The Book
Not far from Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London was a book
seller named Charles Rivington. In May 1724, he placed
copies of a
small,
leather-bound book on his shelves. The author’s name,
Captain Charles
Johnson,
meant little to those who saw it. What caught their eyes was
the title: A General History of the Robberies
and
Murders of the most notorious Pyrates (GHP).
A quick perusal of the title page and contents further
piqued their
interests,
for it revealed the book to be a “vivid and bloodthirsty
account of a
dozen
English and Welsh pirates who had recently been in the
news.” (Johnson,
vii)
Also accompanying the text were illustrations made from
copper
engravings that
depicted the four most famous of these villains –
Blackbeard,
Bartholomew Roberts, and a
page that unfolded to reveal two female pirates, Mary Read
and Anne
Bonny.
According to the table of contents, the chapters featured
not only information about “Their Policies,
Discipline and Government”, but
also numerous pirates who hunted victims between 1717 and
1724. This
list
included a veritable who’s who of pirates:
Henry
Avery
Mary Read
Edward Teach
Anne Bonny
Stede Bonnet
Howel Davis
Edward England
Bartholomew Roberts
Charles Vane
George Lowther
Jack Rackham
Edward Low
First editions of the book quickly sold out. Second and
third editions followed. Then in 1726 another printer,
Thomas Woodward,
released the first of a two-volume set. A few minor
corrections were
made, but
many errors in the original edition remained. The second
volume, which
came out
two years later, included additional, notorious pirates. A
few of these
were
lesser-known villains, but at least one – Captain Misson –
was
fictional. The
more famous pirates included Thomas Tew, William Kidd,
Christopher
Condent,
Samuel Bellamy, and William Fly. Sixty pages were devoted to
Magadoxa
(in
Ethiopia), and the appendix included information on a trial
and
execution of
pirates while Woodes Rogers was Governor of the Bahamas.
The Author
Who was Captain Charles Johnson? We don’t know. Neither seamen’s journals of the
period nor
muster books for the British Royal Navy and the East India
Company
mention him.
A naval captain of that name hunted pirates for Sir Thomas
Lynch in
1682, but
there’s only a slim chance this Johnson was the same as the
author.1
Was he the playwright, Charles Johnson, who wrote The
Successful Pirate in 1712? Probably
not. This tragic-comedy was a revised version of a play from
the
previous
century, and Johnson’s whole aim was to capitalize on the
Henry Avery
craze.2
The playwright was once said “the
only real piracy in his dramas was the taking of the
spectators’ money
for an
entertainment which had nothing to do with piracy.” (Moore,
130)
If you examine GHP,
however, the author does reveal some facts about his
experience, if not
the man.
He
is obviously proud of his knowledge of nautical terms;
but he is
conscious of
the landsman’s point of view at all times, stopping
again and again to
explain
technical difficulties or to bring foreign scenes home
to his readers
by
illustrations drawn from London and the Thames or from
the everyday
conduct of
English life. (Moore, 130)
The narrative shows the historian or journalist’s ability
to
sift through a massive amount of information and present it
in a
coherent
fashion. While fallacies and fiction exist in the narrative,
researchers and
historians have shown the accounts also include many factual
details.
It
used to be said that his history was made up more of
fairy tales than
fact, but
of late years evidence has proved Johnson to be
accurate, and there is
no doubt
that he is on the whole to be believed. (Gosse, 185)
.
. . the portion of his history relating to the North
Atlantic coast has
been
verified by original records and items of current news
in the
newspapers and
found to be a truthful relation in all essential
details. With so much
corroborative evidence at hand it is only fair to
concede the
probability that
other portions of his “History,” not verified at this
time, are also
based upon
fact. (Dow, v-vi)
Johnson had access to transcripts of actual pirate trials
and/or reports of those hearings from various newspapers of
the day,
such as
the London Gazette and Daily
Post.
Unlike historians today who
write books, Johnson did not, however, list his sources.
Johnson
claimed:
Those
facts which he himself was not an eye-witness of he had
from the
authentic
relations of the persons concerned in taking the
pirates, as well as
from the
mouths of the pirates themselves after they were taken .
. . .
(Johnson, x)
If he wasn’t a seaman, he at least interviewed those who
were. He knew the nautical jargon of the day and how to use
it
appropriately.
Discussing
a ship in a storm he explains how ‘they took necessary
measures to
secure the
mast, by rigging preventer shrouds, etc, and then wore
and lay to upon
the
other tack, till the storm was over’. This is exactly
the sort of
understated
description of a nightmare situation at sea that is
frequently to be
found in
the logbooks of sea captains. (Johnson, xiii)
Nearly three hundred years after GHP
first
appeared, we still don’t know who the elusive Captain
Johnson was. Philip Gosse, a pirate historian, wrote in The
History of Piracy:
There
is a strong assumption that the author himself was, or
had been, a
pirate, in
which case he no doubt considered it wise to shelter
himself behind a
nom-de-plume. (185)
Daniel Defoe
Daniel
Defoe was born around 1659 in London. Although
destined for the ministry, he opted to become a merchant,
but lacked a
head for
business. While trade interested him, so did politics, and
he published
his
first pamphlet on the subject in 1683. His reputation as a
pamphleteer
gained
prominence during William II’s reign, but after that
monarch’s death,
Defoe
contributed to an anonymous, religious satire entitled The
Shortest Way with Dissenters. The uproar over
this publication
led to charges of seditious libel. A reward was posted for
his arrest,
which
described him as:
.
. . a middle-size spare man, about 40 years old, of a
brown complexion,
and
dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked
nose, a sharp chin,
grey
eyes, and a large mole near his mouth. (Mutter, 2)
This eventually led to his being pilloried and imprisoned
for two years. He also was bankrupt for the second time in
his life.
Aside from his pamphlet writing, Defoe was also a
journalist. He wrote for Nathaniel Mist’s Weekly
Journal. His writings explored moral scruples, ethics,
and
religion, but
also were spiced with the illicit and immoral, which made
them
intriguing to
read and profitable. On three different occasions in 1724 –
23 May, 6
June, and
29 August – Defoe wrote about GHP.
We
received the same kind of Pleasure from a Book of this
kind, as a Man
does in
travelling thro’ a pleasant Country newly discovered,
where every Thing
he
meets gives him an agreeable Suprize. (Moore, Daniel,
270)
I
am most entertained by those actions which give me a
light into the
nature of
man. (Moore, Daniel, 271)
Pirates fascinated Daniel
Defoe.
They made excellent
subjects “because they were in the news . . . their stories
brought
together so
many of his favorite topics – travel, trade, crime,
colonization, the
national
security, and the isolation of the human soul.” (Baer, 3)
Perhaps his
most
famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719),
was based on an episode in Alexander
Selkirk’s life.3 Both this and other
works, including The
Life,
Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton
(1720), demonstrated that Defoe was knowledgeable
about the maritime world and traveled quite a bit, but he
wasn’t a
seamen.
Defoe
died in April 1731. A prolific writer, he
often published his work under a pseudonym or anonymously.
Of the many
works
published after 1710, only two listed him as the author.
This wasn’t
unusual
for the day; many writers did this to protect themselves
from criminal
and
civil retribution. In spite of his fame while alive, no one
made a
serious
attempt to compile a list of all his writings until sixty
years after
his
death. At no time during his life did he claim to be Captain
Johnson.
The Controversy
Until 1931 everyone accepted the author of GHP
as Captain Charles Johnson. At
different times following Defoe’s death, attempts were made
to
determine if the
author had actually written pieces ascribed to others
(unknown or
fictitious)
or published under “Anonymous,” but these did not include GHP.
John Robert Moore, however, claimed he accidentally
discovered
Defoe and Johnson were one and the same in 1931. So certain
was he of
this
breakthrough that he convinced well-respected academic
librarians to
reclassify
the author of GHP as Daniel Defoe.
In the second edition of A
Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe, published
in 1971, Moore
included a paragraph about the complexity of identifying the
author’s
works:
No
fixed line of progression can be charted for our
knowledge of Defoe’s
authorship, which requires constant reexamination on the
basis of
available
evidence. Occasionally such evidence comes from an
accidental
discovery, as in
the six letters from Defoe to De la Faye which were
found in the State
Paper
Office in 1864 and served to open a vast new area in his
journalistic
career.
More often it comes from long-neglected clues or from
careful
observation of
likenesses and relationships. (Moore, 240)
In his final analysis regarding GHP,
Moore
found the following:
- Since
the History is not a romance of
adventure but a rather
carefully documented record
of fact (barring some typical digressions of Defoe’s
fancy), we must
expect to
find Defoe writing in his more sober style as editor
and historian
rather than
as the irresponsible teller of interesting tales.
Likewise, although
the hand
of the same author is apparent throughout . . . and
there are
numberless
cross-references which establish the unity of
purpose which underlies
the History, the reader must expect
to meet with
extensive borrowings from the materials on which
Defoe based the work.
- The History is
substantially Defoe’s throughout . . .
is characteristic of Defoe
in style as well as subject-matter, and his
authorship is attested by a
greater
mass of evidence than can be offered for most of his
previously
accepted
writings.
- The History is Defoe’s
only connected account of
piracy, a subject which had such
a fascination for him that he referred to it in
writings throughout
nearly his
entire life . . . .
- The History . . . is
interesting enough in its own
right to deserve its many
reprintings and its translations into foreign
languages.
- It
has exerted a great influence upon
historians . . . . (Moore, Defoe,
126-128)
He
claimed
there was an overlap with Johnson’s writings in
five of Defoe’s: The
History of the Union
(1709), The King of the Pirates
(1719), Adventures
of
Captain John Gow
(1725), The Four Years’ Voyage of Capt.
George Roberts (1726), and Robert
Drury’s Journal (1729). For the purposes of this
article, we
highlight the
third of these – Adventures of Captain
John Gow.
Defoe published this pamphlet the day Gow
hanged, 11 June
1725. This pirate didn’t appear in GHP
until the third edition, and according to Moore, “‘Johnson’
stole the
narrative
from Defoe – unless Defoe rewrote his own
pamphlet. . . . If the second supposition is the right
one, we have
here
not only a remarkable example of Defoe at work rewriting his
own
pamphlet; we
have indisputable evidence for Defoe’s hand in the History
and for his authorship of a considerable part of it.” (Defoe,
160-161)
Twenty-one thousand words comprised the pamphlet, but
Johnson’s version cut that down to 5,000 words. Had he not
done so,
according
to Moore, GHP would have required
significantly more pages. Revision, of course, wasn’t and
still isn’t
unusual
in publishing. Moore compared the two documents and decided
Johnson’s
version
“turned some of the story inside out to give it a more
logical form . .
. [and]
considered [it] as history rather than as sensational
journalism . . .”
(161).
While Johnson retained the important aspects of the
pamphlet, he
corrected the
inaccuracies contained in the original account and fleshed
it out.
Another important comparison is that both authors include
“Smith” as the pirate’s name at some point in the rendering.
The third
edition
of GHP lists him as “Gow, alias
Smith,” while the fourth reverses
the names. Defoe’s pamphlet uses “Gow” throughout, but
incorporates a
letter
signed “John Smith.” There are other discrepancies that
Moore
elucidates, then
he discusses the additions Johnson added to the narrative.
He also
indicates
that “passages in the two versions are absolutely
identical”, while
others show
a slight modification. One example of this is shown below.
| Defoe’s Gow |
Johnson’s Gow |
. . . they stood
away
from Porto Santo, about ten leagues to the windward
of Madeiras, and
belonging also to the Portuguese. Her putting up
British colours, they
sent their boat ashore with Captain Somerville’s
bill of health, and a
present to the governor of three barrels of salmon
and six barrels of
herrings, and a very civil message, desiring leave
to water, and to buy
some refreshments, pretending to be bound to -----.
The governor very courteously granted their
desire,
but with more courtesy than discretion went off
himself, with about
nine or ten of his principal people, to pay the
English captain a
visit, little thinking what kind of a captain it was
they were going to
compliment, and what price it might have cost them.
However, Gow, handsomely dressed, received
them with
some ceremony, and entertained them tolerably well
for a while; but the
governor having been kept by civility as [long as]
they could, and the
refreshments from the shore not appearing, he was
forced to unmask; and
when the governor and his company rose up to take
their leave, they
were, to their great surprise, suddenly surrounded
with a gang of
fellows with muskets and an officer at the head of
them, who told them,
in so many words, they were the captain’s prisoners,
and must not think
of going on shore any more till the water and
provisions which were
promised should come on board.
|
. . .
they
weighed from that road, and beat up to Porto Santo,
about ten leagues
to windward of Madeira, belonging also to the
Portuguese. Here putting
up English colours, they sent their boat ashore with
Captain
Somerville’s health, and a present to the Governor
of three barrels of
salmon, and six of herrings, and a civil message
desiring leave to
water and buy refreshments, on pretence of being
bound to the West
Indies.
The Governor receiving this compliment kindly, not
only granted the
request, but went himself to pay his compliments to
the English
Captain, with several of his people. Smith received
them handsomely
enough, and entertained them with the best the ship
afforded, without
giving any suspicion; till the Governor going to
take leave, and the
provisions not coming off, he thought it necessary
to pull off the
mask. Whereupon a parcel of fellows immediately, by
his order,
surrounded them with firearms, and Captain Smith let
them know they
were to be his prisoners till the water and
provisions which were
promised, came aboard.
|
Moore explained the shorter
account
thusly: “Every
significant detail has been retained, and the style has been
made more
racy of
the sea and even more characteristic of Defoe. There is no
doubt that
any
careful student of Defoe will recognize ‘pull off the mask’
and ‘parcel
of
fellows’ as even more like Defoe’s typical style than
‘unmask’ and
‘gang of
fellows’.” (165)4
He also noted a similarity between the two authors – both
gentlemen possessed the “knack of giving life to a dull
passage of
exposition
by recasting it in the first person.” (166) They also liked
to add
drama by
including personal speech.
| Defoe |
Johnson |
| Then Gow, with an
air of
desperation, told them they were all dead men. |
Smith . . . crying
out in
a terrifying manner, We are all dead
men. |
In his conclusion for the comparison of these two
publications, Moore said, “Unless ‘Johnson’ was a very demon
of skilful
revision, he must have been the author of the original
pamphlet on the
life of
Gow, which he understood so well.” (168) This was why the
condensed
version
worked.
Moore believed Defoe was Johnson because the former
traveled
a lot, recognized a good story when he saw it, and rarely
published his
writings under his own name. The language style and moral
reflections
found in GHP were elements Defoe frequently
employed.
Based on the entirety of his analysis, Moore believed
Johnson and Defoe were the same person, and his Checklist
became the standard authority of what Defoe did write.
The problem was the case he made lacked a solid foundation.
Evidence
toward
this end was presented in 1988 with the publication of
Philip Nicholas
Furbank and W. R.
Owens’ The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe.
According to their research and studies, they found
inconsistencies
that
negated Moore’s comparisons and called into question the
methods he
used to
draw his conclusions. They referred to the latter as “chain
forging,”
which
they defined as building his arguments atop a shaky base
that wouldn’t
stand up
to further scrutiny.
Moore based his attribution on how the two authors used
“idiomatic
phrases, the comic or ironic turns of thought, the
introduction of
dialogue to
dramatize a scene, the interspersed moral reflections . . .
”, as well
as their
similar ideas and interests. (Defoe, xxiii) This is known as
internal
evidence
of attribution, but in and of itself is not a reliable way
to
authoritatively attribute
one author’s work as that of another. For that to occur one
must have
external
evidence:
- a
contemporary who knew the author’s true
identity,
- a
near contemporary who had knowledge of the
author,
- a
pseudonym the author was known to have used,
and/or
- a
distinguishing mark that identifies a work as
being that of a particular author.
In
the
case of GHP
no such external evidence exists, and according to Furbank
and Owens,
there are
numerous examples of such evidence to argue against Moore’s
conclusion
that
Defoe was Johnson. For example, Johnson’s account of Henry
Avery’s life
differs
significantly in tone and fact from that of Defoe’s The
King of Pirates – one of the works Moore used to
substantiate
his claim. As for the Gow evidence, Furbank and Owens
pointed out that
a) Johnson
cited information from the pamphlet without acknowledging
its source;
b) it not
only contained information not found in the original, but
also included
a
crucial detail for Gow’s decision to sail to Orkney; and c)
a few items
actually
contradict what’s contained in the pamphlet.
In Defoe’s The Four
Years’ Voyages of Capt. George Roberts, the pirate Loe
is seen as a
“model
of gentlemanliness and goodwill, plying the captive Captain
Roberts
with wine
and holding late-night conversations with him ‘concerning Church
and State, as also
about Trade’.” (Furbank, 1988)
Johnson, on the other hand, describes Low as “a Terror” and
“a base
cowardly
Villain.” Contrary to Defoe’s description of a gentleman,
Johnson
writes:
But
after taking two Whale-Boats near Rhode Island, he
caused one of the Masters’ Bodies to be ripp’d up, and
his
Intrails to be taken out; and cut off the Ears of the
other, and made
him eat
them himself with Pepper and Salt . . . . (Defoe,
334)
The other difference is the two authors didn’t spell Edward
“Ned” Low’s name the same way.
To further complicate matters, some of Defoe’s works that
Moore
compared Johnson to weren’t proven to have been written by
Defoe – Gow, being one of them. In using Gow as
evidence of the same authorship,
Moore admitted that only one copy of the original pamphlet
existed “and
exact
reprints of it are not at all common . . . .” For his
purposes he cited
from
“accessible modern texts” rather than the original. (Defoe,
165)
Moore found the two men used the same phrases in GHP
and The King of the Pirates, another
indicator that
the two were the
same author. Examples of these included de
facto, de jure, nor do I find,
and in fine. The problem with such comparisons is these were
commonplace
phrases. One commentator wrote:
Such
an unsystematic use of parallels does not even approach
serious
scholarship. .
. Not only did Mr. Moore fail to distinguish between
what is peculiarly
Defoean
and what is merely conventional in contemporary
narrative style and
idiom; he
also drew for his parallels upon works which have been
since shown to
be the
work of others. (Furbanks, 108)
Conclusion
Did Daniel
Defoe
use the alias Captain Charles Johnson to
publish A General History of the
Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates?
The simple
truth is no
one knows. There is no incontrovertible proof to say he did.
“Even
sophisticated computer analyses of his ‘peculiar’ style have
been found
to be
generally inconclusive.” (Defoe, 711)
That Defoe used pseudonyms isn’t in question, and even
during his lifetime, publications were erroneously
attributed to him.
He wrote:
And
this is to have every Libel, every Pamphlet, be it ever
so foolish, so
malicious, so unmannerly, or so dangerous, be laid at my
Door, and be
call’d
publickly by my Name. It has been in vain for me to
struggle with this
Injury;
It has been in vain for me to protest, to declare
solemnly, nay, if I
would
have sworn that I had no hand in such a Book or Paper,
never saw it,
never read
it, and the like, it was the same thing.
My
Name has been hackney’d about the Street by the Hawkers,
and about the
Coffee-Houses by the Politicians, at such a rate, as no
Patience could
bear.
One Man will swear to the style; another to this or that
Expression;
another to
the way of Printing; and all so positive, that it is no
purpose to
oppose it.
(Defoe, 709)
What cannot be questioned is that GHP
influenced our modern concept of pirates and served as
inspiration to other writers, such as Sir Walter
Scott, Robert
Louis Stevenson, J.
M. Barrie, and Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. Had the book never been published our
knowledge of these villains would be greatly diminished.
Each
reader must
decide whether the two authors are the same person. For
me, I believe
Johnson (whoever
he may have been) actually wrote this important source on
historical
pirates
and will continue to do so until someone can show beyond
any doubt
otherwise.
Notes:
1. The age of the naval
Johnson in 1682 is unknown. Gosse
put forth the supposition that if he was twenty-six at
that time, he
would have
been sixty-eight when GHP was
published.
2. Avery, also spelled Every, captured
the Gang-i-Sawai
and disappeared from the
historical record a rich man, although some of his crew
were captured
and
punished.
3.
Selkirk was a
buccaneer/privateer who ended up marooned on Juan
Fernandez Island for
more
than four years before Woodes Rogers’ expedition rescued
him.
4.
Spelling variations play little importance in
writings of the period because English has yet to be
standardized.
For more information, I recommend these resources:
Pirates
and Privateers