In August 1883, shortly after “Treasure Island” was published, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a letter to his friend William Ernest Henley making an unusual confession. “It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness,” he wrote, “that begot Long John Silver… the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.” Fiction’s most famous pirate, the one-legged ship’s cook who dominates every scene he enters, was not modeled on any historical buccaneer at all. He was modeled on a Scottish poet and magazine editor who had never set foot on a ship.
A Poet, Not a Pirate
William Ernest Henley is best remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for a single poem: “Invictus,” with its closing lines “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Born in Gloucester in 1849, Henley spent his career as a poet, critic, and magazine editor, eventually becoming one of the most influential literary tastemakers in London, championing writers including Stevenson himself, Rudyard Kipling, and Thomas Hardy in the publications he edited. Nothing in his career had anything to do with piracy, the sea, or crime.
The Illness Behind the Image
What Henley did have, and what Stevenson borrowed, was his physical presence. Tuberculosis of the bone struck Henley around age twelve and cost him his left leg below the knee by his late teens. When the disease threatened his remaining foot in 1873, Henley traveled to Edinburgh to place himself under the care of the surgeon Joseph Lister, spending roughly two years in the Royal Infirmary there in a successful effort to avoid a second amputation. It was in that hospital ward that Stevenson met him, brought by a mutual friend, and the two men began a friendship that would last fifteen years. Visitors who knew Henley in this period described a man whose damaged body did nothing to diminish, and if anything sharpened, an overwhelming force of personality: loud, opinionated, and impossible to ignore in a room.
Borrowing the Man, Not the Morals
That description is, almost point for point, Long John Silver: a man missing a leg who nonetheless dominates every able-bodied sailor around him through sheer will. Stevenson was careful, in his letter, to specify exactly what he had taken and what he had not. The physical fact of the injury and the outsized personality that came with it were Henley’s. The murderous opportunism, the mutiny, the betrayals, all of Silver’s actual piracy, were invented wholesale by Stevenson and owed nothing to his friend. Henley reportedly found the connection funny rather than flattering when he learned of it, and the two men’s friendship had nothing to do with piracy or crime; it was a literary friendship between a rising novelist and the editor publishing his early work.
A Friendship That Didn’t Last
The bond that produced Silver did not survive the decade. In 1888, Henley wrote Stevenson a letter accusing Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, of having plagiarized a short story from Henley’s sister-in-law, Katharine de Mattos. Stevenson took his wife’s side, and the two men’s fifteen-year friendship effectively ended over the accusation, never fully repaired before Henley’s death in 1903. What survived was the character: a fictional pirate with a real man’s damaged leg and unmistakable presence, still the template that every subsequent one-legged, parrot-shouldered pirate in film and fiction has copied, usually without any idea that the original had never sailed anywhere at all.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “William Ernest Henley” and “Robert Louis Stevenson”; Britannica, “William Ernest Henley”; Poetry Foundation, “William Ernest Henley.”
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