Long before Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, an American compiler named Charles Ellms had already decided that pirate history sold better as pirate fiction. His 1837 anthology, The Pirates Own Book, sold roughly 6,000 copies in its first year and went through at least five further printings. It also, by most accounts of American popular reading, did more than any single earlier work to fix the pirate as a character rather than a historical footnote.
A Compiler, Not Really a Historian
Ellms drew his material from earlier sources, chiefly Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), along with newspaper accounts, trial records, and other pirate narratives circulating in the early 1800s. What made his book different was not new research; it was what he did with the old material. Johnson’s General History had presented pirates largely as historical and legal subjects, men whose lives ended in a specific trial with a specific verdict. Ellms restructured the same events around suspense and violence, trimming the legal and biographical throat-clearing and expanding the dramatic scenes.
Turning History Into Cliffhangers
The clearest example is his account of Mary Read. Johnson’s version spends real space on her emotional and psychological interior before rushing through the violent climax of her story. Ellms reversed the proportions, compressing the buildup and lingering instead on the action, deliberately aiming, in the words of one modern literary analysis, to make readers “sweat, scream, and cringe.” The same treatment applied throughout the book: pirates got individual, self-contained episodes built around a single dramatic moment rather than a full accounting of a life.
Sixty-Six Engravings
Ellms paired the new narrative style with heavy illustration: sixty-six engravings in total, eighteen of them full-page, depicting the book’s most violent and theatrical moments: Mary Read dueling a man who had challenged her lover, pirates burying treasure, a captive being forced to walk a plank. The images were as influential as the text. Searches for figures like Mary Read or Captain Kidd still surface variations on Ellms’s original engravings well before any earlier or more historically careful source, a sign of how completely his visual version of these pirates displaced the historical record in popular memory.
A Book Blamed for Real Piracy
The book’s dramatic style unsettled contemporaries enough that it became a minor scandal in its own right. The best-documented case involves Philip Spencer, son of the sitting U.S. Secretary of War, who was hanged for mutiny aboard the brig USS Somers in 1842. The captain who ordered the hanging specifically noted that Spencer’s favorite reading was The Pirates Own Book and that pirate stories were a constant subject of his conversation before the mutiny, treating the book as evidence of a mind primed for real violence rather than simply entertained by fictional versions of it.
The Template Later Fiction Followed
Ellms’s approach, non-judgmental, fast-paced, built around a handful of vivid set pieces, became the model for the cheap pirate fiction that followed it through the mid-1800s, including titles like The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main and Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain. That lineage runs in a fairly direct line to Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1881, which borrowed the same instinct for compressing history into scenes readers would remember: a map, a parrot, a one-legged man, a black spot. The pirate of modern fiction and film owes at least as much to one compiler’s commercial instincts in 1837 as to anything that happened on an actual ship.
Sources consulted: Project Gutenberg edition of The Pirates Own Book (1837); Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life, “The Danger of The Pirates Own Book.”
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