TREASURE NEVERLAND ‘Captain Teach commonly call’d Black Beard’, from A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c. (London, 1734). TREASURE NEVERLAND REAL AND IMAGINARY PIRATES NEIL RENNIE 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox26dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Neil Rennie 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Preface This book is about factual and fi ctional pirates and is therefore a deliberate combination of history and literary history. Swashbuckling eighteenth-century pirates were the ideal pirates of all time and are still popular today. Most people have heard of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, for example, although they lived about three hundred years ago. But most people have also heard of other pirates, such as Long John Silver and Captain Hook, although those pirates never lived at all, except in literature. So there have been two kinds of pirates—real and imaginary—but the real, historical pirates are themselves somewhat legendary, somewhat fi ctional, belonging on the page and stage rather than on the high seas. The solid basis for the research is in primary material, much of it in manuscripts, inky scribbles in the National Archives and in the British Library—testimonials, narratives, legal state- ments, colonial and mercantile reports—which are the best fi rsthand evidence of actual piracy. Of course the pirates who appeared in such reports, written or spoken by themselves or their victims, can never be simply and transparently factual, but those pirates are nevertheless dis- tinguishable from the literary characters in plausibly ‘realistic’ or amus- ingly ‘fantastic’ fi ctions about pirates who never existed, except in the collaborating imaginations of writers and readers. The aims of the book are to discriminate and describe the ascertainable facts of the real eighteenth-century pirate lives and then to investigate how such facts were subsequently transformed artistically, by writers like Defoe and Stevenson, into fi ctions of various kinds: historical novels, popular melodramas, boyish adventures, Hollywood fi lms. The aim is to watch, in other words, the long dissolve from Captain Kidd to Johnny Depp. There are surprisingly few scholarly studies of the factual pirates— properly analysing the basic manuscript sources and separating those documents from popular legends—and there are even fewer literary- historical studies of the fi ctional pirates, although those imaginary pirates form a distinct and coherent literary tradition—instalments of vi preface a single, continuing story, written by Scott, Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Stevenson, and Barrie. Treasure Neverland is a study of this Scots-American literary tradition and also of the inter- relations between the factual and fi ctional pirates—pirates who are intimately related, as the nineteenth-century writings about fi ctional pirates began with the eighteenth-century writings about supposedly real pirates. ‘What I want is the best book about the Buccaneers’, wrote Stevenson when he began Treasure Island in 1881. What he received, rightly, was indeed the best book: the sensational and unreliable History of the Pyrates (1724). I should add that all translations and mistranslations are my own, unless otherwise indicated, and I must thank the following friends who did their best to make this a better book than it is: Claire, Hugo, John, Kevin, Louis, Marilyn, Philip. Contents List of illustrations ix 1. Every and all the Averys 1 2. Yo-Ho-Ho and a Cup of Bumbo 40 3. Some Rambling Lives 68 4. Gow, the Pirate in Transit 113 5. Buried Treasure 138 6. Treasure Neverland 178 7. Hollywood Lemons 208 8. Something for the Broad 241 Notes 271 Works Cited in Notes 326 Index 347 This page intentionally left blank List of illustrations Frontispiece: ‘Captain Teach commonly call’d Black Beard’, from A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, &c. (London, 1734), reproduced by permission of the British Library. ii Figure 1.1. Harbour of Saint Mary’s Island, an imaginary view, crudely adapted from an illustration of a water spout. 9 Figure 1.2. ‘The two Pirats Purser and Clinton’, from A True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of the two most famous English Pyrats, Purser and Clinton (1639), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 15 Figure 1.3. ‘Buccaneers and scenes from the life of buccaneers’, from A.O. Exquemelin, Histoire des Avanturiers (Paris, 1686), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 17 Figure 1.4. Captain Avery in Madagascar, from The History and Lives of all the most notorious Pirates, and their Crews (London, 1729), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 27 Figure 2.1. Captain William Kidd, Declaration, reproduced by permission of the Public Record Offi ce. 47 Figure 2.2. ‘Capt. Kidd hanging in chains’, from The Pirates Own Book (1837), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 52 Figure 2.3. ‘Major Stede Bonnet hanged’, from Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers (Amsterdam, 1725), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 58 Figure 3.1. ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’, from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (fi rst edition, London, 1724), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 72 Figure 3.2. ‘Blackbeard the Pirate’, from A General History (second edition, London, 1724), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 73 Figure 3.3. ‘Ann Bonny and Mary Read’, from A General History (fi rst edition, London, 1724), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 79 x list of illustrations Figure 3.4. ‘Anne Bonny captured in Jamaica’, from Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers (1725), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 81 Figure 3.5. ‘Mary Read has died in jail in Jamaica’, from Historie der Engelsche Zee-Rovers (1725), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 82 Figure 4.1. ‘Gow killing the Captain’, from The Pirates Own Book (1837), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 114 Figure 5.1. ‘Mr. Helme in the character of Blackbeard’, engraving by C. Tomkins, after I.F. Roberts, reproduced by permission of the Institute of Historical Research. 153 Figure 5.2. Illustrations by Felix Darley for ‘The Gold Bug’, in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 28 June 1843. 159 Figure 6.1. ‘Captain Mackra, and the Pirate with a wooden leg’, from The Pirates Own Book (1837), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 186 Figure 6.2. Thomas Rowlandson, portrait of a nautical cook, c.1799, reproduced by permission of the National Maritime Museum. 188 Figure 6.3. William Nicholson, design for costume of Captain Hook, reproduced by permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 200 Figure 7.1. Still from The Sea Hawk (1924), originally captioned ‘Her skin was white as milk, her eyes two darkest sapphires, her head a coppery golden that seemed to glow like metal as the sunlight caught it’. 214 Figure 7.2. Still from Captain Blood (1924), originally captioned ‘I shall never forget what you did, Mr. Blood. I shall never forget’. 217 Figure 7.3. The exploding Arabella, during the fi lming of Captain Blood, 1924. 218 Figure 7.4. Walter Paget, frontispiece to Treasure Island (1899), captioned ‘The Coxswain loosed his grasp’, reproduced by permission of the British Library. 229 Figure 7.5. N.C. Wyeth, illustration to Treasure Island (1911), captioned ‘One More Step, Mr. Hands’, reproduced by permission of the British Library. 230 Figure 8.1. ‘Mary Read killing her antagonist’, from The Pirates Own Book (1837), reproduced by permission of the British Library. 263 Figure 8.2. A. Debel, illustration of Mary Read, from P. Christian, Histoire des pirates et corsairs (1846). 264 I Every and all the Averys Come all you brave Boyes whose Courage is Bold Will you venture with me and I’le glut you with Gold - Make haste into Coruna a Ship you will fi nde Now called the Fancy which will pleasure your minde (‘A Copy of Verses Composed by Capt. Henry Every’, 1694)1 iracy has been called by many names, but—by any name—it is basi- Pcally and simply robbery at sea. Although, as such, it is probably as old as seafaring, its so-called ‘golden age’, the period of its fl ourishing—distantly, invisibly, at sea in ships, and also legibly, saleably, on land in print—is the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This is the age of the historical pirate who is still, who doubles as, the imaginary pirate of today.