Fiction · 1921
Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates
Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main
Seven pieces on the buccaneers of the Spanish Main by the writer-illustrator whose pen and pencil did more than any other to fix the popular image of the pirate: a historical opening chapter on the buccaneers and marooners themselves, followed by six tales mixing invented characters with real ones — the ghost haunting a murdered captain's treasure, a shipwrecked boy's discovery of a strongbox, Blackbeard's last days and his death at Lieutenant Maynard's hands off Ocracoke, the rise and fall of the pirate Blueskin, and, closing the book, the double life of "Captain Scarfield," a respectable Quaker trader by day.
Pyle's pirate stories and pictures originally appeared scattered across magazines during his lifetime; collector and editor Merle Johnson gathered them into this single volume in 1921, a decade after Pyle's death, with a foreword explaining the compilation. Pyle's own Preface, written for the original stories, gives the historical background of piracy in the West Indies that opens the collection.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1853–1911 · Victorian
Howard Pyle (1853–1911) was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and studied art in Philadelphia before Scribner's Magazine accepted his first published piece in 1876. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), his own retelling of the ballad tradition illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings, became the version of the outlaw most American readers grew up on, and he went on to write and illustrate further books on medieval romance and piracy. From 1894 he taught illustration at Drexel Institute, and after 1900 ran his own school in Wilmington and nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; its roughly two hundred students, many of whom became major illustrators in their own right, became known as the Brandywine School. He died in Florence, Italy, in 1911, while studying mural painting.
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