“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main…” – Walt Disney
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” - Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
What goes with Wenches? Pirates! Well, in theory anyway. We Wenches haven’t actually written many pirate stories between us, interestingly enough … but it might be fun to take a look at this quintessential historical sea-adventurer … the pirate, the buccaneer and the privateer, too … and explore a little of why he works – or doesn’t! – as a romantic hero.
As a kid, I thought pirates were pretty cool – I read Treasure Island in elementary school (and noticed there were no girls in it), and watched various movies of Treasure Island (there are a lot of versions!). And of course, there was Hook and his crew from Peter Pan. As kids, my friends and I played pirates and dressed up as such for Halloween. So the stereotype was imprinted pretty early on.
In middle school and high school, I was voraciously reading Sabatini – Captain Blood, The Sea-Hawk, The Black Swan – along with Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek. Later I read Grania by Morgan Llewellyn (Grania O’Malley) and Pamela Jekel’s Sea Star (Anne Bonny). A few pirate romances were among my favorites – Laura London’s Windflower; Marsha Canham’s Iron Rose: Thief of Hearts by Teresa Medeiros; and Wench Pat Rice wrote a retired pirate in Much Ado About Magic and another in Moon Dreams.
And who could resist the appeal of pirates in fiction and the movies? Pirate ships sailing the high seas, the Jolly Roger flag flying; cutlasses, eye patches … treasure maps and chests filled with gold … sea battles and walking the plank … all these are part and parcel of the pirate mythology that has developed so vividly in literature, based on and elaborating on history.
Pirates have always existed (where there are ships and seas, there are pirates, then and now), from the earliest seafaring days of the Sumerians and Greeks to the medieval era (Eustace the Monk, a name that conjures images of Friar Tuck aboard ship, was a pirate who haunted the waters of the English Channel); then there were the glam bewigged and dashing pirates of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Henry Morgan and the pirates and buccaneers of the Caribbean, and 18th century pirates like John Teach, called Blackbeard, and Captain Kidd, whose buried treasure has never been found, but may yet exist somewhere along the coast of North America…
The historical reality of pirates wasn’t so pretty. By and large, historical pirates were tough, unforgiving men with a cruel bent, interested in gain, survival and conquest on seas that were rough in more ways than one. Pirates, in realistic terms, were little more than thugs and murderers on rolling decks (and still are). Dirty, savage, unwashed beasts – and if we time traveled and met them on the deck of a galleon or a square-rigged frigate, we wouldn’t find them very appealing.
Traditional piracy waned after the 1820s, but they had begun to thrive in literature, from Stevenson to Pyle and Sabatini, and on to genre fiction and romance. Historical fiction was followed and reinforced by the juicy pirate heroes of the movies – Errol Flynn was in his element in "Captain Blood" and "The Sea Hawk," Robert Newton was the goodest of the bad in "Treasure Island," and of course there's the unforgettable, untoppable Johnny Depp, along with Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley in "Pirates of the Caribbean."
“Life's pretty good, and why wouldn't it be? I'm a pirate, after all.” – Johnny Depp
So why romanticize these pirates, these thugs and bad boys of the sea? Where does that come from? In part, we have Robert Louis Stevenson to thank – his Treasure Island created and codified, to a large extent, the stereotype of the pirate, from the desperate search for treasure using a map marked “x,” to the eye patch, wooden leg, striped shirt and parrot buddy named after a dead cap’n – it’s all there in an exciting story that every kid, just about, has read or watched in one form or another. Add to that mix Captain Hook and Peter Pan and later Pirates of the Caribbean, and countless other stories of mystery, adventure, untold treasure, and the basic recipe for swashbuckling adventure is still in play.
It’s at work in romance fiction, too, but the requirements of the genre are different – a pirate hero has to be appealing physically and romantically. There's the allure of the wild freedom of the sea, the risk of a bad boy, the enticing contrast of a pirate hero with noble standards. Captain Blood was possibly the first and the best of these, a physician unjustly imprisoned and in search of justice, yet capable of high risk behavior with huge courage. Now there’s a pirate worth his salt, and as a teenage reader, I fell hard. In romance fiction, a bad boy that far gone - pirates are criminals, after all - presents huge risks, and so he can be the ultimate challenge.
And while we're on the subject, with the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie ready for release later this month - are you Team Jack Sparrow? What's his appeal? I'm thinking ... he's dirty, unprincipled, untrustworthy – and yet smart, charming, a good-hearted softie on the inside, and ultimately a salvageable diamond in the rough -- and that's a hero who represents a risk worth taking.
Do pirate heroes appeal to you? If so – why, and if not, please tell us what doesn’t work for you! And if so, what are some of your favorite pirate books and movies?
Susan
Look for Queen Hereafter in bookstores and online - and The Black Thorne's Rose in ebook!