The Lady and the Pirate

Emerson Hough published this comic romance in 1913, and its best joke is that the pirate steals his own boat. The narrator is a retired lawyer with money, a trout stream and no particular reason to get up in the morning. Two runaways interrupt his fishing: Jimmy Henderson and John Saunders, aboard a lake boat they have repainted with a skull and crossbones and renamed the Sea Rover, having styled themselves L’Olonnois and Jean Lafitte. He signs on as Black Bart. Then the game acquires a point. His yacht, the Belle Helène, is under charter to Cal Davidson, who is cruising the Mississippi with Jimmy’s aunt Helena Emory aboard and marriage in mind. So the pirates board her. The run carries them past New Orleans into the Gulf and a shipwreck, the boys observing pirate etiquette throughout.