A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (Maritime Classics) - Hardcover

Johnson, Charles; Defoe, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558217665 ISBN 13: 9781558217669

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Both Robert Louis Stevenson and J.M. Barrie were inspired by this 1724 classic--the first book to introduce the world of Captain Kidd, Mary Read and 19 other pirates to the reading public. David Cordingly, author of Under the Black Flag, provides an introduction to this edition, which was taken from the third edition, published in 1925. Includes a glossary and an abstract of the 1720 civil and statute law relating to piracy. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

Review:

"I presume we need make no Apology for giving the Name of a History to the following Sheets, though they contain nothing but the Actions of a Parcel of Robbers."

A "Parcel of Robbers" they may be, but pirates have long held a special place in our imaginations. The iconography of piracy--peg legs, eye patches, pieces of eight, squawking parrots, the Jolly Roger--was first codified in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. This collection of brief biographies reads like a Who's Who? of piracy, with entries on Captains Kidd, Rackam, and Roberts, women-in-disguise pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and the infamous Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, "that couragious Brute, who might have pass'd in the World for a Heroe, had he been employ'd in a good Cause."

First published in 1724, A General History is the book that launched a thousand pirate stories--inspiring Robert Louis Stevenson's Long John Silver, J.M. Barrie's Captain Hook, and Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. Though it had been attributed to a shadowy character named Captain Charles Johnson since its date of publication, the book has now been convincingly (though not incontrovertibly) attributed to Daniel Defoe. The 18th-century text, reproduced here complete with the awkward sentence construction, capitalization of nouns proper and common, and frequent italicizing typical of its era, sometimes makes for rather difficult reading, but Defoe's prose still manages to sparkle. With a new introduction by Richard West, author of Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures, A General History is a must-read for armchair swashbucklers. --C.B. Delaney

From the Back Cover:

Captain Charles Johnson: The identity of Captain Johnson remains a mystery. For many years the name was believed to be a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and other classic works including Moll Flanders and Captain Singleton, which is the fictional biography of a pirate. Recent research has cast doubt on this interesting theory, and although there are some similarities in the style of Defoe's known works and Captain Johnson's History, there are too many discrepancies to confirm the attribution. It has been suggested that Johnson was a seaman, and possibly even a pirate, because he is clearly at home with the language of the sea and he shows an inside knowledge of the lives of some of the pirates he describes. He certainly had access to trial documents and may well have interviewed former pirates or sailors who had been captured and spent time on pirate ships. His book undoubtedly provides the most vivid and authentic description of the great age of piracy. Since its first publication in 1724 it has been the prime source of information about the lives of the most notorious pirates and has been an inspiration for numerous books, plays and films, from R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan to the swashbuckling movies starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Errol Flynn.(71/2 X 10, 388 pages, illustrations, charts)

About this edition

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1558217665
• ISBN 13: 9781558217669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 370