![]() Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Walter Scott’s The Pirate and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson came out in 1883.īut all of these pirate stories were sold as boys’ reading, as if girls weren’t interested in adventure. Nineteenth-century literature was awash with pirate stories: R. It’s easy to romanticise the pirate life and modern-day piracy is anything but romantic.īut for those of us who grew up watching The Onedin Line on television and reading Enid Blyton’s Devon coast-set Famous Five, adventure stories about the sea were in our blood.Īdded to that, I lived close to the sea and was a regular visitor to the Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth to see Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, and, later, the recovered wreck of The Mary Rose. Then there was Captain Teach – better known as Blackbeard – who plaited his long beard with ribbons before battle and marooned his own crew on a desert island.īut my heart belonged to Mary Read and Anne Bonny, the legendary 18th-century female pirates on whom I later learnt Knightley’s character had been based. Its pages were filled with the romance and the swagger of the sea buccaneers, buried treasure and brutish villains: the Scottish privateer, Captain Kidd Henry Morgan, the Welshman who became the notoriously-brutal governor of Jamaica. ![]() But my favourite, by far, was the Ladybird Book about Pirates.
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