Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates

Howard Pyle spent years writing and illustrating pirates for the Harper’s magazines, and after his death Merle Johnson gathered the results into this 1921 collection. It mixes straight history with invented yarns, so essays on Henry Morgan sacking Panama and on Blackbeard’s last fight sit beside stories of buried treasure, marooned sailors and ghosts left behind to guard the loot. Pyle’s own drawings run through the book, and they are largely responsible for the pirate everyone now pictures: the sash, the earring, the cutlass, the plank. He was writing for boys and never wrote down to them, so the cruelty of the Spanish Main is left where it belongs. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.