Aye, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye scurvy lubbers! It beseems me we’ve been lax in its observation in the last few years, but ye can lay to it I’ll show proper reverence today. Albeit, by thunder, I refuses to say “Argh!”
Belay that; I just did.
All right, enough of that. Pirates historically were not all that romantic, except in the abstract – the idea of escaping from the tedium and brutality of merchant sailing into a more-or-less democratic and potentially profitable criminal enterprise. They were cruel men, but they lived in a cruel age. Still, I’ve always disliked them. I root for the pirate hunters. Let ʾem swing, says I.
The most famous literary pirate of all, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver, was inspired, according to my reading, by two different men, one of them an actual pirate. (I’ve written about this here before, but I’m confident you’ve forgotten.)
In August of 1720, an East India Company ship called Cassandra, under the command of Captain James Macrae, encountered two pirate vessels off Johanna Island near Madagascar. These ships were commanded by Edward England and John Taylor. The pirates captured Macrae’s ship after a long battle, and Macrae and some of his men fled ashore, where they hid for ten days. Then Macrae, hoping the pirates’ blood-lust had ebbed, approached them to try to negotiate the recovery of his vessel and goods. The pirates responded by debating whether to kill him or not.
Fortunately for Macrae, he was a good captain and several of the pirates had served with him before. Suddenly a heavily bearded, one-legged pirate, “swearing like a parrot,” his belt stuffed with pistols, stomped up to the deck, took Macrae by the hand, and said he was very glad to see him again. “Shew me the man that offers to hurt Captain Macrae,” he said, “and I’ll stand to him, for an honester fellow I never sailed with.”
The pirates let him and his crew go in a secondary vessel with half their cargo. They made it to India, starving but alive. (Source: The Pirates, by Douglas Botting, pp. 61-63, c. 1978, Time-Life Books.)
A century later, R. L. Stevenson would make that rescuer one of his models for Long John Silver.
But there was another model, according to Stevenson himself. This was a personal friend of his, William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903), an English poet, writer, critic and editor. He is most famous for the poem “Invictus,” which I dislike as a Christian and will not reproduce here.
Henley had a reputation as a brave and honorable man. He suffered from tuberculosis of the bone, which forced the amputation of his left leg below the knee in 1868-69. Although he suffered from the effects of his illness all his life, he played the staunch, cheerful Englishman to the hilt, and others found him an inspiration. Stevenson stated in a letter to Henley that he had inspired the Silver character.
As a sideline, Henley’s daughter Margaret was the inspiration for Wendy in J. M. Barrie’s play, Peter Pan.
(Source: Wikipedia, of course.)
