Is there not a profitable lesson to be learned in the history of such a human extreme of evil—all the more wicked from being the rebound from civilization?
Thus, in the present volume, it has been deemed best to add as a sequel to the redoubtable narrative of the honest Dutchman Esquemeling, the history, first of Captain Kid—who stood upon a sort of middle ground between the buccaneers and the marooners proper—and then the story of the lives of Black-beard, Roberts, and Avery: roaring, ranting, raving pirates per se.
As a rule it is generally difficult to find any actual data, any tangible history of the popular villain-hero. Now and then the curious collector of such ephemeral trifles gathers together a few chap-book histories of such, but as a rule any positive material passes quickly away and is lost in the oblivion of past things. Their deeds and actions are usually of small moment in the policy of nations, and it is only in popular romance and fiction that their name and fame is embalmed and preserved. But in the case of Kid and of Black-beard, however, and the more famous pirates and notorious rogues of their generation—both land-thieves and water-thieves, land-rats and water-rats—a Pliny has arisen, who has handed down their names and the history of their deeds to the present time—Captain Charles Johnson, who, in the earlier half of the eighteenth century collected and edited numberless chap-book histories of famous pirates and highwaymen.
As in the case of “The History of the Buccaneers,” Johnson’s works have gone through numberless editions, so that if by the quantity of books we measure the popular regard, Black-beard and Kid and Avery with their land-types—Duval, Shepherd, and Jonathan Wild—have a very dear place in the hearts of the people.
The first of these collected histories appeared under place and date, London, 1724, 8vo. It was entitled, “General History of the Pyrates of the New Providence,” &c., and appeared again in a second edition of two volumes in 1727. In this history, most quaint and rare, appear the lives both of Black-beard and Kid, and it is now numbered among the more interesting and curious of Americana.
In 1734 was published in folio form “The History of Highwaymen and Pirates,” &c.; but although the history of Black-beard appears in this edition, that of Captain Kid is, for some reason, omitted. In 1742 followed a second edition of this same history, printed from the original plates. Both this and the first edition (some of the copies of which bear the date 1736) are now grown quite rare and curious, being not often met with outside the libraries of the book-collector. From them so numerous a progeny had sprung that, as in the case of “The History of the Buccaneers,” it is almost an impossible task to follow and particularize them. One of the more notable reprints appeared in 1839, another with additions by C. Whitehead in 1840, and again in 1853. These are but a few of a numerous tribe of the grand family in which these popular heroes act their life under the gaze of our far-away time.
To them the reader must turn if he would seek further in the dark passages of such lives as are here presented in the most notorious examples, perhaps, of all.
HOWARD PYLE.
Wilmington, Delaware,
November, 1890.