From Book Riot: The Lives And Adventures of Sundry Notorious Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson In 1724, Captain Charles Johnson published a catalog of pirates, talking in detail about various individual pirates and their exploits. It was an immediate bestseller and has remained so pretty much ever since. It’s from this book that the vast majority of our piratical knowledge endures. Although we can track pirates through other sources — testimonials given in courts, arrests, execution orders, stories handed down and eventually written down — our major source of pirate knowledge comes from this book. From it, we learn quite a lot about famous pirates you already know without opening the book. Captain John Rackham, Captain William Kid, Captain Teach, better known as Blackbeard…they, and more besides, have entries in this book. It makes for fascinating reading all these years later. (An aside: I just poked the calculator. This book is two hundred and eighty-nine years old! Let that sink in for a moment. To put it in context, this book was fifty-two years old when the United States was founded. I mean…wow.) One thing which has helped this book endure for so long is that name on the front cover, Captain Charles Johnson. It’s known to be a pseudonym, but whose? That’s the unanswered question. There’s a lot of suggestion that it was possibly author Daniel DeFoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and who seems to have the right amount of knowledge and motive and is likely to have done the book. But did we? Well, it’s 289 years old. We’ll never know. gutenberg.org/ebooks/24439
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 08:53:00 +0000
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