Rereading Marcel Schwob’s La Cité Dormante the other day put in mind a host of pirate stories and novels I’d loved as a kid, many of which my parents or grandparents read to me. Here’s what I can recall:
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
The Master of Ballantrae (Stevenson)
The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (Defoe)
A General History of the Pyrates (Defoe)
The Pirate (Walter Scott) – My grandfather read me this one when we visited most weekends but it was so long and I’d often fall asleep so soon into it that I have only the wispiest sense of the plot.
The Red Rover (Fennimore Cooper)
The Coral Island (Ballantyne)
Swallows and Amazons (Ransome)
The Book of Pirates (Howard Pyle)
The Ghost Pirates (William Hope Hodgson)
Tales of Pirates and Blue Waters (Conan Doyle)
The Sea Hawk (Sabatini)
Captain Blood (Sabatini)
The Black Swan (Sabatini)
(And for all the Sabatini books the movies are even more recommended)
A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes)
And the final entries, by Pierre Mac Orlan, are confusing. Of the three I remember (which his wiki page tells me must have been À bord de L’Étoile Matutine, Les Clients du Bon Chien jaune, and L’Ancre de miséricorde) only the first has been translated (as On Board the Morning Star) so someone had to have read the other two to me. I’ve bought a copy of Les Clients du Bon Chien jaune because I remember the terrifying at the time image of pirates dressed as skeletons and hunched in the rigging as they approach their prey with an eerie flute playing in accompaniment.
Extracts 