Book of Pirates

Howard Pyle
Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of

the Spanish Main: From the writing & Pictures of Howard Pyle:
Compiled by Merle Johnson

CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY MERLE JOHNSON

PREFACE
I. BUCCANEERS AND MAROONERS OF THE SPANISH MAIN

II. THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN BRAND
III. WITH THE BUCCANEERS

IV. TOM CHIST AND THE TREASURE BOX
V. JACK BALLISTER'S FORTUNES

VI. BLUESKIN THE PIRATE
VII. CAPTAIN SCARFIELD

FOREWORD
PIRATES, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea

wolves who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in
present-day conceptions in great degree as drawn by the pen and

pencil of Howard Pyle.
Pyle, artist-author, living in the latter half of the nineteenth

century and the first decade of the twentieth, had the fine
faculty of transposing himself into any chosen period of history

and making its people flesh and blood again--not just historical
puppets. His characters were sketched with both words and

picture; with both words and picture he ranks as a master, with a
rich personality which makes his work individual and attractive

in either medium.
He was one of the founders of present-day American illustration,

and his pupils and grand-pupils pervade that field to-day. While
he bore no such important part in the world of letters, his

stories are modern in treatment, and yet widely read. His range
included historical treatises concerning his favorite Pirates

(Quaker though he was); fiction, with the same Pirates as
principals; Americanized version of Old World fairy tales; boy

stories of the Middle Ages, still best sellers to growing lads;
stories of the occult, such as In Tenebras and To the Soil of the

Earth, which, if newly published, would be hailed as
contributions to our latest cult.

In all these fields Pyle's work may be equaled, surpassed, save
in one. It is improbable that anyone else will ever bring his

combination of interest and talent to the depiction of these
old-time Pirates, any more than there could be a second Remington

to paint the now extinct Indians and gun-fighters of the Great
West.

Important and interesting to the student of history, the
adventure-lover, and the artist, as they are, these Pirate

stories and pictures have been scattered through many magazines
and books. Here, in this volume, they are gathered together for

the first time, perhaps not just as Mr. Pyle would have done, but
with a completeness and appreciation of the real value of the

material which the author's modesty might not have permitted.
MERLE JOHNSON.

PREFACE
WHY is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an

unpleasantly titillating twang to the great mass of respectable
flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern

civilization? And pertinent to this question another--Why is it
that the pirate has, and always has had, a certain lurid glamour

of the heroical enveloping him round about? Is there, deep under
the accumulated debris of culture, a hidden groundwork of the

old-timesavage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an
unsubdued nature in the respectablemental household of every one

of us that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? 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? And we ourselves--would we not

rather read such a story as that of Captain Avery's capture of
the East Indian treasure ship, with its beautiful princess and

load of jewels (which gems he sold by the handful, history
sayeth, to a Bristol merchant), than, say, one of Bishop

Atterbury's sermons, or the goodly Master Robert Boyle's
religious romance of "Theodora and Didymus"? It is to be

apprehended that to the unregenerate nature of most of us there
can be but one answer to such a query.

In the pleasurable warmth the heart feels in answer to tales of
derring- do Nelson's battles are all mightily interesting, but,

even in spite of their romance of splendid courage, 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, and of how he divided such a quantity of booty in

the Island of Plate (so named because of the tremendous dividend
there declared) that it had to be measured in quart bowls, being

too considerable to be counted.
Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a

redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man
that lies within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his

battle against the tremendous odds of all the civilized world of
law and order, have had much to do in making a popular hero of

our friend of the black flag. But it is not altogether courage
and daring that endear 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
doubloons 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.
And what a life of adventure is his, to be sure! A life of

constant alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean
Ishmaelite, he wanders forever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard

of for months, now careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited
shore, now appearing suddenly to swoop down on some merchant

vessel with rattle of musketry, shouting, yells, and a hell of
unbridled passions let loose to rend and tear. What a Carlislean

hero! What a setting of blood and lust and flame and rapine for
such a hero!

Piracy, such as was practiced in the flower of its days--that is,
during the early eighteenth century--was no sudden growth. It was

an evolution, from the semilawful buccaneering of the sixteenth
century, just as buccaneering was upon its part, in a certain

sense, an evolution from the unorganized, unauthorized warfare of
the Tudor period.

For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish
ventures of Elizabethan days. Many of the adventurers--of the

Sir Francis Drake school, for instance--actually overstepped
again and again the bounds of international law, entering into

the realms of de facto piracy. Nevertheless, while their doings
were not recognized officially by the government, the

perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for their
excursions against Spanish commerce at home or in the West

Indies; rather were they commended, and it was considered not
altogether a discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the

spoils taken from Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace.
Many of the most reputable citizens and merchants of London, when

they felt that the queen failed in her duty of pushing the fight
against the great Catholic Power, fitted out fleets upon their

own account and sent them to levy good Protestant war of a
private nature upon the Pope's anointed.