Table Of ContentTREASURE 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
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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. T reasure 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 T reasure Island in 1881. What he received,
rightly, was indeed the best book: the sensational and unreliable H istory
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
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List ofillustrations
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, H istoire des Avanturiers (Paris, 1686),
reproduced by permission of the British Library. 17
Figure 1.4. Captain Avery in Madagascar, from T he 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 T he Pirates
Own Book (1837), reproduced by permission
of the British Library. 5 2
Figure 2.3. ‘Major Stede Bonnet hanged’, from H istorie
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
