Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main

About the book

Compiled by Merle Johnson, this collection gathers Howard Pyle's writing about the buccaneers and marooners of the Spanish Main. An opening historical account establishes a world of violent raids and precarious fortunes, while stories such as The Ghost of Captain Brand, Tom Chist and the Treasure Box, and The Ruby of Kishmoor turn its possibilities into fiction. Young adventurers and hardened captains move through plots in which valuable objects attract both opportunity and menace. The book's own mixture of fact and fancy matters: vivid narrative should not be mistaken for a uniform documentary record. Its fascination with picturesque figures coexists with cruelty and the insecurity of lives organized around plunder. The collected form offers several approaches to the pirate adventure rather than one continuous novel.

• Treasure and greed
• Adventure and violence
• History and invention

Why read it

The different tales show the narrative versatility behind Pyle's influential imagining of the pirate world.

English collection compiled by Merle Johnson from Howard Pyle's writing