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It is perhaps the most influential book on pirates ever to have been written, the inspiration for never-ending tales of treasure and terror on the high seas. Yet the identity of its author remains a mystery. Three hundred years ago, in 1724, the pseudonymous author “Captain Charles Johnson” published a pair of volumes under the hefty title A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates.
They gathered together the scandalous biographies of villains such as John “Calico Jack” Rackham and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, and were an immediate success – running to a fourth, much expanded edition in only two years. In the centuries since, the book has served as the source text for many more dastardly characters, stalking the pages of J M Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island’s Israel Hands is even named after a figure from the General History, Blackbeard’s second-in-command). The General History invented the modern pirate, turning a rabble of violent criminals into glamorous folk heroes.
And adventure is in the air again in 2024. Last week, Pirates of the Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer revealed plans to reboot the two-decades-old franchise. February saw the release of Skull and Bones, a $200 million video game about pirates, while tales of Blackbeard will soon find a place alongside the likes of Dickens and Tolstoy on the Penguin Classics list, via the new Penguin Book of Pirates. And there’s a piratical flavour to Disney’s new revival of James Clavell’s Shōgun (1975), headed by Cosmo Jarvis’s scenery-chewing sailor John Blackthorne – who spends early episodes protesting that he is not in fact a pirate, simply a man politely requesting the return of his ship, flintlocks and cannons.
Seaborne criminals have always been around. Pompey Magnus (famous now for being defeated by Julius Caesar, an amusing legacy for someone whose name means “the great”) made his name hunting pirate fleets out of Anatolia and Crete in 67 BC, and people were no doubt robbing, slaving and killing on the oceans long before.
Use the word “pirate” today, however, and everyone will know what you’re talking about: sailors in striped rags, roving the seven seas in search of plunder. The word brings to mind parrots, cutlasses and doubloons; sea battles, shanties and scurvy, all taking place in a historical smear that extends roughly from the very real Francis Drake in the late-16th century to the wholly imaginary Jack Sparrow in the mid-18th. Johnson’s General History, even though it only tackles the 30-odd years leading up to 1724, casts a long shadow across them all – firing the imagination and giving us popular tropes such as walking the plank, buried treasure, the faux-heroic “pirate’s code”, and the skull-and-crossbones of the Jolly Roger (“a black Ensign, with a white Death’s Head in the Middle of it”).
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