General History of the Pyrates

Before Jack Sparrow, before Treasure Island, there was this book. Published in 1724, A General History of the Pyrates invented the pirate as we know him: the black flag, the eyepatch, the code of honor among thieves, the desperate last stand. Charles Johnson (a pseudonym whose true identity remains debated) gathered accounts of the Golden Age's most fearsome raiders and transformed them into something between journalism and legend. Here are the real stories of Blackbeard's terror, Calico Jack's doomed romance, and dozens of others who ruled the Caribbean seas in the early eighteenth century. Johnson embellished his sources, certainly, but the verve with which he rendered these lives of violence and freedom lodged itself permanently in the cultural imagination. This is the book that gave us the pirate myth and all the adventure and danger it implies.