas A. Janvier’s “New York Colonial Privateers” in 1895. Also, Frank Schoonover wrote and illustrated a story titled “In the Haunts of Jean Lafitte” in 1911, and he illustrated the young adult novel Privateers of ’76 (1923) by Ralph D. Paine. However, it should be noted, for instance, that the illustrated story of Lafitte makes no mention of his wartime efforts, focusing instead upon his accepting a ransom among other piratical activities.

Discovering the pirates’ buried treasure is his reward. Silver, on the other hand, runs away like a coward. Many coming-of-age stories thereafter follow a similar plot in which a young male protagonist is initially mesmerized by the pirate life, but ultimately returns to proper society. This occurs in Howard Pyle’s Jack Ballister’s Fortune as well as his

Ruby of Kishmoor. Paine’s Blackbeard Buccaneer follows a similar trajectory. Several other novels of this time period, including Johnston’s To Have and To Hold and Rafael

Sabatini’s Captain Blood, suggest that their hero “turns pirate” only under dire circumstances, and ultimately leaves piracy behind for a civilized life.

Howard Pyle even goes so far as to make this moral lesson explicit. In his introduction to Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America, he explains why he has chosen to include four Defoe pirate stories that go beyond the original Exquemelin text. His reason, again, relates to law and order and how lawlessness leads to moral and civil breakdown:

There is another, a deeper, a more humanitarian reason for such a sequel. For is not the history of the savage outlawry of the marooners a verisemblance of the degeneration, the quick disintegration of humanity the moment that the laws of God and man are lifted? The Tudor sea-captains were little else than legalized pirates, and in them we may see that first small step that leads so quickly into the smooth downward path. The buccaneers, in their semi-legalized piracy, succeeded them as effects follows cause. Then as the ultimate result followed the marooners – fierce, bloody, rapacious, human wild beasts lusting for blood and plunder, godless, lawless, the enemy of all men but their own wicked kind…. Is there not a profitable lesson to be learned in the history of such a human extreme of evil – all the more wicked from being the rebound from civilization?156

In essence, then, Pyle uses the pirate stories as a warning, an example of how the beginnings of moral breakdown can lead to total collapse. Other authors and illustrators of pirate tales follow this formula as well, if more implicitly. A reader may be enticed by the wealth of the pirate, his greed, his physical strength, and his independence.

Illustrators exaggerate these qualities, which entertain the viewer, inviting them to live

156. Pyle, introduction to Buccaneers, 38-9.

vicariously, but also encouraging them to read the accompanying tale. Enjoy the fantasy,

but return to morality. In this manner, the pirate is a social critic. He is the outlaw hero

who “is displaced socially, but … does not disappear.” Instead, he “criticizes … because

he is unaccountable.”157 Pyle’s historical analysis suggests this role. The pirate acts as an alarm of sorts: any society in which he takes to the seas is surely in need of reevaluation.

Pyle’s words follow a long tradition of pirate as social critique, or pirate as outlaw hero. In this tradition, pirates expose the piracy of a greater society. According to

Rediker, a story taken from Ancient Greece marks the start of this tradition. In it,

Alexander the Great arrests a sea robber and questions his motives to “keep … hostile possession of the sea.” The robber boldly replies, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”158 This story gives rise to a slew of literary

examples in which lesser pirates augment the piracy of larger entities, from dynastic

rulers to overpowering governments and businesses. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and

Polly rely on this tradition to attack Robert Walpole’s corruption in the 1720s. Defoe’s

history also uses Caribbean pirate accounts to highlight the depravity of contemporary

British government.159 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century pirate stories and images follow

this well-worn tradition. Pirate heroes arose in the U.S. precisely at the moment that big

businesses and trusts were overtaking democratic traditions, and Pyle, Schoonover, and

Wyeth’s fantastical pirates provided the heroic doppelganger to Gould, Rockefeller, and

Carnegie. In the end, the pirate does not or at least should not succeed. Thievery and even

157. Beach, “Robin Hood,” 22. 158. Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei (City of God), trans. Marcus Dods (413-26; New York: Modern Library, 1993), bk. 4, chap. 4. 159. Rediker, Villains, 174-5.

high boots connect all of these fin-de-siècle pirates. Nevertheless, the strong, independent men created by Golden Age illustrators entertain and assuage the anxieties brought about by the large-bellied, greedy men of Puck cartoons.

The fantastical pirate is the definitive outlaw hero, living by his own terms and warning others of society’s ruin. From the many examples in newspaper headlines and political cartoons, it is clear that the term “pirate” and the figure of the pirate were quite prevalent in this era. However, what is not clear is what the pirate represented. “Piracy” took on a multivalent meaning. The pirate’s strength was certainly enticing, and Pyle, but even more so Schoonover and Wyeth, certainly exaggerated his muscles and physical stature. Pirates’ strength and vigor referenced the cult of the body that flourished especially in the new century as a counterattack to brainwork and neurasthenia. Other pirates, though, did not have Wyeth and Schoonover’s athleticism; Puck instead focused upon men who had swollen bellies and who held bulging bags of money. These pirates represent the greedy side of piracy, or the anti-hero who steals his wealth. Newspapers, with their headlines against lumber pirates, oyster pirates, literary pirates, sand pirates, and railroad pirates, seemed obsessed with this side of piracy.

These accusations complicate the heroism associated with piracy and yet they also demonstrate another set of anxieties that the fantastical pirate addresses: the social and economic insecurities of the fin-de-siècle era. In the midst of big business successes, the economy saw also deep dips in wealth, making social status volatile and financial stability a mere dream. The illustrated pirate, then, contributed to a fantasy of wealth.

Basing their creations on historical pirates, illustrators provided a nostalgic respite. These pirates did not fit within a civilized system of law and order, but existed outside of it,

turning the system on its head as they created their own way of conducting business.

Their pirates steal booty from merchant ships, dig up hidden treasures, and adorn their bodies with the fruits of their labor. In the accompanying tale, the fantastical pirate is ultimately caught and subjected to the realities of law and order, which is perhaps a warning or criticism of capitalist big business. In the meantime, the images allow for a glimpse into the fantasy of a physically-fit, treasure-laden, egalitarian crew of men who lived outside an unreliable capitalist system. The fantastical pirate, then, strides the line between decency and despicability. He is both greedy and independent, murderous and strong. Ultimately, the viewer/reader enjoys the adventure because the pirate is outlaw and hero.

Chapter Four

A Primitive “Other” for Regression Fantasists

The illustrated pirate reverts to primitivism. In The Boarders Swarmed Over the

Fence like Monkeys, for instance, Wyeth did not avoid, but rather embraced a simian

comparison (fig. 16). With pronounced brow ridges, large hands, and barred teeth, these

Treasure Island foes “go ape.” The setting sun reflects off the soiled, ripped clothes that

can barely contain the pirates’ powerful chests and arms. They are in attack mode as they

claw their way over a rudimentary stockade created by Captain Smollet, Squire

Trelawney, and Jim Hawkins. The natural elements in the background – forest,

mountains, and expansive sea – indicate the uninhabited territory from which the

attackers have come. Despite their animalistic trappings, the pirates carry sophisticated

weaponry, from scabbards and rapiers to rifles. Quite literally, they are on the fence

between savagery and civilized society.

Wyeth created this highly charged scene, choosing to depict a tense moment in

the narrative when the future is uncertain. Will these nasty brutes be able to scale the

barricade and overtake Hawkins’ camp? The darkest of the pirates has clambered to the

near side, standing upright and striding toward the edge of the picture plane. His invasion

presages an imminent and disastrous future for Hawkins and his allies, a future in which,

as Hawkins fears, the pirates will “shoot us down like rats in our stronghold.”160

And, perhaps this ape-like pirate heralds a disastrous future for the viewer as well.

Wyeth places him within the invaded territory. The viewer is Hawkins’s cohort, seeing the pirate as Hawkins sees him: as the enemy, as different from himself, and as the

160. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883; New York: Signet Classic, 1998), 119.

purveyor of destruction. These half-civilized pirates, therefore, also encroach upon social

order, or the world from which their onlookers would have been observing them.

This primitive pirate must have stirred up racial anxieties during the turn of the

century. His portrayal connects him to evolutionary theory and its overlying influence

upon the nation’s social perceptions. Charles Darwin’s model, along with those of other

and in some instances earlier evolutionists, trickled down into social theory and ignited

racial fears. Termed Social Darwinism by early twentieth-century sociologists opposed to

its doctrines, this version of evolution nonetheless held popular sway in the second half

of the nineteenth century and asserted that civilized people developed from primitives

who exhibited baser physical and emotional characteristics.161 Arthur de Gobineau’s The

Inequality of Human Races (1849) is but one example of the symptomatic fear that arose

amidst this constricted – and constricting – version of evolution. Focusing not on a

civilization’s past, but rather its future, Gobineau states that “all civilizations derive from

the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a society is great and brilliant

only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.” 162 He therefore

believed that the Aryan race, though dominant in the West, could essentially destroy

itself through interbreeding with lesser races. By the late nineteenth century, Victorians

looked to the past and the future with racial (and racist) apprehension: any signs of more

primitive characteristics indicated not only the savagery from which Victorian society

came, but also the savagery that was threatening to return.

161. This system of thought was certainly problematic since it aligned biological with social circumstances, ignoring, for instance, the place of education as well as social habits and practices in the development of a society. D. Collin Wells, “Social Darwinism” American Journal of Sociology 12, no. 5 (1907): 695-701. 162. Arthur Gobineau, Inequality of the Human Races (1849; repr. with translation by Adrian Collins, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 210.

Various forms of entertainment latched onto the fin-de-siècle repulsion to but fixation upon primitivism. Patrick Brantlinger labels this new genre “regression fantasy” and describes it as “a rejection of individual and social rationality and a movement backward to primitive or infantile modes of perception and belief.”163 While

Brantlinger’s project focuses upon Imperial Gothic literature, his three overarching tropes can be aptly applied to any form of fin-de-siècle entertainment in which anxieties of white, middle-class, and male audiences are relieved in racial fantasy. The first characteristic in regression fantasy allows the protagonist – and therefore the reader vicariously – to venture into a personal regression. In other words, he gets to “go native.”

Secondly, the plot often revolves around a barbaric or demonic force that overtakes or threatens to overtake the civilized world. Finally, it is made clear that the protagonist

“goes native” because so few adventurous opportunities await him in his own, modern world.164 Catalyzed by the lasting fear and fascination precipitated by Social Darwinist assertions, Victorian entertainment focused upon race and the connections among race, social dominance, and adventure.

In this regard, pirate illustration provided one such regression fantasy. The illustrated pirate became a racial “other,” acting as a reminder of its viewers’ darker past and a fearful hint as to where they may be heading once again. In some ways, paradoxically, the pirate resembles the ideal heroes of an expanding United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He is the cowboy of the sea or a forerunner to the

163. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 240. For a further discussion of how Brantlinger’s regression fantasy translates into nineteenth-century imagery, please see the chapter titled “Dirty Pictures” in Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 164. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 230.

U.S. Navy sailor. These associations become clouded, however, with the recognition that

the pirate assails the frontier on behalf of no (read: white, U.S., and newly Imperialist)

nation. In other words, in their transformation to icon, pirates – as Pyle claimed – “knew

their own minds.” Furthermore, the fantastical pirate’s uncivilized savagery, and in many

images, his swarthiness reveal his connections instead to lesser races, or more

specifically, to Spaniards and Latin Americans with whom the Imperial U.S. had tenuous

and even hostile relations. Fin-de-siècle pirate illustrators created a regression fantasy

that allowed an audience’s safe voyage into this anxious allure of racial “otherness.”

The pirate regressed into “otherness” at the same time as another popular figure –

the cowboy – developed unambiguous, heroic status. Theodore Roosevelt, representative

of this era’s racial insecurity, made plain his love for the epic cowboy. Military hero,

New York Governor, Vice President, and finally, U.S. President, Roosevelt was an

outspoken and influential politician, and his well-chronicled opinions on race,

immigration, and imperialism appear frequently in biographical accounts.165 Speaking as

President to the National Congress of Mothers in 1905, for instance, Roosevelt addressed

his fears of a depleting race, which he termed “race suicide.” He says,

…if the average family in which there are children contained but two children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more robust ideals.166

165. Sarah Watt’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, has been an invaluable resource in discovering turn-of-the-twentieth century philosophies of race, its effect on Roosevelt’s beliefs about race, immigration, and imperialism, and how his beliefs affected his politics. Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 166. Theodore Roosevelt, “On American Motherhood” (address to the National Congress of Mothers, Washington, DC, March 18, 1905).

Roosevelt explicitly appeals to the fears of a white nation who might be overtaken by

“more robust” breeders, such as immigrants or other invaders upon Anglo-Saxon

hegemony. Furthermore, cartoons such as A Popular View of the Commissioner’s Victory

over the Spoils System, Rough Rider Charge, and Vice-Presidential Possibilities: The

Rough Rider intimately connect Roosevelt to his heroes of whiteness: the U.S. soldier

and the cowboy icon (figs. 80-82). In this race-obsessed time period, these are two

figures for which the pirate comes to act as an “other.”

Notably, at the start of this era, both the cowboy and the pirate had the potential to

become racial “others.” In the 1870s and early 1880s, according to Henry Nash Smith,

Easterners’ idea of the “cowboy,” or “herder,” called to mind “a semibarbarous laborer

who lived a dull, monotonous life of hard fare and poor shelter.”167 President Chester A.

Arthur worried, for example, about “armed desperados known as ‘Cowboys’” in his First

Annual Address to Congress in 1881, asking them to send troops to deal with the cowboys’ violent escapades in the Territory of Arizona.168 Arthur’s words and

subsequent actions indicate that the cowboy was considered a menace rather than a hero,

at least in the beginning of the 1880s.

The early career of illustrator Frederic Remington hinted at this infamous version

of the cowboy as well. Before 1895, he wrote about and illustrated the Texas type of

cowboy, or vaquero, whom he describes as “a brave fellow, a fatalist, with less wants

than the pony he rides, a rather thoughtless man, who lacks many virtues,” but who had

167. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950; repr., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 109. 168. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, vol. 8 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature, 1909), 53-54.

“invented the whole business of running steers to Abilene.”169 Remington was particularly prolific in his pursuit: his western-themed images began to receive public and critical recognition in 1881, and in that year alone, he published at least 177 images in

Harper’s Weekly, Outing, Youth’s Companion, and The Century.170

An example of this earlier type decorates the opening page to Roosevelt’s article,

“The Ranchman’s Rifle on Crag and Prairie” from 1888 (fig. 83). This “Texas Type of

Cowboy” stands casually smoking while puffs waft from his cigarette and from between

his lips. He wears a wide-brimmed hat and chaps and has a thick sash at his waist, an

earring in his right lobe, and a headscarf securely tied beneath his hat. His unkempt outfit

suggests a rough character, which is reinforced by his scruffy beard, a feature that also

contributes to his dark facial complexion.

Significantly, if early Remington cowboys such as this one had continued to show

off their questionable heritage and violent thievery, they would have been pirates. A

comparison between Pyle’s Captain Kidd (fig. 84) and Remington’s “Texas Type”

Cowboy reveals striking similarities. Pyle created several illustrations in 1902 to

accompany John D. Champlin, Jr.’s story “The True Captain Kidd.”171 In the illustrator’s

imagining, Kidd is the “Texas Type” cowboy of the sea: he wears a wide-brimmed hat

with a headscarf beneath it and gold loops in his ears; he has a dark complexion with

darker facial hair. Kidd’s sartorial slovenliness even echoes Remington’s vaquero with

his open shirt collar, dangling sleeves, and wide sash. They both casually stand and

169. Frederic Remington, Pony Tracks (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1895), 92; Frederic Remington to Owen Wister, February 1895, in Allen P. Splete and Marilyn D. Splete, eds, Frederic Remington, Selected Letters (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 265. 170. Watts, Rough Rider, 145. 171. John D. Champlin, “The True Captain Kidd,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1902, 27-36.

smoke. In this manner, Pyle’s pirate is close in character to the 1870-80s cowboys, or the

“semibarbarous laborer” and “armed desperado.”

The early cowboy and the pirate are linked visually, but they share a common heritage as well. Owen Wister wrote an article, for instance, in which he draws a direct connection between the two. In explaining the cowboy’s ancestry, he describes the persisting characteristic: “Adventure, to be out-of-doors, …to enjoy independence of spirit or mind or body (according to his high or low standards) – this is the cardinal surviving fittest instinct that makes the Saxon through the centuries.” He then lists a series of these adventurous, Anglo-Saxon types, which includes the “conqueror, invader, navigator, buccaneer, explorer, colonist, [and] tiger-shooter.” Wister even singles out the buccaneer among this list, going on to say that the Saxon instinct “dangles him a pirate from the gallows on the docks of Bristol.” In still a third instance, the author implicitly invokes pirate lore when he states that the “rover may return with looted treasure or incidentally stolen corners of territory to clap in his strong-box (this Angle is no

angel).”172 With their exploits into unknown, non-Anglo, and therefore uncivilized

regions, cowboys trod and pirates sailed upon similar terrains.

Paradoxically, though, while they both claim Anglo-Saxon superiority, their

heritage does not eliminate regression into primal behaviors. In fact, both characters

spring from the same ideals that governed the advent of the Masculine Primitive, a

physical culture movement that was discussed in relation to the pirate in the previous

chapter and whose very name acknowledges the fascination with evolutionary history. Of

cowboys, Roosevelt states, “Out on the frontier, and generally among those who spend

172. Owen Wister, “The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” Harper’s Monthly, September 1895, 604.

their lives in, or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental

conditions.” And later, he seems to draw a parallel between cowboy and Primitive when

he asserts, “… in the earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to himself, and

to guard his rights with a strong hand.”173 In his book on Remington, Brian W. Dippie similarly attests that cowboy culture became a fantasy closely resembling the Masculine

Primitive ideal: “On lakes and mountain trails and in the depths of the forest, Americans could still find the personal challenges that would harden muscles, test resolve, teach self-reliance, and forge character. … And so the myth of cowboy-land.”174 With all their

freedom and physicality, both the cowboy and the pirate related at least tangentially to

regression fantasy.

The cowboy’s ties to regression become peripheral, however. Roosevelt, along

with other enthusiasts like Wister, transformed the historical cowboy into an icon of both

masculinity and whiteness. As an 1885 photographic portrait confirms, Roosevelt began

to participate in cowboy culture while in his twenties: riding horses, sleeping outdoors,

and wearing the uniform of the Old West, i.e., chaps, neckerchief, and wide-brimmed hat

(fig. 85).175 By the turn of the century, however, the West towards which Roosevelt

turned – the West that straddled the border between settlements and unexplored land –

existed only in fantasy. Referencing the 1890 census, Frederick Jackson Turner

confirmed the end of the western frontier: “This brief official statement [i.e., census]

marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has

173. Theodore Roosevelt, “In Cowboy-Land,” Century, June 1893, 276. 174. Brian W. Dippie, The Frederic Remington Art Museum Collection (Ogdensberg, NY: Frederic Remington Art Museum, 2001), 21. 175. Along with his own participation, Roosevelt wrote several articles for The Century, which encouraged his readers to join his manly pursuits. In addition to the aforementioned “In Cowboy-Land” and “The Ranchman’s Rifle on Crag and Prairie,” he also wrote “Frontier Types” in 1888.

been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.”176

Consequently, Easterners began to adopt not Remington’s “Texas Type,” but Roosevelt’s

cowboy, allowing their imaginations to run wild in the Wild West. For example, N. C.

Wyeth, an illustrator of cowboys and pirates, looks quite similar to Roosevelt’s cowboy

portrait in a photograph from October 1904 (fig 86). No longer treading upon uncivilized

territory, cowboys became the fantastical Anglo heroes in an invented West.

Roosevelt and Wister – and eventually Remington – even protested too much to

an Anglo-Saxon heritage. With his precarious beginnings, the cowboy would not have

survived as an unambiguous icon otherwise. The unkempt and swarthy make-up of

Remington’s 1888 cowboy was too far removed from Roosevelt’s ideal, or the white,

middle and upper-class fantasy of the West.177 Remington ultimately acquiesced to

Roosevelt and Wister’s wishes, creating the icon still familiar today (fig. 87). A far cry from his earlier incarnation, this cowboy actively controls his horse rather than standing passively, smoking a cigarette. This new icon also shuns unnecessary adornments like jewelry, secures his kerchief at his neck rather than beneath his hat, and although tan, still has a blonde moustache that attests to his whiteness. For Harper’s Monthly in 1895,

Owen Wister writes, “Such is the story of the cow-puncher, the American descendant of

Saxon ancestors, who for thirty years flourished upon our part of the earth.”178 Always

176. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (address to the American Historical Association, Chicago, July 12, 1893). 177. Given the racial anxiety in turn-of-the-century American thought, the cowboy found a receptive audience precisely because of his assertion of white supremacy. Editors frequently praised these accounts of the cowboy. One commentator, reviewing Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, states, “Roosevelt has seen that the history of the West is the history of the movement of a people which cannot be understood except in connection with the similar movements that have characterized the Aryan race, and especially the English portion of it, for centuries upon centuries.” W.P. Trent, “Theodore Roosevelt as a Historian,” review of The Winning of the West, vol. 4, by Theodore Roosevelt, Forum, July 1896, 570. 178. Wister, “Evolution of the Cow Puncher,” 617.

100

concerned with Anglo-Saxon heritage, he almost obsessively contrasts this racial

superiority with other, and lesser, peoples:

But to survive in the clean cattle country requires spirit of adventure, courage, and self-sufficiency; you will not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews in that district; it stands as yet untainted by the benevolence of Baron Hirsch. Even in the cattle country the respectable Swedes settle chiefly to farming, and are seldom horsemen. The community of which the aristocrat appropriately made one speaks English. The Frenchman to-day is seen at his best inside the house; he can paint and he can play comedy, but he seldom climbs a new mountain. The Italian has forgotten Columbus, and sells fruit. Among the Spaniards and the Portuguese no Cortez or Magellan is found to-day. Except in Prussia, the Teuton is too often a tame, slippered animal, with his pedantic mind swaddled in a dressing-gown. But the Anglo-Saxon is still forever homesick for out-of-doors.179

The recreated cowboy was a fantasy of whiteness, a man who capably straddles his horse as well as the fine line between the fascination with primitivism and the security of

Anglo-Saxon superiority.

As the cowboy’s re-inventors obsessed about his unambiguous superiority, pirate illustrators obsessed about the pirate’s race as well, coming up with a very different type of icon. They highlighted the pirate’s primitive features in order to provide a regression fantasy in which their viewers could “go native.” Example after example connects the pirate not to whiteness, but to primitivism. The pirate has dark skin, for instance. Figures

88 to 90 show off the swarthy complexion that came to represent the pirate. Furthermore,

“baser” emotional characteristics – like savagery – match this “baser” physical characteristic. He seems constantly to be murdering, fighting, or preparing to do so as exemplified in Pyle’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, Schoonover’s Kidnapped – Pirate with

Sword, his Man Waving Cutlass, or even Wyeth’s Black Spot (figs.77, 91-93). Finally, he is unkempt. Always wearing tattered and wrinkled clothes – or no clothes at all, the illustrated pirate is decidedly uncivilized. Unlike the cowboy version of Roosevelt, who

179. Ibid., 604.

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could easily clean himself up for proper society, no one would expect the swarthy characters from Schoonover’s Ned Rackham Espied the Derelict Scene to be invited into a Victorian home (fig. 94).180 Whether the pirate reminds his viewers of the lower species from which they came, or he indicates a dark future ahead for them, the pirate fascinates because of his status as “other.” Despite a tangential connection to Anglo superiority, the pirate – through the choices of his illustrators – entered dark waters, achieving and maintaining his iconic status precisely because of his racial inferiority.

Just as the pirate became the racialized “other” to the iconic cowboy, he was also the foil to another white hero touted by Roosevelt: the U.S. Navy sailor. As early as 1882,

Roosevelt pushed for greater U.S. sea power, writing, in that year, The Naval War of

1812, which argued that a strong navy was essential to national war preparedness. Not long after, Alfred Mahan, known as an authority on naval power, wrote The Influence of

Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890). This text reinforces Roosevelt’s claim that a strong nation must have a strong navy, and in it, Mahan goes further to explain that any

“seaman who carefully studies the causes of success or failure will not only detect and gradually assimilate these principles, but will also acquire increased aptitude in applying them to the tactical use of the ships and weapons of his own day.”181 These are but two examples. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the nation heard continuously from U.S.

Navy proponents in magazine articles, which eventually convinced Congress to replace wooden ships with steel ones and to place armored fleets in strategic maritime sectors.182

180. Even if Ned Rackham and his unseemly crew could not participate in proper Victorian society, the image of them – re-titled Christmas Boat – was nonetheless used as the Schoonover family’s Christmas card in 1922. Christine B. Podmaniczky, N. C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, vol. 1 ([Wilmington, DE]: Wyeth Foundation for American Art, 2008), 360. 181. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, 14th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898), 9. 182. Watts, Rough Rider, 208.

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Washington took other steps as well. In 1882, the Office of Naval Intelligence

was founded, followed two years later by the Naval War College. Construction began on

the first American battleships, Maine and Texas, in 1886.183 In 1897, President McKinley

appointed Roosevelt to the position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, giving Roosevelt

an even louder voice in promoting naval build-up.184 The U.S. involvement in the Cuban

Insurrection in 1895, the War with Spain in 1898, and the Philippine Insurrection in 1899

all reveal U.S. Imperialist efforts, and the Navy’s importance in it.

Thus, sea power came to represent U.S. strength, but also white superiority. In a

speech to the Hamilton Club in 1889, Roosevelt asserted, “The army and the navy are the

sword and shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations

of the earth.”185 And, as its champions promoted it, this Navy had a certain moralistic slant. Mahan writes, for example, in 1907 that the U.S. Navy was an icon of self- discipline, free from “extraneous matter – love-making and the like … intimate knowledge and idle trash.”186 This moralizing had a racial component as well. The U.S.

Navy, according to Mahan, “could not survive the big introduction of alien matter,” alien matter here referring to a broad range of men whose racial and sexual make-up did not fit into white hetero-normativity.187 Furthermore, from 1907 until 1909, Roosevelt sent out sixteen of his new warships to tour the world, but first had them painted white and

183. Jack Sweetman, American Naval History, 3rd ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 86, 88. 184. Watts, Rough Rider, 208. 185. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life” (address to the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899); printed in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in Fourteen Volumes, executive ed., vol. 12 (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, Publishers, 1900), 17. 186. Alfred Thayer Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1907), vi. 187. Ibid., 53.

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nicknamed the Great White Fleet.188 Like Western expansion, the control of the sea spoke

of a strong “Great White” U.S. nation.

In this manner, and especially after the new century, the U.S. Navy sailor could be

considered the maritime equivalent to the transformed American cowboy. Upon

becoming the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897, Roosevelt invited Remington to

tour the new, modernized ships, specifically choosing the illustrator for his love of

western themes and his ability to promote them. After their meeting, Roosevelt hoped

that this connection between cowhand and seaman would take effect. He writes to

Remington: “You will never care for the ship as you do for the horse, but you must like

the ship, too, and the man aboard [who] works hard, and if need be is willing to die

hard.”189 Roosevelt specifically added modern Navy sailors to the long tradition of cavalry and naval cultures that preceded them.

Though Remington remained a cowboy illustrator, images from other artists display Roosevelt’s influence. An article from Harper’s Monthly is a salient one whose text and accompanying illustrations speak of Mahan’s self-disciplined and modern soldiers.190 The initial image portrays a bright-eyed, smooth-skinned (and inarguably white) youth who plays a drum slung over his shoulder (fig. 95). He wears a clean, if low-ranking, white uniform with a V-neck shirt and a scarf tied slightly askew around his neck. His head held high, he looks slightly to the left, ready to work hard, and – “if need be” – die hard. A later image in the same article, In Sight of the Enemy – The Challenge, gives the viewer a glimpse into a thoroughly capable maritime crew in the midst of attack

188. Watts, Rough Rider, 223. 189. Roosevelt to Frederic Remington, 26 Oct. 1897, in Frederic Remington, Selected Letters, 286-87. 190. Lieutenant S. A. Staunton, “A Battle-Ship in Action,” Harper’s Monthly, April 1894, 653-69.

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(fig. 96). Standing firmly and looking out at the enemy, the foregrounded captain leads

his men. He is poised, assessing the situation in the moments before he barks orders at the

sailors waiting behind him. The members of the crew, with their freshly cleaned, white

uniforms, seem unconcerned with the looming enemy, secure perhaps in their own

superiority as well as the superiority of their vessel which towers in the background. In

sum, according to biographer Sarah Watts, Roosevelt had “invested modern battleships

with civilization’s moral imprimatur.”191 Not unlike the U.S. cowboy, then, the U.S.

Navy came to stand for white superiority.

In this regard, the pirate is nothing like the Navy man; the way he looks and acts in magazine illustration has no roots in the tradition of “civilization’s moral imprimatur.”

For example, the sailor, or initial image, to “A Battle-Ship in Action” shares few traits with Howard Pyle’s How the Buccaneer Kept Christmas (fig. 64). Both stand casually with their weight shifted to one leg. Their heads turn slightly to the left, looking beyond the picture plane. Curiously, both seamen are far removed from the water on which they make their living. However, their costume and accessories clearly indicate their position, especially in relation to civilization and morality. The sailor’s drum and uniform proclaim his military status; the pirate’s pistol as well as his chest and bags of treasure suggest his life of marauding upon the waters. The former’s instrument and white skin and clothing speak to his patriotism. The buccaneer, by contrast, has an elaborate but slightly disheveled costume, dark facial hair, and dark-skinned – and in this rare instance, even female – companions. With his weaponry, moneybags and bottle of intoxicating wine, he is not self-disciplined and patriotic, but immoral and greedy. Pyle’s image is

191. Watts, Rough Rider, 223.

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demonstrative of the pirate as foil to U.S Navy sailor as his crew resembles the feared

“alien matter” from Mahan’s descriptions.

This contrast between seafaring icons becomes especially evident in evolutionary terms. Roosevelt was intent upon a modern U.S. Navy, preaching the need for new materials, i.e., an all-steel ship construction. However, “modern” also relates to the fear of earlier, primitive stages of development, and the desire to leave them behind in favor of a stronger, forward-looking nation. This overarching concern with Social Darwinism explains the bright – and white – sailor’s face, which is decidedly absent in Pyle’s and his students’ swarthy buccaneers. Additionally, an evolutionary difference distinguishes their ships. The U.S. Navy has a steely, even sleek, ship in In Sight of the Enemy (fig. 96). In comparison, pirate ships are ornamental and archaic as witnessed by the galleon in

Wyeth’s cover image for The Ladies’ Home Journal (fig. 32). Furthermore, wooden pirate ships are certainly less reliable: the galleon in Wyeth’s image, as well as the pirate

decks featured in Pyle’s Flying Dutchman and Captain Keitt (figs. 37 and 97), lean

perilously, presumably rocked by choppy waters. No such instability afflicts the strong

vertical mast in In Sight of the Enemy. Keeping in mind the ripple effects of Social

Darwinism, the navy sailor is the ultimate evolutionary goal. The pirate, in illustration

especially, suggests an earlier developmental stage, or else a falling off into primitivism.

The pirate could not have become the maritime cowboy, then, because illustrators created

him as a fantasy of individual regression. With more respectable pursuits commandeered

by the “Great White” Navy, U.S. writers and illustrators focused exclusively upon the

pirate as a fantastical character.

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This fin-de-siècle reverie marks a difference from earlier in the century in which

contemporary accounts of piracy peppered news reports. For instance, mid-century

newspapers recounted the adventures of Narcisco Lopez, a captain who, in 1849 and

1851, led unsuccessful trips to Cuba in order to claim it for the U.S. The North American

and United States Gazette even reprinted Lopez’s address to his followers, in which he

says, “Soldiers of the Liberating Expedition of Cuba! Our first act on arrival shall be the

establishment of a provisional constitution, founded on American principles, and adapted

to the emergencies of the occasion.”192 Given his patriotic words, it is noteworthy that

Lopez’s expositions fall under the terms of piracy. Lopez did not operate within the U.S.

military system, but instead took matters into his own hands, acting out the U.S. fever for

expansion during and immediately following the Mexican-American War. Along with

other enthusiasts, he became a filibuster described by turn-of-the-century author Herman

A. Hedyt as “one who, warring upon another country, does so, not for private gain, but

for public benefit.”193 In this manner, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, contemporaneous piratical behavior overlapped with the more historical accounts by

Defoe and Exquemelin.

All forms of piracy – including filibustering – had ended in the U.S. by the fin-de- siècle period, and turn-of-the-century newspapers made it a point to announce this distance between pirate and reader. “Coast Pirates of Old Days,” reads one lamentation.

The headline continues, “Their Descendants Now Scattered Along the New Jersey

192. General Narcisco Lopez, “Soldiers of the Liberating Army of Cuba,” (1850; repr. as “The Cuba Expedition: General Lopez’s Address to the Patriots,” North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), May 20, 1850). 193. Herman A. Hedyt, introduction to Pirates and Piracy, by Oscar Hermann (New York: Stettiner Brothers, 1902), 8-9. Hedyt goes on to concede that filibusters have become associated almost exclusively with expansionists from the U.S. at mid-century seeking to acquire Spanish-American territory (ibid.).

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Seaboard.”194 All that remains to the excitement of the “old days” is its aftermath. There is a similar headline that exclaims, “The Last of the Pirates. He Was of the Old School, and He Has Just Died in Honolulu.”195 Another suggests a faraway, romanticized time for the pirate: “Reads Like a Romance. Treasures Buried Years Ago By Pirates. Several

Fortunes Wasted and Three Persons Driven Insane in Fruitless Searches for the Hiding

Place – The Location Said to Be Known.”196 “Buccaneer Days,” reads a headline from

1886, suggesting a certain ye olde lore. The title continues, “Some Stirring

Reminiscences of Piratical Adventure.”197 Finally, the term “old” asserts itself again:

“Pirates of Olden Times. Only in Chinese Waters Now Does the Black Flag Float.”198

Just as Turner highlighted the end of the western frontier, contemporary newspapers proclaimed that the time of piracy in the U.S. had passed into infamy.

Illustrators, then, provided what had seemingly slipped through the modern man’s fingers: adventure in primal settings. In “Why Don’t You End It?” (fig. 18), Pyle sets the swordfight on a deserted, sandy beach. No hints at civilization – homes, offices, streets – can be seen, and Pyle includes instead the vast ocean in the far background, an appealing and also unnerving expanse of freedom for the civilized man. Other telling Pyle examples are “Pirates Used to Do That to Their Captains Now and Then” and On the Tortugas

(fig. 78 and 98). As with End It, both scenes show a deserted beach – void of civilization

– behind the prostrate body of a pirate in the foreground. The barren location, the pirates’ savagery, and the aftermath of violence provide fodder for a regression fantasy for the middle-class, white, and male viewer.

194. Emporia Daily Gazette (Emporia, KS), “Coast Pirates of Old Days,” January 9, 1895. 195. Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), “The Last of the Pirates,” March 25, 1888. 196. Galveston Daily News (Houston, TX), “Reads Like a Romance,” May 24, 1890. 197. St. Louis Globe, “Buccaneer Days,” January 23, 1886. 198. Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), “Pirates of Olden Times,” October 26, 1896.

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Interestingly, Frederic Remington, the painter who “whitened” the disappearing

West, admired Pyle’s uncivilized pirates. He purchased “Pirates Used to Do That to

Their Captains Now and Then” from Pyle in 1894.199 Never one to shy away from the fear and fascination of primitivism, Remington built his career on providing provocative imagery. He created the unsavory cowboy before conforming to Roosevelt and Wister’s ideal version. Furthermore, he wrote Pony Tracks, an 1890-95 series in Harper’s Monthly about “savage” Sioux Indians and Chiracahua bronco busters. And, in 1906, he sculpted

Paleolithic Man, arguably the most revealing evidence of his primitive predilections (fig.

99). Perhaps Remington found a kindred spirit in Pyle who fashioned uncivilized, and even savage, voyagers of the sea.

Wyeth and Schoonover again follow Pyle’s lead, placing their subjects in a similar geography. Wyeth’s pirates are found in a barren setting as in his endpaper for

Treasure Island (fig. 17). In the image, Wyeth foregrounds his figures against a desolate backdrop, forcing the viewer to focus full attention upon these anti-heroes. It also suggests the rugged, harsh, and completely primitive terrain in which his characters must survive. Schoonover also followed this tactic in images such as And So the Treasure was

Buried (fig. 66). On the edge of an uninhabited beach, Schoonover’s pirates secure their loot in a setting where only the strongest could flourish.

This primitive location, however, is not generic or even incidental. As one headline paradoxically announces, “Pirates Still Exist.” How can this be, considering the barrage of evidence to the contrary? The subtitle, however, reveals the specific and political intent: “In the Mediterranean and Loot a Spaniard.”200 The pirate’s destination is

199. Charles D. Abbot, Howard Pyle: A Chronicle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 145. 200. Galveston Daily News (Houston, TX), “Pirates Still Exist,” May 7, 1892.

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the savage and disputed Spanish terrain in this example, revealing that Spain, pirate, and looting co-mingled in fin-de-siècle imaginations. And, in illustration, Spain and its colonies take center stage in any understanding of the pirate’s appeal as racial “other.”

To be sure, imperialist ideology towards Spain and Latin American is made manifest in the illustrated fantastical pirate. The romance of the Golden Age of Piracy – or, a romance about the Caribbean during the time of Spanish rule – enraptured turn-of- the-century readers. As Brantlinger makes clear, regression fantasy “maps its own desires, its own fantastical longitudes and latitudes” on “Africa, India, and the other dark places of the earth.”201 The “dark places” of the Caribbean became the backdrop for the fin-de-siècle pirate buff’s fantasies specifically because it corresponded to the territories where the U.S. was flexing its new imperialist muscles. Like Lopez before them, the U.S.

Navy and the fantastical pirate sailed toward a Spanish colonial locale, fulfilling desires for exoticism and imperialist expansion.

Newspapers at the end of the century even connect the pirate to this xenophobia.

A newspaper headline from 1892, a few years before Roosevelt’s race speech, proclaims,

“Spectral Pirates. Scenes of More than Fifty Years Ago Re-enacted. Ellis Island, the

Government Immigrant Landing, Is Said to Be Haunted by the Ghosts of Former

Criminals of the Sea Who Were Hanged There.”202 This assertion focuses upon the pirate as criminal and dangerous. Then, by placing the unsavory pirate at Ellis Island, the newspaper craftily intertwines this treacherous creature to the equally scary immigrant.

Both are dangerous criminals with the potential to overtake civilization. In this instance, the pirate figure is used as “other” to represent both evil and immigrant.

201. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 246. 202. Wisconsin State Register (Portage, WI), “Spectral Pirates,” August 12, 1892.

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On the other side of the racial divide, however, headlines connect the pirate to

white imperialist heroism. In the year after the start of the Spanish-American War, an

article surfaced in the Weekly News and Courier that centers – naturally – on combat.

What is more surprising is that the article links the recent war to piracy, or more

specifically, U.S. privateering in colonial America. Titled “The Privateers in Modern

War,” the article interweaves this imperialist conflict with the Revolutionary War. In

part, it states, “As is well known, the damage done to English commerce was tremendous,

and volumes, and very interesting volumes many of them have been, too, have been

written on the life and adventures of our different ‘rough riders of the waves.’”203 The

piratical activity of U.S. colonial privateers is linked auspiciously to Roosevelt and his

famed Rough Riders. The Anglo-Saxon tie, which connects cowboy, pirate, soldier, and

hero, has not been severed completely.

Illustrated pirate imagery is rarely this racist or this laudatory. “In the simplest

terms,” according to historian George Mariscal, “Spain was to function as Other for the

construction of an American imperial identity.”204 Therefore, illustrators eschewed both

xenophobia and hero-worship, choosing instead to hint at the fantastical pirates’

“otherness” by creating a tenuous link to Spanish types. Harry Humphrey Moore, for

instance, exhibited Spanish Gypsies of Granada in the U.S. in 1872 (fig. 100), which is

33 years before Pyle illustrated So the Treasure was Divided and almost 40 years before

Wyeth’s Treasure Island title page became available to the public (figs. 14 and 60).

Despite the different subject matter, dates, and venues for these pieces, the gypsy dons

203. Weekly News and Courier (Charleston, SC), “The Privateers in Modern War,” December 2, 1899. 204. George Mariscal, “An Introduction to the Ideology of Hispanism in the U.S. and Britain,” in Conflicts of Discourse: Spanish Literature in the Golden Age, ed. Peter W. Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 3.

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the same headscarf as these piratical men, which visually connects these two types.

Headscarves, in fact, became a standard among pirate heroes only in turn-of-the-

twentieth-century illustration. 205 Looking back to Dafoe, one notices no precedent for

this type of head covering. From Mary Read and Anne Bonny to Captains Roberts and

Blackbeard, all sport some sort of head covering, but none wears a headscarf. Also, in the

few illustrations of pirates earlier in the nineteenth century, headscarves are decidedly

absent. Sir Henry Morgan, for example, from the 1859 issue of Harper’s Monthly (fig.

19), wears a feathered cap similar to the Captain Roberts illustration from Defoe (fig. 44).

Headscarves, then, were not a common costume accessory for buccaneers, or at least,

were not imagined as part of the pirate costume until turn-of-the-century illustration, and

notably, after salon paintings such as Moore’s.

While neither Pyle nor the pirate illustrators who followed ever explained their

decision to use the headscarf, the pirate-gypsy connection seems likely – if not probable –

given that both groups are identified as itinerant “others.” With Humphrey as but one

example, the headscarf was standard dress for contemporaneous gypsy genre paintings

coming out of Paris salons, and every salon from 1831 to 1888 included at least one

painting that featured a gypsy or gypsies.206 As the historian Lou Charnon-Deutsch explains, gypsies had “exotic appeal” because of their “boundless” Gypsyness (i.e., itinerancy), but also, and paradoxically, because of their Spanishness, since Europe had

205. I owe a debt to David Rickman, the Exhibits Coordinator for the Delaware Division of Parks and Recreation and a freelance illustrator, for pointing out to me the ubiquity of the headscarf in the pirate uniform as well as the headscarf’s connection to turn-of-the-twentieth century Spanish types. David Rickman, conversation with author, Wilmington, DE, May 22, 2007. 206. Elizabeth Boone, Vistas De España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860-1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 126.

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“the tendency … to look to southern Spain to fulfill its desire for an exotic other.”207

Therefore, the wandering gypsy represented a unique and complicated Spanish type. He

or she simultaneously signified Spanish national pride, but also became an exploited

stereotype manipulated by Spain as well as by outsider visitors.208 In this manner, then,

the gypsy came to represent both Spain and exoticized “other” to artists and travelers

from Europe, and by extension, to American viewers as well. U.S. illustrators took

advantage of this ambiguous “other” in their pirate imagery. The cowboy’s neckerchief

moves upward to a headscarf as the roving pirate wanders southward into the territory of

Spanish “otherness.”

Other Spanish types from the Salon conflate with the gypsy to create the

costuming of the illustrated pirate. The thief in William Turner Dannat’s Contrebandier

aragonais (fig. 101), for instance, smuggles goods in and out of Spain, but wears the

clothes of Aragon. Dannat’s painting – which won him a medal at the 1883 Salon209 –

exhibits the traditional Aragonese costume with its wide sash around the waist, short

pants, and open cuffs. With these sartorial choices, his thief also resembles the

crewmembers in Pyle’s Kidd at Gardiner Island (fig. 23, which shows a pirate wearing

the smuggler’s vest as well), his Blackbeard Buries His Treasure (fig. 102), and

Schoonover’s Ned Rackham (fig. 94). Artist-tourists imagined Spain through genre

paintings of smugglers and rovers. Fin-de-siècle pirates emulated in appearance and

behavior these Spain-inspired, and tellingly lawless, types.

207. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 15. 208. Boone, Vistas, 130. 209. Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 199.

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Interest in Spain went beyond artist-tourists and the Salon. Rodrigo Botero

explains this rise of Spanish subjects during this era:

Along with the reduction of official intercourse between the two countries after the 1820s, this period brought about the birth of Hispanic studies in the US, as intellectual interest in Spain and to a lesser degree, in Spanish America, encouraged North American scholars, writers, and travellers [sic] to become acquainted with Spanish history, literature, and culture.210

In other words, illustrators were imagining a pirate that an audience of “scholars, writers, and travellers” would have readily recognized as possessing Spanish qualities.

This desire to learn about Spain, however, led to exoticizing as Spanish types became fodder for the fantastical pirate type. Guidebooks and tourist books proliferated at the century’s end, and Frederick R. McClintock’s Holidays in Spain: Being Some

Account of Two Tours in that Country in 1880 and 1882 provides a description of the aforementioned Aragonese people. Without the reference to Aragon, McClintock easily could be describing of one of Pyle’s pirates, such as The Buccaneer was a Picturesque

Fellow (fig. 12):

The dress of the Aragonese peasantry now attracted our attention from its peculiarity, and because of its unlikeness to anything we had yet seen. The men as a rule wear no hats, but have instead a coloured handkerchief wound round the head, leaving the top quite bare. They wear knee-breeches slashed down the sides, and tied by strings below the knee, and an open waistcoat. Round the waist they wind a wide sash, which is made to act as a receptacle for articles of various kinds. Here are stowed away pipes, tobacco, money, provisions, and other odds and ends – the folds of the sash keeping everything as safe as a pocket. They also frequently carry a blanket of various colours, which they throw in a graceful manner over their shoulders. On their feet they wear a kind of sandal.211

As the interest in Spanish culture increased at the Salons overseas, fascination spread to

the United States. Tourists and painters along with travelers, writers, and illustrators

210. Rodrigo Botero, Ambivalent Embrace: America's Troubled Relations with Spain from the Revolutionary War to the Cold War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 51. 211. F. R. McClintock, Holidays in Spain: Being Some Account of Two Tours in That Country in the Autumns of 1880 and 1881 (London: E. Stanford, 1882), 103.

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began to portray the romanticized and exoticized Spain to an ever-growing U.S.

audience.

Consequently, magazine readers could find contemporaneous Spanish subjects in

the pages of Harper’s Monthly as well. Case in point is Charles C. Reinhart’s 1882

illustrations for George Lathrop’s serialized travel stories, “Spanish Vistas.”212 The account follows Lathrop and Reinhart as they visit different cities and regions of Spain:

Madrid, Toledo, Cordova, Seville, Valencia. Spanish types – guitar players, dancers, gypsies, bullfighters – dominate their imagery of this romantic, mysterious nation.

Several of Reinhart’s images, such as The Serenaders, Professional Beggar, and Difficult for Foreigners, even wear the tell-tale headscarf of fantastical pirates (figs. 103-105). In fact, the barbers in Reinhart’s Street Barbers (fig. 106) closely resemble what were to become Pyle’s pirates. With pants that stop at the knee, wide sashes, and headscarves,

Reinhart’s barbers provide a clear model for Pyle’s Which Shall be Captain? and

Wyeth’s Treasure Island, title page (figs. 10 and 60). Even the dead pirate on the beach in Dead Men Tell No Tales (fig. 77) resembles Reinhart’s lowly subjects, which are later emulated by N. C. Wyeth in “Oh, Morgan’s Men are Out for You” and by Schoonover in

Pirate with Spy-Glass (figs. 107 and 108).213

212. George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pts. 1 to 5, Harper’s Monthly, April 1882, 641-62; May 1882, 801-20; July 1882, 205-22; August 1882, 371-92; September 1882, 546-66. 213. Reinhart’s Street Barbers could have easily been a direct influence on Pyle’s development of his pirate hero. Much of Pyle’s correspondence has been lost; therefore, it would be difficult to connect conclusively Pyle’s pirate and the source of his inspiration. Conjecture, however, allows for the possibility that Pyle looked to his fellow illustrators. According to his biographers, Pyle belonged to the same professional and social network as Reinhart when they both lived in New York and worked for Harper’s Monthly in the 1870s. While there is no direct evidence that Pyle continued to follow Reinhart’s career (i.e., correspondence), it is known that Pyle did consider himself part of the artistic community even after moving back to Wilmington, Delaware. His still extant correspondence with his mother as well as his series of lectures to the New York-based National Academy of Design attest to his continued interest in the art world and its developments. Furthermore, his personal library contained all the issues of Harper’s Weekly from 1857-1905, mining these magazines perhaps for illustration inspiration. Pyle’s issues of Harper’s

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Curiously, although Reinhart illustrates only two gypsy scenes along his trip (figs.

109 and 110), none of his male gypsies wears a headscarf or a wide sash around his waist. Furthermore, although Reinhart’s gypsies look dissimilar from the Salon examples, the male gypsy in figure 108 wears short pants and sandles similar to Dannat’s smuggler and Pyle’s Picturesque Fellow. There is an overlap, therefore, in the sartorial choices among street types – beggars, street vendors, gypsies, smugglers – at least as far as turn- of-the-century artist-tourists imagined them. The romanticization of Spain, therefore, conflates several lowly “types;” it is not important to be accurate in terms of which type, only to be accurate enough in order for the viewer to recognize Spain as the referent.

Therefore, characteristics – i.e., lowly and lawless and Spanish – combine to create the costume of the fantastical pirate, who is an “other” as well.

While referencing Spain allows any artist-tourist to “other” its subject, Spanish- influenced pirate illustration carries a unique message for fin-de-siècle America. Spain’s reputation as Empire – both gained and lost – acted simultaneously as exemplar and forewarning to America’s developing internationalism. “The Spanish empire, with its legacy of artistic and political preeminence, was a useful model for the U.S., a young nation ready to become a world power in its own right,” the art historian M. Elizabeth

Boone explains. She continues, “But Americans viewed Spain selectively, defining its

Weekly are now housed in the Howard Pyle Library Collection, Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. During his New York stint, furthermore, Pyle himself showed interest in Spanish subjects. In a letter from Pyle to his mother, addressed on February 28, 1878, Pyle discusses an image that reveals his fascination with Spanish types. He writes, “The first one represents a Spanish caballero standing against the side of a bridge looking after his Dulcinia whom he has mortally offended by a lampoon written in a fit of jealousy. She is ‘soaring’ past him with a scornful expression on her face and he is looking after her in a beseeching way. The scene is early morning and I think I have gotten a real feeling of early sunlight in the picture. I borrowed a Spanish cloak from an artist friend of mind that almost entirely covers the modern European dress and which with the addition of a sombrero gives him quite a picturesque look” (qtd. in Abbot, Howard Pyle, 49). Spanish subjects grabbed the attention of Salon goers and tourists, and while the scene Pyle describes above has been lost, the fascination with Spain seems to have enchanted him as well.

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successes and detailing its flaws.”214 The relationship between the U.S. and Spain

remained ambiguous. It was convenient for the U.S. to enumerate Spain’s faults as they

argued for control of Spanish American territory, for example, in the Mexican-American

War or the later Spanish-American War. Indeed, the U.S. admired Spain; however, given

that Spain (and its colonies) and the U.S. were continuously arguing in border disputes,

antagonisms often cropped up.

On the positive side, contemporary accounts acknowledge the U.S. indebtedness

to Spain. For instance, Roosevelt, who pushed for, and himself fought in, the war against

Spain, acknowledged that this great imperialist power “expanded and fell” but left behind

a “whole continent” of Spanish-speaking nations.215 Furthermore, in his serialized article,

Lathrop records an exchange with Reinhart that underscores a Spanish-U.S. connection.

He states, “It was of Spain’s past and present that we were speaking, and ‘What,’ I asked,

‘have we given her in return for her discovery of the New World?’” With this question,

Lathrop reveals the debt, and therefore the intimate connection, that the U.S. had with

Spain. However, Reinhart’s response and Lathrop’s commentary reveal that in Spain’s past lies a warning for America’s future:

“The sleeping-car and the tram-way,” answered Velazquez [Reinhart’s nickname], with justifiable pride. He was right, for we had seen the first on the railroad, and the second skimming the streets of Madrid. Still, the reward did not appear great, measured by the much that Spain’s ventures in the Western hemisphere had cost her, and by the comparative desolation of her present.216

214. Boone, Vistas, 11. 215. Roosevelt to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, 27 December 1904, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 1083-4. 216. George Lathrop, "Spanish Vistas," pt. 2, 801.

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With this exchange, Lathrop both admires and fears the fate of a large imperial nation.

And, in the meantime, he points out Spain’s backwardness by contrasting it to U.S.

technological progress.

Every positive outlook has its opposite, and Lathrop, Roosevelt, and other U.S.

patriots also drew upon the leyenda negra. A term coined by an early twentieth-century

Spanish historian, the leyenda negra, or Black Legend, suggests – in name alone – racial

anxieties.217 This anti-Spanish myth-making genre developed during the Enlightenment

and was still in full force at the end of the nineteenth century. And, according to a more

recent historian, European political and literary establishments developed the Black

Legend out of fear, envy, and hatred of the Spanish Empire and its extreme wealth.

Ultimately, because of this antagonism, Spain came to represent the “horrible example of

all that the Enlightenment was to combat” and contributed to the “uncritical popular and

intellectual acceptance of anti-Spain distortions, especially by nations shaping western

thought after Spain lost hegemony.”218 The Black Legend situates Spain as “other,” contributing to the exotic, anti-Enlightenment sentiments in turn-of-the-twentieth-century artist-tourists images. Also, given the anxieties concerning primitive backsliding in the late nineteenth century, the Black Legend takes on new, racial significance. Finally, and most pointedly, the leyenda negra allows the U.S. to pit itself as white hero against the dark and savage Spanish enemy in contemporaneous skirmishes in the Caribbean.

Indebtedness to a Spain that existed mostly in the imaginations of American citizens, therefore, triggered friction between the two countries during the turn of the

217. This Spanish historian is Julián Juderías, who coined the term in his 1914 book La leyenda negra y la verdad historica. 218. Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 10.

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century. Contemporary U.S.-Spanish clashes revved up, for instance, with the Virginius

incident in 1873. Spain captured the U.S. ship Virginius, sent it to Santiago de Cuba,

declared it a pirate ship, and executed the majority of its crew, including several U.S.

citizens. Unfortunately for Spanish-U.S. relations, this incident found a Black Legend

antecedent in an incendiary account written by Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1552, which

describes Spain’s cruelty even in its title: A Brief Account of the Destruction of the

Indies: An Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacre and Slaughter of

20,000,000 People in the West Indies by the Spaniard.219 Asserting Spain’s brutality in its

own time, the book was resurrected in its English translation in the U.S. during the

Spanish American War. Public outrage in the U.S., justified by the Black Legend, created

long-lasting resentment towards Spain, which finally erupted into war at the end of the

century. From Virginius to Las Casas, U.S. supporters of American southern expansion

embraced the idea of a wicked Spain.

Significantly, and as the Virginius incident intimates, turn-of-the-twentieth-

century friction parallels Anglo-Latin conflict during the Golden Age of Piracy. Howard

Pyle often acknowledges this tension in his introduction to Exquemelin’s history. Over

and over, he pits “Anglo-Saxon” against “Latin” forces. He begins by asserting, “I fancy

that the majority of us would rather turn back over the leaves of history to read how

Drake captured the Spanish treasure-ship in the South Sea.” 220 He continues with a litany of Anglo-versus-Latin references:

For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish ventures of Elizabethan days.221

219. Boone, Vistas, 5. 220. Howard Pyle, introduction to The Buccaneers and Marooners of America, by A.O. Exquemelin, ed. by Howard Pyle (1678; New York: MacMillan and Company, 1891), 16. 221. Ibid., 17-18.

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The Western World is filled with names of daring mariners of those old days, who came flitting across the great trackless ocean in their tub-like boats of a few hundred tons burden, partly to explore unknown seas, partly – largely perhaps – in pursuit of Spanish treasure: Frobisher, Davis, Drake, and a score of others.222 In this left-handed war against Catholic Spain many of the adventures were, no doubt, stirred and incited by a grim, Calvinistic, Puritanical zeal for Protestantism.223 Cruelty begat cruelty, and it would be hard to say whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin showed himself to be most proficient in torturing his victim.224

Finally, Pyle states outright that Spain is different from the rest of the world by asserting,

“Though Spain might be ever so well grounded in peace at home, in the West Indies she

was always at war with the whole world – English, French, Dutch” [my emphasis].225

Pyle admits that both sides participated in “cruelty” and “torturing,” and yet he still divides the world into “Spain” and “not Spain,” playing up the leyenda negra and drawing connections between the Golden Age of Piracy and fin-de-siècle Imperialism.

In the end, Pyle and his fellow illustrators present an inconsistent view of piracy, a view that ultimately translates to pure fantasy. In the Exquemelin text, the pirate is

Anglo and therefore a Spanish antagonist; in his fantastical images, by contrast, pirates are neither Davises nor Drakes, but mostly nameless crewmembers. Furthermore, these nameless men – in figures 10, 17, 62, 88, for instance – have headscarves, short pants, and dark complexions, which resemble the types coming out of an exotic Spain. Pyle,

Schoonover, and Wyeth, therefore, blur the fear of Spain’s Black Legend with its fascinating darkness and savagery. They create something entirely devoid of loyalty to any race or nationality, or something more closely related to the primitive man. Hence, the viewer is prompted to indulge in their regression fantasy.

222. Ibid., 19. 223. Ibid., 19. 224. Ibid., 20. 225. Ibid., 21.

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This fantastical pirate grew out of an era of expansion, imperialism, and racial anxiety. Until now, the dominating figures of Theodore Roosevelt, the iconic cowboy, and the U.S. Navy sailor have overshadowed him, and scholars have looked passed the pirate’s value for representing turn-of-the-century phenomena. Not unlike the cowboy icon, the fantastical pirate grabbed the attention of U.S. middle-class men and boys.

These avid viewers sought to emulate the pirate’s adventurous nature and physical stature, if also they were drawn in by the allure of his primitive brutality. Remington seems to have enjoyed the fantasy of pirate illustration, as witnessed by his purchase of

Pyle’s Pirate Used to Do That to Their Captain Now and Then. N. C. Wyeth, furthermore, participated for a time in the cowboy lifestyle, but became most well known for his Treasure Island pirates. Drawing this connection between cowboy and pirate, though, points out where the two icons diverge: while the cowboy became an upstanding white hero of Western expansion, pirates resembled President Arthur’s infamous “armed desperadoes” as they stole their way through expansion southward.

Considering his intermingling of national and racial identity, the pirate also challenged iconic status by looking like a racial “other” rather than the archetypal U.S.

Navy man. The unexplored, maritime terrain he shares with this U.S. sailor highlights their even greater difference: the Navy seaman is a white man; the pirate is racially ambiguous. With his headscarf, wide sash, short pants, and swarthy complexion, he looks nothing like the Anglo-Saxon cowboy or sailor. Instead, American illustrators chose to emulate contemporaneous Spanish gypsies and Spanish genre subjects. The pirate gained popularity despite, or more likely because of, the indeterminate nature of his national and racial identity. The illustrator, and subsequently the viewer, may have wanted to identify

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with him because of his violent, adventurous, even manly, nature, but his dark skin and

similarity to Spanish lowly types is perplexing.

As Wyeth’s Boarders elucidates, the illustrated pirate is, therefore, on the fence:

between uninhabited terrain and claimed territory; between primitive and sophisticated

modes of fighting; between a simian and Anglo Saxon heritage; between conquering hero

and repugnant anti-hero; between fearsome and fascinating. The viewer could admire the

Boarders as they clamber for what they desire. According to fin-de-siècle mores,

however, their costuming, complexion, and savage actions clearly categorized the pirates

as the “other,” who like all racial inferiors – immigrants, primitives, gypsies –should be

prevented from entering the stronghold of whiteness.

Their very invasion, however, allowed for a regression fantasy. Wyeth himself

clearly enjoyed this image, describing it in a letter to his mother with these words:

I am writing dangerously near to a fiendish bunch of Godless men scrambling over a stockade! It’s surprising how quietly they are doing it, too, loaded down as they are – first with rum and all manner of arms, guns, pistols, cutlasses and knives!226

Descriptions like “fiendish,” “Godless,” and “scrambling,” along with the pirates’ association with rum and weaponry, indicate that Wyeth believed his characters to be uncivilized, if not entirely savage. And yet, because of these “baser” qualities as well as their proximity to Wyeth, the pirates provided the artist with a feeling of danger.

Following Brantlinger’s definition, the pirate character allowed the viewer – and in this case, the creator as well – to “go native” vicariously. In a white, middle-class, and male world in which opportunities for adventure had waned, the pirate explored the “dark

226. N. C. Wyeth to Henriette Wyeth (mother), 24 June 1911, in The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, ed. Betsy Wyeth (Boston: Gambit, 1971), 383.

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places” of the Caribbean, fulfilling imperialist and expansionist desires while also appealing to the viewer’s fear and fascination of the “other.”

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Chapter Five

Fantasy and Reality: Beyond the Golden Age with Errol Flynn, Johnny Depp, and Somali Pirates

Captain Jack Sparrow is, arguably, the most recognizable pirate to date (fig. 111).

Played by Johnny Depp, Sparrow is the star of the Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy, the installments of which came out in 2003, 2006 and 2007. At least partially due to

Sparrow’s popularity, Depp received People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” prize in 2009, appearing on the magazine’s cover and suggesting the continued desire for the pirate’s brand of masculinity. Though not the protagonist in this swashbuckling love story,

Sparrow steals the show, at once the cad, dandy, comedian, hero, and curse. The happy- go-lucky pirate orchestrates the twists and turns of these swashbuckling adventures; he facilitates the union of the hapless couple Elizabeth and Will even as he pursues his own selfish interests for gold, women, and freedom. And, his appearance owes a debt to the

Golden Age of illustration.

Captain Jack Sparrow is a replica of Howard Pyle’s portrait Captain Keitt (1907; fig 97). Although Captain Jack has considerably more hair, he resembles Keitt in his long captain’s coat. Loose-fitting pants sway in the breeze over high brown boots. These two men don the same tri-corner hat, cross the same belt and buckle across their chests to hold their swords, and carry pistols in their flowing sashes. Sparrow, who is unable to walk straight due to ceaseless drunkenness and sea legs, shares Keitt’s slightly off-kilter appearance. Keitt’s darkened face and skin parallel the dark, heavily made-up complexion of Captain Jack.

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Though 100 years separate Keitt and Sparrow, they certainly have more in

common with each other than either has to the twenty-first-century Somali pirates. While

Sparrow steals a sloop, which ultimately lands back into the hands of the British Navy,

and humorously gets slapped by two scorned women, slaps which he observes he “may

have deserved,” pirates accounted for “41 attacks in the waters off Somalia in 2007, 111

attacks in 2008 and 66 attacks since January 2009.”227 After being marooned on an island by his former crew, Sparrow bemoans, “Why is the rum gone?” On the other hand, 18- year-old Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, who seized the U.S. flagged Maersk Alabama on

April 8, 2009 with several other young pirates, was the only survivor in the U.S. Navy siege to reclaim kidnapped Captain Phillips. He faces 10 counts in a New York court,

“including piracy under the law of nations, conspiracy, hostage-taking, kidnapping and possession of a machine gun while seizing a ship by force.”228 Commanding galleons,

Sparrow and Keitt wear captain’s coats and pistols. Somali pirates, according to one newspaper account, “typically wear fatigues and operate from speedboats equipped with satellite phones and GPS equipment. They are often armed with automatic weapons, anti- tank rockets and various types of grenades.”229 Marooning, rum-drinking, and sloop- stealing do not belong in a world of grenades and speed boats.

Mike Carraway, the exhibit designer at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in

Beaufort, N.C, astutely observes that pirates are “just your basic thugs [but] we've for

227. Larry Howard, “How Should the Somali Pirates Be Dealt With?” Washington Post, May 10, 2009. 228. Tom Hays, “Teen Somali Piracy Suspect Indicted in New York Court,” Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), May 20, 2009. 229. Anita Powell, “Young Somalis Get Rich as High-Tech Buccaneers,” Globe and Mail (Canada), April 9, 2009.

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some reason romanticized them.”230 Pyle’s illustrations, along with those of Wyeth and

Schoonover, are responsible for creating this romanticized icon, conjuring up a fantastical pirate. Subsequent illustrators and more especially moviemakers have run with the romance to the point where the fantastical pirate has replaced any reality of piracy on the high seas. Disney specifically has had a large part in this overhaul. They have co-opted the Golden Age pirate and promulgated him as a commodity. This commercialization is problematic, however, in the face of Somali examples. The kidnapping and ransacking of vessels along the African coast, or the reality of piracy, disrupt the current definitions of happy-go-lucky piracy.

Yet, these contemporary news stories have not created a “crisis” around the fantastical pirate. In fact, the pirate icon is very much alive. Johnny Depp is currently filming a new Pirates of the Caribbean installment; the Whydah travelling exhibition, which features a sunken pirate ship, still tours major U.S. museums;231 Jolly Roger socks are available at retail stores nationwide; and Campbell’s soup commercials feature a homemaker and her two boys sharing a cup of soup after wearing eye patches and headscarves in their make-believe world on the high seas. How is it possible that a mother playing pirate with her (plastic-)sword-wielding sons can co-exist with desperate pirates, some of them teenagers, who hijack ships and kidnap their captains? How can both be labeled piracy, and how do we reconcile the fantasy and reality? The short answer is that we can’t. But, more importantly, these two definitions must coexist uncomfortably together because each definition throws the other into high relief. Because

230. Jocelyn Noveck, “We’re Going Through a Crippling Recession” (derived headline), Spartanburg (SC) Herald – Journal, April 25, 2009. 231. In fact, museum curators even acknowledge this commercialization. Mike Carraway, who is the exhibit designer at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, N.C, admits, "It's like dinosaurs, or the Titanic … They're our aces in the hole" (qtd. in Noveck, “Crippling Recession.”)

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we are attracted to the fantastical pirate, we gravitate to real-life examples in Somalia,

giving a voice to youths who, with no other recourse, are pushed to a depraved

occupation. And, because of the regrettable Somali attacks, we are faced with the

conundrum of the pirate, a good and bad man wrapped into one fantastical icon. We have

the opportunity to learn how, despite or perhaps because of his complex nature, the pirate

has become our hero.

The contemporary obsession with fantastical piracy has traversed the ages from

the late-nineteenth century because of the intervening illustrators and moviemakers that

continued to popularize the pirate. During the waning years of illustration’s Golden Age,

John Sloan, for instance, imagined pirates studying math and literature on the shore or

simply languishing in boredom on the beach (figs. 112 and 113). Published in

Everybody’s and Collier’s, these lesser-known works introduced the humorous pirate to

magazine readers.232 Sloan’s foray into pirate imagery capitalized on an icon whose ubiquity assured popularity for his work.

His illustrations also suggest that the icon was so well entrenched, it was subject to humorous critique. In 1922, for instance, Sloan illustrated Ralph Bergengren’s pirate tale entitled “Redefining Influence of Captain Kidd.” One illustration (fig. 114), titled

Doting Pirates Sat in the Nice Red Rocking-Chairs and Watched the Tender Infant Busily

232. It is important to note that, by the early twentieth century, the world of illustration and the world of fine art were beginning to separate. While in the process of establishing himself as a fine artist, John Sloan worked as an illustrator, leaving behind him several pirate cartoons. Furthermore, this transition affected N. C. Wyeth who attempted to divorce his reputation and success as an illustrator from his entrée into the more respected world of the fine arts. According to his biographer, “Wyeth saw … a chance to decide once and for all between illustration and painting. With a fortune from Hearst, he felt he could buy the time to be the painter he should be … he could abandon illustration and devote himself entirely to painting. The two forms, he still imagined, were mutually exclusive. Moving between them would always be ‘a jump from white to black.’” David Michaelis, N. C. Wyeth: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 232. For more information on illustration, art, and the growing divisions between the two in the early twentieth century, please see Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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Sliding Checkers Off the Domelike Cranium of Their Baldest Comrade, portrays a group

of pirates who wear the costumes found in earlier Pyle, Wyeth, and Schoonover

illustrations (see, for example, figs. 10, 107, and 108). Loose-fitting, tattered pants and

shirts accompany headscarves and sashes, topped off with facial hair on their fierce faces.

The “Baldest Comrade” even has a few pistols stuck in the sash at his waist.

However, as the illustration’s caption suggests, Sloan “redefines” the pirate.

Bergendren and Sloan take on Captain Kidd, one of the more infamous historical pirates

of the Caribbean. They play upon the name “Kidd,” choosing to tell a tale of Kidd as a

“kid.” In figure 115, “delighted” pirates have successfully entertained the baby Kidd

who, in response, “wiggle[s] his chubby legs.” Gone are the pistol-wielding and sword-

waving pirates of “Stand and Deliver!” or Pirate with Flintlock (figs. 24 and 116).

Similarly, Sloan defies the viewer’s expectation of the illustrated pirate in his image,

titled Red Whisker, One Hand on the Rail and Captain Kidd in the Other, Had Bounded

Lightly over the Bulwarks (fig. 117). Sloan provides us with a typical pirate captain: tri- cornered hat, swashbuckler boots and long, dark coat and sash. Furthermore, much like

Wyeth’s pirates in Treasure Island or Schoonover’s crew in Blackbeard Buccaneer (figs.

16 and 43), the pirate leaps over a barrier. He is not the physically intimidating or violent pirate like Silver or Blackbeard, however. Instead, he holds a baby the way a housewife would amidst myriad household duties. Sloan uses the fantastical pirate not to suggest vicarious experience, but instead to elicit humor. As they take a vacation or participate in domestic affairs, pirates become more deeply woven into the fabric of U.S. pop culture, light-heartedly illustrating the banal side of living.

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Sloan was not the only illustrator to recognize the pirate’s pop-cultural resonance.

Norman Rockwell brought the pirate to the middle-class American who faithfully read the Saturday Evening Post in the 1910s through the 1960s. Cousin Reginald Plays Pirate, a 1917 cover for Country Gentleman – a sister publication to the Post – is the first of

Rockwell’s five pirate illustrations (fig. 118). The illustrated pirate is, by this time, deeply steeped in fantasy, and the boys on Rockwell’s covers display his attributes. They wear tattered, red clothing, and bandannas. The boy at left kneels, draped in the skull and cross bones of the Jolly Roger. The boy at the right even displays the bare chest of the

Masculine Primitive, although his body is much less developed than the manly physiques displayed by Sandow, Tarzan, or in Wyeth or Schoonover imagery. With his menacing sword slung on his hip and artificial facial hair, the captain leads this homosocial scene, standing firmly at the center and pointing down at his captor. This prisoner is a sissy, a youthful version of the neurasthenic, bespectacled brainworker. Like this 1917 image,

Rockwell’s Land of Enchantment (1934; fig. 119) appeals to children and depicts the vicarious escape enjoyed by reading literature. Amidst the various characters of children’s fantasies is a pirate. Striding from right to left with peg leg and crutch,

Rockwell’s pirate directly mimics Wyeth’s imagining of Long John Silver, all the way down to the faithful parrot that rests on Silver’s shoulder.

A Family Tree from 1959 is Rockwell’s final pirate cover (fig. 120). In this late image, Rockwell presents the Post reader an American family tree. Adorning the tree are typical players in American history – the Jacksonian businessman, the Union and

Confederate soldiers, the Protestant preacher and his dowdy wife all the way up to the

1950s nuclear family of mother, father, and bright, hopeful, red-headed boy. Occupying

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the tree’s base, however, are not the typical founding fathers or the Puritans, but instead a

pirate and his Spanish, aristocratic wife. She, the reader can assume, was taken as booty

from the burning Spanish galleon at the right of the image. Given the veracity of this tree,

i.e., pirates indeed played their part during several eras of U.S. history, this insertion

could be seen as incendiary. During its creation, Rockwell himself had trouble with this

pirate, rubbing him out, replacing him with first a Puritan and then a swashbuckling

drunkard. However, eventually, as seen in the final product, he returned to his original,

fierce pirate. Rockwell does not give any historical explanation as to why the pirate

appears, but instead asserts that he is “exciting and picturesque.”233 After almost seventy

years and countless examples of piratical adventure – all of which began with Pyle’s

Walking the Plank – fantastical piracy was now inextricably a part of U.S. history and

could conceivably be placed at the roots of a U.S. family tree. The initials “H.P.” which

Rockwell places prominently on his treasure chest, function as a seal of approval from

the master of the fantastical pirate himself.

Despite his historical and cultural significance, the pirate is subject to Rockwell’s

critique as well. In June of 1924, Rockwell created two images that function as a diptych,

of sorts (figs. 121 and 122). First, he created a pleasure-starved clerk dreaming of

excitement. Behind his shrunken physique, a pirate ship fills this middle-class worker’s

thought bubble. On its own, the theme – a scribe dreaming of a more active life –

certainly implicates office work in this man’s depleted spirit. In fact, this sad scribe could

even be Puck’s Johnny (seen in Chapter 3): all grown up in his little office, but still

imagining heroic escapades.

233. Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988), 396. For the play-by-play on the creation of this image, please read his entire chapter titled “I paint another Post cover,” 367-409.

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The following June 14 cover, however, upsets this model. In a similar composition, a man slumps in the foreground while a thought bubble reveals his desires.

This time, Rockwell creates the bookkeeper’s foil: the pirate dreaming of home. Replete with peg leg, torn cloak, headscarf, pistol, and sword, this pirate wears the trappings of fantastical piracy. But the depiction is unflattering. While it does not vilify by showing the boorish, illicit behavior of the pirate, the illustration portrays a man who has lost his edge of wild abandon. The pirate is not only defeated, but downright sluggish, dreaming of home and the stability at a permanent hearth. Perhaps, for Rockwell, the pirate’s glamorous life has begun to fade, much like the life of another hero, i.e, the cowboy, which the illustrator also criticizes in Gary Cooper as Texan (fig. 123). With his exaggerated make-up painstakingly applied, the Wild West cowboy is only a Hollywood fabrication. Rockwell cheekily acknowledges that for every slumped-shouldered bookkeeper, there is his antithesis, but he’s not always the quintessential, strapping adventurer we wish to imagine.

Rockwell’s images react to the deluge of swashbuckling pirate films that inundated pop culture and continued to do so even after Rockwell’s commentary. Into the twentieth century, in fact, the pirate created during the Golden Age of Illustration continued to shine most brightly from the silver screen. Two early films – Captain Blood from 1924 and The Black Pirate from 1926 – harken back to illustrations by Pyle,

Schoonover, and Wyeth.234 Both films relay fictionalized stories based on the pirates of the Caribbean. The Black Pirate borrows not only Pyle’s setting but also directly alludes

234. David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995), 172-173.

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to imagery from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.235 And, a knowledgeable filmgoer would not have to watch long to see the allusions in action. For instance, as in Pyle’s

“Jamaica” initial or Wyeth’s Boarders, the movie begins with a pirate captain clenching a scabbard securely between his teeth. The comic relief of the movie, an old seadog, is a drunkard with a peg leg and missing arm, referencing Wyeth’s less comical Long John

Silver. Finally, during a dramatic sequence of the film, the protagonist played by Douglas

Fairbanks battles the ferocious pirate captain in a swordfight very similar to Pyle’s “Why

Don’t You End It?” or Wyeth’s Duel on a Beach.

Most tellingly, The Black Pirate pays tribute to Howard Pyle with a direct nod to

Marooned. Fifteen minutes into the film, a title card appears reading “Marooned.” Then, the camera fades from black to portray the eponymous pirate left to die on a deserted island (fig. 124). Functioning as the title to this vignette, “Marooned” flawlessly recreates

Pyle’s image of the same name (fig. 56). While the film version raises the horizon line and includes palm trees dotting the landscape, the allusion is undeniable. The slumped shoulders and hidden face of the isolated figure, the island surroundings, and the distance of the character from the viewer belong to Pyle. While both elicit sympathy, Pyle’s

Marooned accompanies an historical narrative, creating in visual and somewhat fanciful terms the definition that he includes in his article. In the movie, by contrast, the marooned sequence functions as a plot device, drawing the moviegoer into the protagonist’s world.

235. Several artists involved with the making of The Black Pirate can be linked to Howard Pyle. According to his biographer, “When Fairbanks decided he would do his pirate story in color, he wanted the film to have the overall visual design of the production be akin to an illustrated book by Howard Pyle.” Furthermore, Dwight Franklin was hired as art director for Black Pirate, and he is described as “an authority of buccaneer life and paintings and a disciple of Howard Pyle.” Jeffrey Vance, with Tony Maietta, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 206. I owe a debt to David M. Lubin for introducing me to this source in his article titled “The Persistence of Pirates: Pyle, Piracy, and the Silver Screen,” in Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, forthcoming).

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This is an important transition. By the early decades of the twentieth century, Pyle illustrations – and not historical accounts – became the reference material for what a pirate should look like. Golden Age illustration was the new source for genuine pirate imagery.

Just as fin-de-siècle illustrators moved farther and farther from pirate history into glamour, the movie pirate moved farther away from Pyle, always maintaining Golden

Age of Illustration imagery as a legitimizing referent, however. Mordaunt Hall’s New

York Times review of The Black Pirate reveals the ever-increasing interest in glamour.

He states, “With its excellent titles and wondrous color scenes this picture seems to have a Barriesque motif that has been aged in Stevensonian wood.” It was not the storyline that impressed Hall, but instead the bright colors and action sequences from earlier pirate adventures, such as Peter Pan and Treasure Island; he may have even been picturing

Wyeth’s Treasure Island gun- and sword-wielding imagery (see, for example, figs. 17 and 68). Hall goes on to say, “This is a production which marks another forward stride for the screen, one that the boy and his mother will enjoy and one that is a healthy entertainment for men of all ages.”236

Fantasy fueled this “healthy entertainment for … all ages.” Swashbuckling films first gained popularity during the silent film era with movies like Black Pirate (1926),

Sea Hawk (1924), and an early version of Captain Blood (1925). The Great Depression, and the newly discovered “talkies,” however, triggered a distinct turn towards contemporary subject matter. The issuing of the Legion of Decency in 1934 saw

Hollywood return again to period pieces because producers, writers, and directors

236. Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen: Mr. Fairbanks’s New Picture,” New York Times, March 9, 1926.

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discovered that fantasy films skirted the strictest morality laws. No one expected such

whimsy to be taken seriously. Hollywood’s rejection of realism and contemporary life at

this time parallels Golden Age pirate illustration and its success as a regression fantasy.

In both instances, a viewer could escape into a depraved, exotic world of thievery,

adventure, and murder, but then could return to contemporary life unscathed. The 1934

production of Treasure Island was the first film to venture again into pirate waters after

this period of realism, and its success heralded a barrage of other fantastical pirate films,

including the 1935 version of Captain Blood that ignited Errol Flynn’s career.237

Before there was Johnny Depp, there was Errol Flynn, the archetypal leading man/swashbuckler (fig. 125). In turn, this Hollywood actor continued to bring fame to illustration’s icon. Flynn’s breakout performance came with Captain Blood, which was based on Rafael Sabatini’s 1922 novel of the same name. As with The Black Pirate, violence and adventure made the film popular. So much was violence the theme that in pre-production Robert Lord, the screenwriter, showed concern at this singular focus. In a letter to the producer Hal Wallis, he worries, “Why do you have so much flogging, torturing and physical cruelty in Captain Blood? Do you like it? Does Mike [Micheal

Curtiz, director] like it or do you think audiences like it?”238 With the sheer success of the film, Lord need not have worried. Audiences, of illustration and then film, esteemed pirates partly because of their violent nature.

Captain Blood remains quite faithful to Sabatini’s novel, which highlights the heroic qualities of piracy. As in Sabatini’s novel, the eponymous hero starts out as Dr.

237. For the history of censorship in early U.S. film, please see Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Matthew Bernstein, ed., Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1999). 238. Rudy Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 25.

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Peter Blood, a man living in England in the late 17th century. He is strong, adventurous,

and ambiguously British. Both novel and film make it a point to emphasize Blood’s lack

of nationality, or perhaps seen in a different light, his internationalism. Born in Ireland,

he learned to fight in the Dutch Navy; he fought with the Spanish against the French, as

well as with the French against the Spanish; and finally, he settled into calm, English

village life. Almost immediately in the film, though, English courts declare him a traitor,

sending him to the Caribbean as a slave. As with so many pirate stories and images, the

Anglo hero dallies in exotic identities, including in this case, slavery as well as lawless

piracy. Ultimately, though, Blood’s regression ends, and he returns to his rightful place in

white normativity. He embraces his British heritage, receiving a commission from King

William of England.

Visually, Captain Blood is even more faithful to illustration’s construction of the

fantastical pirate. In fact, the movie strays from the novel in ways that parallel the historic

inaccuracies perpetuated by pirate illustration. For example, at the beginning of the novel,

British Loyalists carry away Blood and his fellow traitors, creating chaos in their wake:

“There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and overthrown, the shouts

and laughter of brutal men … Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams

of a woman in the acutest agony.”239 The film simply does not address this sexual violence. Furthermore, during one piratical raid in the film, screen panels read, “to loot, pillage and celebrate – in pirate fashion.” In the next sequences, pirates look drunk, fire rifles into the air, and sing. An educated audience member, one who read Defoe and

Exquemelin for example, would know that “in pirate fashion” also historically meant

239. Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood: His Odyssey (New York: Grosset and Dunlap Publishers, 1922), 20.

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sexual dalliance as well as drunkenness and thievery. However, the movie shows no allusion to sex; in fact, it displays no women at all in this sequence. In their portrayals of sex and female representation, Captain Blood’s creators practiced self-censorship.

Returning again to the screenwriter Lord’s letter, he worries, “Women and children will be warned to stay away from the picture – and rightly so.”240 Though he need not have worried about the level of violence, his concern makes it clear that filmmakers were keenly aware of their audience. They knew it included women and children as well as men. Therefore, they cleaned up and cleared out sexual portrayals to the point of removing women altogether in certain instances.

Unlike the case of the Pyle pirate, however, women are rarely completely removed, and in fact, the plotlines of most pirate movies present a significant departure: they revolve around a love story. Such is the precedent set by Fairbanks’s Black Pirate and Flynn’s Captain Blood. These moving pictures – with their large size and trace of the real – expanded exponentially the appeal of the illustrated pirate, but a pirate transformed to appeal to both men and women in the audience. “As far as Hollywood was concerned,” explains the pirate historian David Cordingly, “pirates provided an opportunity for buccaneering heroes to rescue beautiful women from picturesque villains in exotic locations.”241 Pirates were violent thieves and strong adventurers, a precedent established in illustration and usurped by moviemakers. However, the celluloid pirate, while legitimized by illustration, began to resemble Rockwell’s Gary Cooper as Texan. Pirate films are “in common with westerns, but with swords instead of guns, and acrobatics in

240. Behlmer, Inside Warner Bros., 25. 241. Cordingly, Under the Black Flag, 171-2.

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the rigging instead of chases on horseback.”242 As with the closing of the frontier and the rise of the imagined cowboy, the transformation to the fantastical pirate was complete.

Hence, Rockwell reacted with the affected cowboy and the world-weary pirate, but movies continued to pump out fantastical escapes that had adventure for the male moviegoers, but now also had romance for the their female companions.

Errol Flynn scored again as Captain Thorpe in the early 1940s, but at a time when, due to the outbreak of a second world war, pirate films became even more gruesome. His 1940 film, titled Sea Hawk, is based on another Rafael Sabatini novel published in 1915. While Flynn sails nation-less during most of Captain Blood, he battles the empire-building, bloodthirsty Spanish in the name of Queen Elizabeth of England in

Sea Hawk. Before we even see the pirate hero, one of his crew says to another: “Have you ever seen a Spaniard the captain hasn’t swallowed whole?” Then, during the course of the movie, Thorpe overtakes a Spanish galleon with the help of his equally blood- hungry crew, he fights the evil Spanish Ambassador Lord Wolfingham in the Queen’s palace, and he and his crew attempt to ambush Spanish caravans laden down with Aztec riches.

Though Captain Thorpe’s violence and his loyalty to England have a new context for mid-twentieth century viewers (i.e., World War II), Sea Hawk’s creators still legitimate the pirate by referencing Pyle, Wyeth, and Schoonover prototypes. Errol

Flynn, with his pencil-like moustache, long, wavy hair, and high swashbuckling boots

(fig. 126), shares an iconography with illustration’s Golden Age pirates. He is also strong, swinging easily from boat to boat on a rope or fighting in hand-to-hand combat with his Spanish captors. At one point in the film, Thorpe and his crew become slaves,

242. Ibid., 172.

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chained to their oars in the bowels of a Spanish galleon. His naked torso and rippling

muscles reveal his resilience in the face of severe conditions. The musculature of

Wyeth’s Long John Silver or Schoonover’s Blackbeard (figs. 30 and 38) comes together

in Flynn’s Thorpe. This physique is then combined with the agility of Pyle’s buccaneers

(fig. 18), since Flynn is also a successful sword-fighter who easily defeats Lord

Wolfingham.

By the 1950s and therefore in a war-weary world, pirate films took an even more

unrealistic turn, moving farther afield from the Golden Age pirate. Popular movies at this

time include a 1950 version of Treasure Island, Anne of the Indies from 1951, Crimson

Pirate and Blackbeard the Pirate both from 1952, Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl from

1954, and in 1958, The Buccaneer. This is also the era of the first animated version of a

movie with a pirate: Disney’s Peter Pan from 1953. Before this time, pirates represented

adventure, freedom, treachery, or maybe even British loyalty. By the mid-20th century, the pirate in these films becomes light-hearted and in some cases, the comic relief.

Crimson Pirate is one example of light-hearted whimsy. Upon hearing its ominous-sounding title, an audience member might expect mighty sea battles and bloody combat. Starring Burt Lancaster as the eponymous hero, the film even begins with

Lancaster swinging on a rope from sail to sail, shouting orders at his crew. He pauses and speaks directly to the audience, portending fearful times ahead:

Gather ’round lads and lasses, gather ’round. You’ve been shanghaied aboard for the last cruise of the crimson pirate a long, long time ago in the far, far Caribbean. Remember: in a pirate ship in pirate waters in a pirate world, ask no questions. Believe only what you see. No, believe half of what you see.

Here, Lancaster readily provides what an audience has come to expect from fantastical pirate stories, namely distance in time and space from contemporary life in the form of

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the exotic Caribbean location; untrustworthy thieves who lie, cheat, and steal; and the

promise of adventure.

However, despite the dramatic title and opening sequence, the movie’s adventure

is less violent than audiences would be led to believe. Instead, the fights are acrobatic and

sometimes even silly, deleting any “crimson” from this pirate’s behavior or appearance.

Lancaster, playing a pirate named Captain Valo, wears the outfit of an acrobat rather than

that of a bloody pirate. His shirtless costume consists of tight pants with vertical red and

silver stripes, matching silver leotards that continue below the calf, and silver ballet-like

slippers. Even as he dons a red sash and a gold earring, he is many times pictured

shirtless, advertising his athletic acrobat’s body.

Bloodlust – which has marked other pirate films – is not the order of the day here

either. A battle scene occurs off stage, for instance, at the start of the film, as Valo sits in

the cabin with his prisoners. Later on, Captain Valo and his equally acrobatic mate, Ojo – who also happens to be a mute – go ashore, and antics, more circus-like than piratical, ensue. Followed by British soldiers, Valo and Ojo zip around town, alluding their captors by sliding along clothes lines, hiding in barrels of fish guts, and finally, walking around town holding an identity-protecting fisherman’s boat over their heads. Barrels of fish guts are a far – and comical – cry from The Pirate Captain Looked Impassively On or “Pirates

Used to Do That to Their Captains Now and Then” (figs. 69 and 78).

The quintessential swashbuckler that illustrates this kinder, gentler pirate is

Captain Hook, specifically from Disney’s Peter Pan (1953; fig. 127). First of all, he is animated: his existence as fiction is even more emphasized by this fact. He plays the foil and antagonist to the hero Peter Pan. Furthermore, he and his crew provide comic relief.

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The interactions between Hook and Smee, his first-mate, reveal them to be silly and stupid. For instance, when Hook lies back to be shaved, a seagull lands on his face, and

Smee shaves the bird’s rump feathers instead of Hook’s cheeks. Hook and his crew are clearly no match for Peter Pan. The sense of adventure that usually characterizes pirates in pirate stories has been turned on its head and now belongs to Peter Pan, the fighter of pirates. J. M. Barrie can be credited with establishing Hook’s role as antagonist; however,

Hook’s role as fool comes much later with this more light-hearted version of the anti- hero.

This silliness is a switch from earlier films based on Peter Pan. In the 1924 version, for instance, there are certainly many nods to Pyle, which indicates a close proximity in time to the ubiquitous pirate illustration from the previous era. When we first see Hook and his men, they are reclaiming their treasure on a sandy beach. The pirates are first digging and then freeing a treasure chest from its sandy grave. Around them are sparsely covered trees and hills of soft sand. In essence, with its setting and piratical activity, the film set looks very similar to Buried Treasure, Dead Men Tell No

Tales, On the Tortugas or “And Twenty One and Twenty Two (figs. 41,77, 98, and 128).

Even the treasure chest from the film seems to have been lifted from Pyle’s studio. In this introduction to Hook and his crew, the thievery, exotic location, and outfits are taken from Pyle, not Barrie, who created the original story.

By the 1950’s Disney version, and as illustrated above, Hook had become a buffoon, and, even more importantly, Hook has remained a buffoon – even to the point of becoming sympathetic – in the most recent adaptations of the Peter Pan story. In Hook

(1991), a sequel – of sorts – to the original story, the eponymous character even begins to

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look clown-like (fig. 129). He has a wide moustache that curls up at the ends, and while this alone could indicate a menacing character, his thick eyebrows similarly curl at the peak of their arch. In his battle with Peter Pan, Peter removes the pirate’s curly black wig, revealing a balding, white-haired head beneath. Maggie, Peter Pan’s daughter, sympathetically asks her father not to kill Hook: “he’s just a mean, old man without a mommy.” No longer a threat, Hook is a fantastical pirate with neither heroic nor anti- heroic characteristics; instead, he is the object of pity. This same over-the-top quality, like the eyebrows in Hook, can be found in Peter Pan from 2003. Hook loses his ability to fly as the Lost Boys and Wendy shout at him, “Old, Alone, and Done-For!” and the audience feels triumph, but also his sadness as he plummets into the dark ocean. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century Hollywood films are far removed from the reality of pirates’ plundering and thievery, allowing the fantastical pirate to evolve into a hyperbolic, comedic, and even pitiable character.

With his thin, slightly dandy-ish physique and long coat reminiscent of Captain

Keitt or the Flying Dutchman’s captain, Hook’s costume still owes a debt to Golden Age illustrators, remaining remarkably consistent in all four films. With its loose, tattered, and dirty clothing, headscarves, and pistols, so, too, does the costume of Hook’s crew.243 The four films also include piratical characteristics that have been added to Pyle’s quintessential figure along the way. For instance, each movie includes a peg-legged pirate, a character that became popular – and then standard – after the popularity of

Treasure Island’s Long John Silver. Silver also made popular the parrot companion, a character that shows up in Hook, and the 2003 Peter Pan. Eye-patches, worn by several

243. The crews are often bearded with dirty faces, and also, interestingly, in the three live-action films –including the one from 1924 – the crews consist of pirates with dark skin (played by African- American actors). They also embellish their costumes by wearing gold loop earrings.

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pirates in each film, have become as standard as the tattered clothes and headscarves after

the Golden Age of Illustration. Finally, the horizontally striped shirt has become an

indicator of piracy as well; it dominates the costumes of most of the pirates in the 1924

version of Peter Pan, and finally finds its way more subtly into the costume of Smee in

Disney’s Peter Pan and Peter Pan from 2003. The eye-patch, parrot, striped shirt, and

peg-leg are not standard characteristics from illustration; the pirate has evolved from

illustration to film, making these accessories – as well as the pirate’s happy-go-lucky

behaviors – synonymous with fantastical piracy.244 However, the underlying costume and sense of adventure are validated, having come from the pirate of illustration as if, like

Rockwell’s family tree painting, they were stamped with Pyle’s seal of approval.

The pirate from the 1980s – the pirate I knew as a child – follows the model set by

Disney’s Captain Hook, or that of the humorous, less notorious fellow who participates in childhood or childish adventures. Three movies from this decade particularly stand out:

The Pirates of Penzance from 1983, which follows the libretto and storyline of the 100 year-old Gilbert and Sullivan musical; The Goonies, the film from 1985, that ignited my own childhood imagination about pirates; and finally, The Princess Bride, a movie released in 1987 and based upon William Goldman’s 1973 book of the same name.

Interestingly, in all three films, the pirate – or pirates – plays a hero rather than a villain.

In Penzance, the protagonist originally seeks refuge from his pirate-bosses, but in the end, turns pirate himself. In Goonies, the protagonist Mikey has a profound respect for the pirate captain One-Eyed Willy, a respect that borders on idol worship. And finally, in

244. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, these attributes are fantastical to the point of hyperbole. For example in Peter Pan (2003), the first pirate that the viewer encounters is a brightly-colored parrot with a peg-leg and eye-patch. All the signifiers of piracy – parrot, peg-leg, eye-patch – come together in this ridiculous, humorous, and over-the-top character.

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The Princess Bride, the hero Wesley seeks to save his beloved Buttercup from the evil

Prince Humperdinck; however, along the way, Wesley has found fame and fortune, quite by accident, as the infamous Dread Pirate Roberts. The pirate is a hero, but a hero with a connection to adventure, not violence.

None of these pirates is to be taken as a serious threat to the audience’s or the other characters’ personal safety even as they reference their notoriety. For instance,

Mikey and his band of “Goonies” begin their adventure to find “fortune and glory,” or the booty from One-Eyed Willy’s raid on the Northwest coast. Similarly, the masked character, with a name like Dread Pirate Roberts who reportedly “takes no survivors,” seeks out Princess Buttercup and appears threatening only on the surface. By this time, the role of pirate as entertainment – and humor at that – has shifted drastically away from the violent exploits that predominated in the Golden Age of Illustration. One-Eyed Willy is a silly name, conjuring double entendres and childish humor. Wesley reveals to

Buttercup that the Dread Pirate Roberts is a phantom. Different adventurers have played the role over the course of his twenty years of marauding, but it is the name that invokes fear: “No one would be afraid of the Dread Pirate Wesley.” Wesley even decides at the end to transfer this notoriety to Inigo Montoya, a swordsman who has helped unite

Wesley with Buttercup. Any sense of fear or threat has been removed from these pirate heroes who all the same are able to maintain their exoticism and adventurous natures.

The epitome of silly hero-pirates can be found in the most recent, twenty-first century pirate films: Stardust from 2007, and most popular of all, the Pirates of the

Caribbean trilogy from 2003, 2006, and 2007. Though hardly a main character in the film, the pirate captain from Stardust is certainly unforgettable. Played by the

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consummate “tough guy” actor Robert de Niro, Captain Shakespeare is anything but a tough man or even a typical pirate. Instead, Captain Shakespeare is a cross dresser. He loves to keep the dresses of his captives as booty. He is also a romantic, aiding the protagonist Dustan and his love interest Yvaine from being captured by the witches who are determined to keep them apart. Stardust provides a hyperbolic example of Sloan’s domesticated pirates. The film ironically plays upon the audience’s preconceived notions of pirates as coarse, violent men as well as De Niro’s reputation for playing gangsters. A viewer cannot help but laugh as De Niro parodies the life of a pirate captain, prancing around his quarters wearing corsets and frilly, pink dresses (fig. 130). Shakespeare is silly, but also likeable and quite a long way from a Hook character who captures the Lost

Boys and Wendy or a Long John Silver who threatens Jim. And, it is especially far removed from the pirates in Pyle’s Dead Men Tell no Tales or The Flying Dutchman; or

Schoonover’s imaginings of Blackbeard’s bulky, intimating body. Captain Shakespeare is a hero, like the illustrated fantastical pirates, but not for the same reasons. Instead, he is kind.

Captain Shakespeare reflects the interest in pirates – and pirates from all walks of life – that runs rampant in contemporary American popular culture. I have seen pirate paraphernalia dominate the children’s aisle – pirate wrapping paper, pirate party favors, pirate Halloween costumes, pirate Lego projects. Since I have begun this project, I have received a Jolly Roger flag, a pirate action figure, pirate finger puppets, a pirate coloring book, a Jolly Roger mouse pad, pirate tee shirts, Jolly Roger band-aids, and a pirate tote bag. Pirates have been used to sell bandages – that’s how far the pirate has progressed as a commodity industry, especially in the last few years.

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Disney can be thanked for the pirate’s omnipresence. Captain Jack Sparrow, mentioned at the start of this chapter, set ablaze the already deeply rooted preoccupation with pirates within U.S. culture. Disney released the first installment of the film, titled

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, in 2003. The film was such a financial boon that Disney subsequently released two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels:

Dead Man’s Chest in 2006 and At World’s End in 2007. The Disney Corporation is a savvy business enterprise, and so, along with the release of the films, they have also unleashed a plethora of Pirates of the Caribbean-related products. Children can see the movie, and then convince their parents to buy them action figures of the major characters, such as Captain Jack, Will Turner, Captain Barbossa, and Davy Jones. Disney also introduced the Pirates and Princesses Parade, taking place at regular intervals at their

Orlando theme park. Disney translated the box office success of their films into commercial success of the pirate, now to be found not just in fantastical and imaginative worlds, but in toy stores and supermarkets as well.

The trilogy is loosely based upon “Pirates of the Caribbean,” a theme park ride first introduced at Disneyland in Anaheim, California in 1967, and subsequently installed at Disneyworld in Orland, FL in 1973 as well as at Tokyo Disneyland in 1983 and

Disneyland Paris in 1993. The ride features the usual cast of characters acting in the expected pirate manner: pirates in headscarves and tattered clothes wield their knives and chase ladies through the town of Tortuga. Or, the buccaneers sit around drunkenly singing sailors’ songs. The theme park ride, then, takes behavior and appearance from earlier Hollywood films and entertains with puppets and song as children and their

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parents ride along through the story. Of course, being family-oriented, the Disney rides

suppress the levels of violence and romance common in movie portrayals.

While Disney may have single-handedly made the pirate a national phenomenon,

it was not without some help. Disney is perpetuating the myth of the pirate whose origins

are in turn-of-the-twentieth century illustration. Jack is a replica of Pyle’s Captain Keitt.

Where Sparrow differs from Keitt, i.e. his headscarf and braided beard, Disney has taken

from other pirate images such as the Blackbeard imagined by Pyle and Schoonover. The

connection between Pyle and the Disney film franchise goes beyond this circumstantial

evidence. According to Joyce Schiller, the former Curator of American Art at the

Delaware Art Museum (DAM), the Disney studio paid the DAM a generous amount of money for all Pyle pirate transparencies as well as the rights to use them.245

Keitt is a bit of an anomaly in Pyle’s oeuvre, however. Pyle created Keitt as an accompaniment to his story “The Ruby of Kishmoor,” an exaggerated tale that Pyle intended as a light-hearted jest at pirate-adventure stories. 246 In order to portray Keitt as a

hyperbole, Pyle mimics the traditional portrait imagery laid out in Defoe’s The General

History of the Pyrates. Captain Keitt’s pose resembles Blackbeard’s or Captain Roberts’s

(fig. 44). He cocks his elbow and places his left hand on his hip; he also holds a horn in

his right hand, which replaces Blackbeard or Roberts’s upraised swords. As with the

Defoe images, a nautical battle rages over Keitt’s shoulder, and again, a ship seems to

have been lit ablaze. However, as he draws from this tradition, Pyle pokes fun of piracy

by over-dramatizing it. He uses bright colors, and creates a slightly off-kilter Keitt. With

some difficulty, Keitt stands on the stern of a ship rather than outside the action. He

245. Joyce Schiller, conversation with author, Delaware Art Museum, May 22, 2007. 246. Howard Pyle, “The Ruby of Kishmoor,” Harper’s Monthly, August 1907, 327-44; Charles D. Abbot, Howard Pyle: A Chronicle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 148-150.

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furrows his brow, further evidence that he is within the action rather than posing for his close-up. In their Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Disney references this and other

Golden Age images, and through this appropriation, Pyle acts as the authority on piracy.

Importantly, though, Disney specifically references Pyle’s foray into melodrama, sealing the pirate’s fate as unrealistic invention.

From Errol Flynn to Johnny Depp, Howard Pyle illustrations to Life covers, so much entertainment has come out of the pirate fantasy that modern-day attempts at chronicling pirate history or real-life occurrences of piracy necessarily turn to fantasy as well. The Pirate Walking Tour in Savannah, for instance, takes visitors to certain local venues while detailing the lives of Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and others.

Blackbeard, in particular, is an important historical figure since he marauded the

Savannah coastline, and Captain Maynard captured him near Savannah waters in 1718.

However, during my own tour, the tour guide lost somewhat of her credibility by wearing a corset, flowing black pants, and knee-length boots. And, the tour ended at

“Blackbeard’s Treasure,” a toy shop that featured pirate tee-shirts, plastic swords, and a bubble machine.

It is understandable, if not entirely forgivable, for the Savannah tourism industry to capitalize upon the celebrity of fantastical pirates; however, pseudo-historical examples do not end with tourist attractions. “Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the

Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship” is a 2009-12 traveling exhibition made possible by the National Geographic Society, which chronicles the history of the resurrected eighteenth-century slave-cum-pirate ship that sank off Cape Cod. While providing an account of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave ship component gets more or less

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neutralized by the accompanying pirate displays, the latter of which combine artifacts

with play-acting. Gold pieces, ammunition, and even the silk stocking of a nine-year-old

boy, the youngest crewmember on the Whydah, mix with wax dummies of less

historically accurate pirates who sit around drinking rum or rest in their hammocks.

Interactive spaces also allow visitors to walk aboard a model of a pirate ship deck or

climb into the ship’s galley while lights and wind machines make them feel as if they are

on the high seas. In this manner, the exhibition’s playful and sometimes morbid

sentimentality falls just short of Disney’s theme park ride. The attraction – and in the end

absorption – into pirate fantasy cannot be denied even by the National Geographic

Society.

There is a case to be made in which this overtaking of the pirate fantasy is not just

regrettable, but truly problematic, as with the reality of Somali piracy. Golden Age

illustrators had to reinvent the pirate against its violent background in order to create a

fantasy. Today, Somali piracy– a brutal reality in which desperate men and teenagers

attack large commercial sea vessels – threatens our definitions of fun-living, fun-loving

piracy. However, because of the manner in which newspapers report the goings-on, real-

life piracy has, in some instances, been victim to the fantasy.

In truth, similarities link the reality to the fantasy. As Jay Wolpert, one of the

screenwriters on the original Pirate of the Caribbean movie explains, “Of course, they're

not like any of today's real pirates [except] they're interested in money."247 The desire for wealth is what originally ignited the interest in and fame of the fantastical pirate, and today, the Somali pirates are trying to get wealthy. Abdullahi Omar Qawden, a former naval officer, reports, “All you need is three guys and a little boat, and the next day

247. Noveck, “Crippling Recession.”

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you’re millionaires."248 While the large sums of money actually go to the bosses, pirate foot soldiers can make thousands per year. Adani, for instance, grew up on the streets of

Bassaso, but according to one article, the now nineteen-year-old pirate “owns a big house and large truck” from the $75,000 he earned in two hijackings. He validates his life of piracy in financial terms: "When you have nothing people despise you and if they see that you have money you will be respected… This next job will be my last in the piracy trade.

I know it's a big risk but I believe in gambling.”249

Wolpert’s above assessment about money, however, does not acknowledge the

other, fantastical aspects that newspapers relay to an eager audience. Along with love of

wealth, romantic love – the licentious side of piracy, mainly censored out of images by

Pyle and his immediate followers – finds existence both in Hollywood pirates and their

realistic counterparts. “It [is] wonderful … I'm now dating a pirate,'' boasts one young

woman, enthusiastic about her newly-found romance and perhaps excited about her

newly-found wealth as well.250 Adani also includes the pursuit of love in his justification for turning pirate: “If I win [the next job], I will get married and give up piracy.”251 Not all instances of romance are G-rated. Sheikh Ahmed, a mosque leader in the town of

Galkayo, laments, "The use of drugs such as cannabis and the drinking of alcohol, sex and other obnoxious misconduct are now becoming common within the pirates, causing social problems.”252 Seeking wealth, drunkenness, cavorting with women – Somali piracy

shares some of Sparrow’s fantastical behaviors.

248. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Somalia's Pirates Flourish in a Lawless Nation,” New York Times, October 31, 2008. 249. Mohamed Olad Hassan, “Pirates’ Newfound Riches Mean Change for their Neighbors,” Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), December 7, 2009. 250. Gettleman, “Somalia’s Pirates.” 251. Hassan, “Pirates’ Newfound Riches.” 252. Ibid.

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Perhaps because of these similarities, many Americans follow the stories in the

New York Times or local newspaper with the ardor paid to pirate novels or films. As one

journalist points out, “We're going through a crippling recession. The CIA is under fire

over its interrogation techniques. And U.S. policy toward Cuba may be about to change.

But the most-followed news story of late? A tale of pirates on the high seas.”253 In fact, in a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press for the week of

April 13, 2009, 34 percent of Americans said they followed the Somali pirate siege involving Captain Richard Phillips more closely than any other story. The economy came in second at 27 percent.254 Any thrilling and violent headline attracts immediate attention, and in recent history, it is pirates who have provided the sensational fodder.

When confronted with violence, threats, and terrorism, turn-of-the-twentieth-century illustrators transported this reality to the fantasy of exotic locations, fantastical costumes, and entertaining adventures. “Pirate” became synonymous with exotic thrill seeker, a moniker that still delights today with Pirates of the Caribbean, but also infects the perception of the current attacks of the African coast, a coast that is, arguably, “exotic” to many U.S. readers. Somali sailors could be defined as thieves, terrorists, protectors of a nation, or a coast guard, but newspaper headlines label them pirates.255 Marty Kaplan,

professor at the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, explains

this reaction very simply: "If we thought of them or talked about them as punks, thugs,

thieves or kidnappers, they wouldn't stir our blood or promise a good yarn." By “them,”

253. Noveck, “Crippling Recession.” 254. Ibid. 255. According to one of the pirates’ spokesmen, named Sagule Ali, perception is warped because of this association: “He [Ali] said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. ‘We don't consider ourselves sea bandits,’ he said. ‘We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.’” Jeffrey Gettleman, “Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money,” New York Times, October 1, 2008, late ed.

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Kaplan speaks of “Captain Hook, Treasure Island, the Disney ride, [and] Blackbeard.”256

Tellingly, though, I think this evaluation applies quite easily to the Somali pirates’ appeal as well.

Along with these more fantastical “yarns,” some newspapers accounts include the realistic aspects as well. One article rounds out the personalities of these sketch-like characters by describing a pirate’s philanthropic work. "We have leaders, investors, young people who go to the sea for hunting ships and also negotiators in many areas," says the pirate Madobe, who adds, “[we have] very reliable support from the people on the ground."257 However, support comes from hopelessness as another article reveals,

For years, piracy was a middling trade in Somalia, just one way that desperate young men with guns could make a living in a desperately poor land. In recent months, however, with food prices soaring, the interim government careening toward collapse and local authorities powerless to intervene, hardly a day has gone by without an attempt to commandeer a ship.258

Piracy is not the fun and games of wealth and women, and some raids are unsuccessful.

“One attempted attack last year fell short,” one story reveals, “when the pirates' ladder

was not long enough to scale the side of a frigate they were trying to board.” In another

attack, “pirates mistook a German military supply ship for a commercial ship and

launched an attack. They were chased down and seven pirates were captured.”259 The

most famous thwarted raid occurred in April of 2009. Four Somali pirate overtook the

U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama on April 8 and kidnapped its captain. An article explains

the subsequent debacle: “The pirates held [Captain] Phillips, of Underhill, Vt., hostage

for several days on a sweltering, enclosed lifeboat that was soon shadowed by three U.S.

256. Noveck, “Crippling Recession.” 257. Powell, “Young Somalis Get Rich.” 258. Shashank Bengali, “Pirates Chase Money, Women,” Star-News (Wilmington, NC), December 21, 2008, 1st ed. 259. Powell, “Young Somalis Get Rich.”

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warships and a helicopter.” And finally, the article soberly reveals, “The standoff ended

when Navy snipers got the go-ahead to shoot three pirates after one held an AK-47 close

to Phillips' back.”260

Faced with these facts, not everyone has been lulled by a “promise of a good yarn.” There are examples of resistance to – or at least evaluation of – the pirate icon.

One headline from The Wall Street Journal explains, “Real Pirates Take the ‘Ho Ho’ of

‘Yo Ho Ho’ for Cap’n Slappy.” Mark Summers, a.k.a. Cap’n Slappy, and the co-founder of annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, “has a beef with the pirates who are seizing cargo ships and taking hostages off the coast of Somalia: They’re ruining his bad name.”261 “Cap’n

Slappy” recognizes the disconnect between happy-go-lucky piracy, exemplified by talking like a pirate, and modern-day crimes, like kidnapping and ransoming international sea vessels. “They’re ought to be a different word for pirates in their current incarnation,”

Summers says, suggesting “sea-thugs, boat-muggers, kelp-festooned kidnappers” as alternative – though flippant – options.

An episode from South Park, the animated series whose political and sometimes crude satires make it – arguably – a modern-day equivalent to Puck magazine, goes even further towards critique. This episode, titled “Fatbeard,” portrays the absurdity of fantastical piracy in the face of its real-life equivalent. Several of the young protagonists head to Somalia with their scabbards, head scarves, and piratical tongues in order to escape from their middle-class Colorado ennui. When they arrive, the destitute young men whom they meet do not resemble the boys’ definition of pirate, and the protagonists

260. Hays, “Teen Somali Piracy Suspect.” 261. Stephanie Simon, “Real Pirates Have Taken the ‘Ho Ho’ Out of ‘Yo Ho Ho’ for Cap’n Slappy - - - It’s No Fun Playing Dress Up, When Thugs Are at Large on High Seas,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2009, eastern ed.

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are further disillusioned when the Somalis reveal that they do not even wish to be pirates.

Unfazed by this revelation, the boys take it upon themselves to teach the Somalis how to

capture a French vessel properly. They also teach them a “Somalian Pirates, We” ballad

before the U.S. government arrives to save the boys from their supposedly depraved

captors.

As the creators of South Park make pointedly clear, the pirate is a thieving,

sometimes desperate, scoundrel and also a hero to children. In other words, he is a

problematic character. The icon has gone mainstream through Golden Age and Post-

Golden Age illustration, through Hollywood films, and especially through Disney’s

promulgation. This pop culture status sparks an interest in historical pirates up and down

the U.S. East and West Coasts and fuels the fascination with real-life piracy in Somalia.

However, as “Cap’n Slappy” has recognized, the difference between Disneyworld and

Somalia is impossible to reconcile. Both cannot possibly represent piracy. And yet, they

do.

These definitions of piracy coexist, and because they do so, each has the

opportunity to point out the problematic nature of the other. The obsession with

fantastical piracy puts Somali marauders on center stage, giving a voice to an otherwise

ignored group who is struggling for financial security in a politically unstable nation. On

the other hand, in the face of contemporary atrocities, we must question why the U.S.

culture values the pirate. “We’re trying to take something bad [from history] and make it

halfway decent,” laments Charles Waldron, a pirate impersonator from New Jersey. On

the state of Somali piracy, he continues, “They’re not helping us at all.”262 Waldron’s sigh of discontent can be viewed more productively, however, even if pirates seem to sail

262. Simon, “Pirates Have Taken the ‘Ho Ho.’”

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far above any depths of thoughtful contemplation. As we work to end real-life piracy, I believe that we can also reexamine our pirate heroes, their origins, and the not-so- frivolous fantasies that we have created around them. By doing so, we can still enjoy the next pirate film or Pyle pirate exhibition, but with greater awareness of the pirate’s cultural significance. We will be better equipped to respond to the words on the Goonies treasure map, as it warns, “Ye intruders beware!”

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Images

Figure 1. Winslow Homer, The Approach of the Pirate [Ship] “Alabama,” 1865. Illustration for Harper’s Weekly, April 25, 1865, 268.

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Figure 2. Howard Pyle, Walking the Plank, 1887. Oil on canvas, 191/2 x 13 in. The Kelly Collection of American Illustration. Published in Howard Pyle, “The Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 511.

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Figure 3. N. C. Wyeth, I Said Good-bye to Mother and the Cove, 1911. Oil on canvas, 471/4 x 361/8 in. Brandywine River Museum. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 58

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Figure 4. Two Views of the President. Illustration for Eagle (Brooklyn). Reproduced in Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 3.

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Figure 5. Howard Pyle, Initial “I.” Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Jamaica, New and Old,” Harper’s Monthly, January 1890, 169.

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Editorial Cartoon 2 -- No Title The National Police Gazette (1845-1906); Oct 22, 1887; 51, 527; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 16

FigureReproduced with 6. permission She of the wascopyright owner. Bound Further reproduction to Go. prohibited Jameswithout permission. Bennie of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Tries To Persuade His Wife Not To Elope and She Wipes the Station Floor with Him, 1887. Illustration for National Police Gazette, October 22, 1887, 16.

Figure 7. She Punched the Dude King. The Encounter Bob Hilliard, the Actor, is Alleged Reproducedto Have with Had permission with of thea copyrightPretty, owner. Red Further-Headed reproduction Actress prohibited, 1888. without permission.Illustration for National Police Gazette, April 22, 1888, 5.

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Figure 8. The Champions Ovation: John L. Sullivan Gets a Rousing Reception from an Audience of Twenty-Five Thousand People at his Great Sparring Exhibition in Boston, Mass., 1883. Illustration for National Police Gazette, April 7, 1883, 8.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Figure 9. F. Opper, Johnny’s Ambitions, and How They Were Not Realized, 1887. Cartoon for Puck, August 3, 1887, 380.

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Figure 10. Howard Pyle, Which Shall by Captain? 1908. Oil on canvas, 48 x 313/4 in. Delaware Art Museum.

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Figure 11. Frank E. Schoonover. Fight! or The Brawn of These Lads Made the Pike a Match for a Pirate’s Cutlass, 1922. Oil on canvas, 28 x 37 in. Current location unknown. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, April 1922, 7.

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Figure 12. Howard Pyle, The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow, 1905. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Fate of a Treasure Town,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1905, cover illus.

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Figure 13. Howard Pyle, Extorting Tribute from the Citizens, 1905. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Fate of a Treasure Town,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1905, illus. opp. 8.

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Figure 14. Howard Pyle, So the Treasure was Divided, c. 1905. Oil on canvas, 191/2 x 291/2 in. Delaware Art Museum. Published in Howard Pyle, “Fate of a Treasure Town,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1905, illus. opp. 12.

Figure 15. N. C. Wyeth, The Golden Galleon – Tailpiece, 1917. Oil on canvas, 27 x 25 in. Private Collection. Published in Paul Hervey Fox, “The Golden Galleon,” Scribner’s, August 1917, tailpiece illus., 167.

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Figure 16. N. C. Wyeth, The Boarders Swarmed Over the Fence Like Monkeys, 1911. Oil on canvas, 47 x 365/8 in. Brandywine River Museum. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 162.

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Figure 17. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, Endpaper, 1911. Oil on canvas, 323/4 x 471/8 in. Brandywine River Museum. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), endpaper illus.

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Figure 18. Howard Pyle, “Why Don’t You End It?” 1900. Oil on canvas, 171/2 x 121/2 in.The Kelly Collection of American Illustration. Published in Mary Johnston, To Have and to Hold (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1900), frontispiece.

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Figure 19. Prisoners Pleading, 1859. Illustration for “Morgan the Buccaneer,” Harper’s Monthly, June 1859, 36.

Figure 20. Parting with the Prisoners, 1858. Illustration for “An Old Filibuster,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1858, 26.

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Figure 21. Charles Dana Gibson, The Weaker Sex, 1903. Ink over pencil with scraping out on board. Library of Congress.

Figure 22. At the Club, 1891. Illustration for Life, November 19, 1891, 295.

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Figure 23. Howard Pyle, Kidd at Gardiner’s Island, 1894. Illustration for Thomas A. Janvier, “The Sea-Robbers of New York,” Harper’s Monthly, November 1894, 825.

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Figure 24. N. C. Wyeth, “Stand and Deliver!” c. 1921. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. Private Collection. Published in Life, September 22, 1921, cover illus.

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Figure 25. Howard Pyle, Cap’n Goldsack, 1902. Illustration for William Sharp, “Cap’n Goldsack,” Harper’s Monthly, July 1902, 164.

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Figure 26. Howard Pyle, “He Lay Silent and Still, with His Face Half Buried in the Sand,” 1890. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Blueskin the Pirate,” Northwestern Miller (Minneapolis), December 1890.

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Figure. 27. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate Fight, 1922. Oil on Best English Linen canvas, 16 x 24 in. Private Collection. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, August 1922, 19.

Figure 28. N. C. Wyeth, It Showed Me Hands and His Companion Locked Together in Deadly Wrestle, 1911. Oil on canvas. Destroyed by fire, December 29, 1952. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 178.

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Figure 29. The Pageants of New York: The Police Review; The Parade of the League of American Wheelmen; John L. Sullivan’s Appearance on the Baseball Field; and Opening Day of the Races. Illustrations for National Police Gazette, June 16, 1883, 16. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Figure 30. N. C. Wyeth, To Me He was Unweariedly Kind; And Always Glad to See Me in the Galley, 1911. Oil on canvas, 47 x 38 in. Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 76.

Figure 31. Frank E. Schoonover, Suddenly Blackbeard Whipped Two Pistols from His Sash, 1922. Oil on canvas, 28 x 33 in. Collection of Michael Ne Ville. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, May 1922, 6.

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Figure 32. N. C. Wyeth, Ladies’ Home Journal, cover, c. 1921. Private Collection. Oil on canvas, 38 x 313/4 in. Published in Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1922, cover illus.

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Figure 33. N. C. Wyeth, For All the World, I was Led Like a Dancing Bear, 1911. Oil on canvas, 471/4 x 381/4 in. Brandywine River Museum. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 244.

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Figure 34. N. C. Wyeth, “One More Step, Mr. Hands,” Said I, “and I’ll Blow Your Brains Out,” 1911. Oil on canvas, 47 x 383/8 in. New Britain Museum of American Art. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 204.

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Figure 35. Frank E. Schoonover, Treasure Island, 1920. Oil on Smooth canvas, 36 x 25 in. Private Collection. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, illustrated with Louis Rhead (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), dust jacket, cover, frontispiece.

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Figure 36. Howard Pyle, Marooned, 1909. Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in. Delaware Art Museum.

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Figure 37. Howard Pyle, The Flying Dutchman, 1900. Published in Collier’s Weekly, December 8, 1900, 26.

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Figure 38. Frank E. Schoonover, Blackbeard in Smoke and Flame, 1922. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. Collection of B. Walker Lee. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, August 1922, 18.

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Figure 39. N. C. Wyeth, Captain Blood, 1922. Oil on canvas on hardboard, 203/4 x 217/8 in. Collection of Houghton Mifflin Company. Published in Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood: His Odyssey (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922), frontispiece, dust- jacket illus.

Figure 40. Howard Pyle, Headpiece, 1896. Illustration for Howard Pyle, The Ghost of Captain Brand (Wilmington, DE: John M. Rogers, 1896), 57.

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Figure 41. Howard Pyle, Buried Treasure, 1902. Illustration for John D. Champlin, “The True Captain Kidd,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1902.

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Figure 42. Howard Pyle, Blackbeard’s Last Fight, 1895. Published in Howard Pyle, “Jack Ballister’s Fortunes,” St. Nicholas, July 1895, 732.

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Figure 43. Frank E. Schoonover. Blackbeard Buccaneer, 1921. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. Current location unknown. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, March 1922, cover.

Figure 44. B. Cole, Captain Bartho. Roberts. Published in Daniel Defoe [Captain Charles Johnson, pseudo.], A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724).

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Figure 45. Francois Lolonois. Published in A. O. Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zeerovers (The Buccaneers of America) (1678).

Figure 46. Bartholomeus de Portugues. Published in A. O. Exquemelin, De Americaensche Zeerovers (The Buccaneers of America) (1678).

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Figure 47. B. Cole, Anne Bonny. Published in Daniel Defoe [Captain Charles Johnson, pseudo.], A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724).

Figure 48. B. Cole, Mary Read. Published in Daniel Defoe [Captain Charles Johnson, pseudo.], A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724).

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Figure 49. N. C. Wyeth, The Boy’s King Arthur, cover, 1917. Oil on canvas, 405/8 x 297/8 in. Private Collection. Published in Sidney Lanier, ed., The Boy’s King Arthur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), cover.

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Figure 50. Howard Pyle, Washington and Steuben at Valley Forge, 1896. Illustration for Woodrow Wilson, “General Washington,” Harper’s Monthly, July 1896, 172.

Figure 51. Howard Pyle, “They Used to Drill Every Evening,” 1892. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “The Soldiering of Beniah Stidham,” St. Nicholas, December 1892, 82.

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Figure 52. B. Pole, Black-Beard the Pyrate. Published in Daniel Defoe [Captain Charles Johnson, pseudo.], A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724).

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Figure 53. Howard Pyle, Stout Robin hath a Narrow Escape, 1883. Illustration for Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1883), 242.

Figure 54. N. C. Wyeth, Robin Hood, cover, 1917. Oil on canvas, 40 x 32 in. The New York Public Library. Published in Paul Creswick, Robin Hood (Philadelphia: David McKay Company, 1917), cover illus.

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Figure 55. Howard Pyle, “Captain Malyoe Shot Captain Brand Through the Head,” 1896. Illustration for Howard Pyle, The Ghost of Captain Brand (Wilmington, DE: John M. Rogers, 1896), vii.

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Figure 56. Howard Pyle, Marooned, 1887. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of America,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 504.

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Figure 57. Howard Pyle, To Have and To Hold, c. 1900. Lithograph, 22 x 141/2 in. Delaware Art Museum. Poster for Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900).

Figure 58. Howard Pyle, Henry Morgan Recruiting for the Attack, 1887. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” Harper’s Monthly, August 1887, 363.

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Figure 59. N. C. Wyeth, Tapping Up and Down the Road in a Frenzy and Groping and Calling for his Comrades, 1911. Oil on canvas, 47 x 38 in. Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 38.

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Figure 60. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, title page, 1911. Oil on canvas, 423/8 x 367/8 in. New York Public Library. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), title page illus.

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Figure 61. N. C. Wyeth, Loaded Pistols Were Served Out to All the Sure Men, 1911. Oil on canvas, 473/8 x 383/8 in. Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 102.

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Figure 62. Frank E. Schoonover. Pirates Coming Through Charleston, 1922. Oil on Single Prime canvas, 36 x 30 in. Private Collection. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, March 1922, 6.

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Figure 63. N. C. Wyeth, The Duel on the Beach, 1926. Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in. National Geographic Society, Commissioned by Carl G. Fisher. Later published in Rafael Sabatini, “The Duel on the Beach,” Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1931, 3.

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Figure 64. Howard Pyle, How the Buccaneers Kept Christmas, 1899. Illustration for Harper’s Weekly, December 16, 1899, 20.

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Figure 65. Howard Pyle, Headband with Title, 1896. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Tom Chist and the Treasure Box,” Harper’s Round Table, March 24, 1896.

Figure 66. Frank E. Schoonover, And So the Treasure Was Buried, 1916. Oil on Best English Linen canvas, 33 x 22 in. Brandywine River Museum. Created for, but not published in Harper’s Monthly.

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Figure 67. Frank E. Schoonover, They Were Filled with Blackbeard’s Own Pirates, 1922. Oil on Cotton canvas, 14 x 36 in. Location unknown. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, July 1922, 12.

Figure 68. N. C. Wyeth, Treasure Island, cover, 1911. Oil on canvas, 47 x 33 in. Private Collection. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color cover illus.

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Figure 69. Howard Pyle, The Pirate Captain Looked Impassively On, 1896. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Tom Chist and the Treasure Box,” Harper’s Round Table, March 24, 1896.

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Figure 70. J. Keppler, The Pirate Publisher – An International Burlesque that Has Had the Longest Run on Record, 1886. Cartoon for Puck, February 24, 1886, 408-9.

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Figure 71. Howard Pyle, Avery Sells His Jewels, 1887. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 502.

Figure 72. Howard Pyle, Headpiece with Title and Illustrated Initial “T,” 1894. Illustration for Thomas A. Janvier, “The Sea Robbers of New York,” Harper’s Monthly, November 1894, 813.

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Figure 73. Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed, 1951. Tempera on panel. Private Collection.

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Figure 74. History Repeats Itself – The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages, and the Robber Barons of To-Day, 1889. Cartoon for Puck, November 6, 1889, 170-71.

Figure 75. In the Robber’s Den. Jay Gould Surprises – Even the Hardened Monopolists, c. 1880s. Cartoon for Puck. Reproduced in Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, following 374.

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Figure 76. Howard Pyle, Morgan at Porto Bello, 1888. Illustration for Edmund Clarence Stedman, “Morgan,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1888, 117.

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Figure 77. Howard Pyle, Dead Men Tell No Tales, 1899. Illustration for Morgan Robertson, “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” Collier’s Weekly, December 16, 1899.

Figure 78. Howard Pyle, “Pirates Used to Do That to Their Captains Now and Then,” 1894. Illustration for Thomas A. Janvier, “The Sea-Robbers of New York,” Harper’s Monthly, November 1894, 816.

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Figure 79. Howard Pyle, Colonel Rhett and Pirate Stede Bonnet, 1901. Illustration for Woodrow Wilson, “Colonies and Nation,” Harper’s Monthly, May 1901, 915.

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Figure 80. Thomas Nast, A Popular View of the Commissioner’s Victory over the Spoils System, 1889. Reproduced in Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, 132.

Figure 81. Rough Rider Charge, 1898. Illustration for Puck, July 27, 1898, 1.

Figure 82. William Allen Rogers, Vice-Presidential Possibilities: The Rough Rider, 1900. Illustration for Harper’s Weekly, February 3, 1900, 117.

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Figure 83. Frederic Remington, The Texas Type of Cowboy, 1888. Illustration for Theodore Roosevelt, “The Ranchman’s Rifle on Crag and Prairie” Century, June 1888, 200.

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Figure 84. Howard Pyle, Kidd on the Deck of the “Adventure Galley,” 1902. Illustration for John D. Champlin, Jr., “The True Captain Kidd,” Harper’s Monthly, December 1902, 29.

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Figure 85. Theodore Roosevelt as a cowboy in the Dakota Territory, c. 1885. Photograph.

Figure 86. N. C. Wyeth as a cowboy, 1904. Photograph.

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Figure 87. Frederic Remington, The Cowboy, 1902. Oil on canvas, 401/5 x 272/5 in. Carter Museum.

Figure 88. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirates With Skull and Crossbones, 1922. Charcoal and crayon on Winsor & Newton illustration board, 11 x 93/4 in. Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, April 1922, 6.

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Figure 89. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirates Hide and Watch, 1922. Charcoal and crayon on board, 83/4 x 131/4 in. Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, June 1922, 16.

Figure 90. Howard Pyle, Ye Pirate Bold, 1911. Illustration for Thomas Francis Madigan, “Ye Pirate Bold,” Autograph, November 1911, frontispiece.

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Figure 91. Frank E. Schoonover, Kidnapped – Pirate with Sword, 1922. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, illustrated with Louis Rhead (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1921), dust jacket.

Figure 92. Frank E. Schoonover, Man Waving Cutlass, 1923. Pen and ink. Published in Ralph D. Paine, Privateers of ’76 (Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Company, 1923), title page.

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Figure 93. N. C. Wyeth, Black Spot or About Halfway Down the Slope to the Stockade, They Were Collected in a Group, 1911. Oil on canvas, 46 x 371/2 in. Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), color illus. opp. 226.

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Figure 94. Frank E. Schoonover, Ned Rackham Espied the Derelict Scene, 1922. Oil on Cotton canvas. 36 x 30 in. Collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Published in Ralph D. Paine, “Blackbeard the Buccaneer,” The American Boy, July 1922, 13.

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Figure 95. Sailor with Initial “T,” 1894. Illustration for Lieutenant S. A. Staunton, “A Battle-Ship in Action,” Harper’s Monthly, April 1894, 653.

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Figure 96. In Sight of the Enemy – The Challenge, 1894 Illustration for Lieutenant S. A. Staunton, “A Battle-Ship in Action,” Harper’s Monthly, April 1894, 655.

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Figure 97. Howard Pyle, Captain Keitt, 1907. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “The Ruby of Kishmoor.” Harper’s Monthly, August 1907, 334.

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Figure 98. Howard Pyle, On the Tortugas, 1887. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” pt. 1, Harper’s Monthly, August 1887.

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Figure 99. Frederic Remington, Paleolithic Man, 1906. Bronze. 51/2 x 81/2 in.

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Figure 100. Harry Humphrey Moore, Spanish Gypsies of Granada, 1871. Oil on canvas, 471/2 x 631/2 in. The Hispanic Society of America, New York.

Figure 101. William Turner Dannat, Contrebandier aragonais, 1883. Oil on canvas, 1101/5 x 70 in. Blérancourt, musée national de la coopération américaine.

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Figure 102. Howard Pyle, Blackbeard Buries his Treasure, 1887. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Buccaneers and Marooners of the Spanish Main,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, September 1887, 509.

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Figure 103. Charles Stanley Reinhart, The Serenaders, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, May 1882, 808.

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Figure 104. Charles Stanley Reinhart, A Professional Beggar, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 2, Harper’s Monthly, May 1882, 815.

Figure 105. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Difficult for Foreigners, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 3, Harper’s Monthly, July 1882, 222.

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Figure 106. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Street Barbers, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 5, Harper’s Monthly, September 1882, 556.

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Figure 107. N. C. Wyeth in “Oh, Morgan’s Men are Out For You; And Blackbeard – Buccaneer!” 1917. Oil on canvas, 501/4 x 351/8 in. Private Collection in Delaware. Published in Paul Hervey Fox, “The Golden Galleon,” Scriber’s Magazine, August 1917, color frontispiece.

Figure 108. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate with Spy-Glass, 1915. Oil on Best English Linen canvas, 33 x 22 in. J. Glenn Brown Family Collection. Created for, but not published in “The Treasure of St. Albans,” Harper’s Monthly.

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Figure 109. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Gypsies, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 4, Harper’s Monthly, August 1882, 392.

Figure 110. Charles Stanley Reinhart, Gypsy Dance, 1882. Illustration for George Lathrop, “Spanish Vistas,” pt. 5, Harper’s Monthly, September 1882, 547.

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Figure 111. Film still of Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, 2003.

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Figure 112. John Sloan, Tailpiece for “Mehitabel,” 1908. Ink and gouache on illustration board, 121/2 x 22 in. Delaware Art Museum. Published in Ralph Bergengren, "Mehitabel: Being the Startling Piratical Adventures of a Virtuous New England Schoolmistress in the Hands of Unlettered and Ferocious Freebooters," Collier's, November 21, 1908. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.

Figure 113. John Sloan, Now Beginneth the Playful and Tragic Romance in Four Fits of the Ten Fatigued Pirates, Who, Seated in Missionary Furniture, Lament the Murderous Monotony of Their Life, 1908. Ink and gouache on bristol board glued to cardboard, 121/4 x 231/16 in. Published in Ralph Bergengren, "Mehitabel: Being the Startling Piratical Adventures of a Virtuous New England Schoolmistress in the Hands of Unlettered and Ferocious Freebooters," Collier's, November 21, 1908. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.

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Figure 114. John Sloan, Doting Pirates Sat in the Nice Red Rocking-Chairs and Watched the Tender Infant Busily Sliding Checkers Off the Domelike Cranium of Their Baldest Comrade, 1922. Illustration for Ralph Bergengren, “Redefining Influence of Captain Kidd” in Gentleman All and Merry Companions (Boston: B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922), opp. 236.

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Figure 115. John Sloan, The Flaming Red Whiskers of Their Brave, Abominable Leader Caught the Baby’s Undivided Attention. He Smiled and Wiggled His Chubby Legs. Admiringly. Presently His Smile Widened and He Extended His Chubby Arms Straight toward the Surprised and – to His Own Amazement – Delighted Pirate, 1922. Illustration for Ralph Bergengren, “Redefining Influence of Captain Kidd” in Gentleman All and Merry Companions (Boston: B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922), opp. 230.

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Figure 116. Frank E. Schoonover, Pirate with Flintlock, 1922. Oil on board, 16 x 8 in. Private Collection. Published in Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, illustrated with Louis Rhead (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), dust jacket.

Figure 117. John Sloan, Red Whisker, One Hand on the Rail and Captain Kidd in the Other, Had Bounded Lightly over the Bulwarks, 1922. Illustration for Ralph Bergengren, “Redefining Influence of Captain Kidd” in Gentleman All and Merry Companions (Boston: B. J. Brimmer Company, 1922), opp. 243.

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Figure 118. Norman Rockwell, Cousin Reginald Plays Pirate, 1917. Illustration for Country Gentleman, November 3, 1917, cover.

Figure 119. Norman Rockwell, Land of Enchantment, 1934. Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1934, 18-19.

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Figure 120. Norman Rockwell, Family Tree, 1959. Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, October 24, 1959, cover.

243

Figure 121. Norman Rockwell, Dreaming of Adventure, 1924. Oil on canvas, 30 x 23 in. The Kelly Collection of American Illustration. Published in Saturday Evening Post, June 7, 1924, cover.

Figure 122. Norman Rockwell, Dreaming of Home, 1924. Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, June 14, 1924, cover.

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Figure 123. Normal Rockwell, Gary Cooper as Texan, 1930. Illustration for Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1930, cover.

245

Figure 124. “Marooned,” film still from The Black Pirate, 1926.

246

Figure 125. Poster advertising Captain Blood, 1935.

Figure 126. Film still from The Sea Hawk, 1940.

247

Figure 127. Film still of Peter Pan and Captain Hook from Peter Pan, 1953.

Figure 128. Howard Pyle, “And Twenty One and Twenty Two,” 1896. Illustration for Howard Pyle, “Tom Chist and the Treasure Box,” Harper’s Round Table, March 24, 1896.

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Figure 129. Film still of Captain Hook from Hook, 1991.

Figure 130. Film still of Captain Shakespeare from Stardust, 2007.

249

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Anne M. Loechle 918 Sunglow St. • Villa Hills, KY 41017 (859) 445-3508 (cell) e-mail: [email protected]

Education PhD 2010 Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Dissertation: “Ye Intruders Beware: Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration” Combined degree in Art History and American Studies Areas of Specialization: American Art, American Studies Advisor: Professor Sarah Burns

MA 2003 Tufts University, Medford, MA Art History Areas of Specialization: American Art, Latin American Art Advisors: Professor Eric Rosenberg and Professor Adriana Zavala

BA 2000 Hanover College, Hanover IN Double major in Art History and Studio Art, magna cum laude Recipient of Distinguished Award in Art History

Professional Experience 2010 Adjunct Instructor, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis HERH-400 Art and Masculinity in American Culture, 1875-1925, Fall 2010

2010 Adjunct Instructor, Northern Kentucky University 2006-2008 A100: Art Appreciation

2007 Adjunct Instructor, Art Academy of Cincinnati AH315-01: Crossing Borders: Modern and Contemporary U.S. and Mexican Art, Spring 2007

2006 Adjunct Instructor, Hanover College ARTH 360: Crossing Borders: 20th-century U.S. and Mexican Art, May 2006

2005-2006 Assistant Instructor, Indiana University Professor Shehira Davezac, H100: Art Appreciation, Spring 2006 Professor W. Eugene Kleinbauer, A101: Ancient and Medieval Art, Fall 2005

2005 Summer Intern, Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Permanent Collection Department

2004-2005 Research Assistant, Indiana University Professor Sarah Burns, Ruth N. Halls Professor of Fine Arts

2002-2003 Teaching Assistant, Tufts University Professor Adriana Zavala, FAH 7: Introduction to Latin American Art, Fall 2002 and FAH 54/154: 20th-century Mexican Art, Spring 2003

2002 Assistant Instructor, Tufts University Professor Eva Hoffman, FAH 1: Art, Ritual and Culture survey course, Fall 2002

2001-2003 Curatorial Assistant, Tufts University Gallery

1999-2000 Art Gallery Student Coordinator, Hanover College

1999-2000 Youth Art/Art History Workshop Coordinator and Teacher, Hanover College

1999, Summer Intern, Cincinnati Art Museum, Education Department

Recognition and Awards 2007 Friends of Art Dissertation Research Grant, Indiana University

2005 Friends of Art Summer Research Grant, Indiana University

2003-2007 Ruth N. Halls Fellowship in American Art, Indiana University

2001 Half Tuition Scholarship, Tufts University

1996-2000 Hanover Horner Full Tuition Scholarship, Hanover College

Publications Articles: “Metaphysics, Mystery and Magic: The Work of Enrico Pinardi.” Enrico Pinardi: Metaphysics, Mystery and Magic. Edited by Jeanne Gressler, David Winkler and Destiny MacDonald. Boston: Tufts University Gallery, 2004. An exhibition catalog.

Publications in Progress Articles: “Gunpower Smoke, Buried Dubloon: Adventure and Lawlessness in Pyle’s Piratical World.” In Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered. Wilmington, DE: Delaware Art Museum, forthcoming. An exhibition catalog.

“What’s so Popular in Mexico? Post-Revolutionary Calendar Art.” Working paper, photocopy.

Guest Lectures 2001 Lecture, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio “Visualizing Beauty in Contemporary Photography”

Professional Service 2004-2005 Co-President, Art History Association, Indiana University

2003-2005 Co-Chair, Art History Association Symposium Committee, Indiana University

Professional Affiliations Association of Historians of American Art College Art Association of America International Center of Medieval Art

Languages Reading and writing proficiency in French and Spanish Some reading proficiency in German

Image Archives and Exhibitions 2003-2005 Digital Image Archives Assistant, Indiana University

1999 Curator of Recycled Art: Masks and Totems, Hanover College Art Gallery, Hanover College

1996-2000 Image Archive Assistant, Hanover College