ABSTRACT
Late eighteenth-century accounts of the pirate, in newspapers and fiction alike, echo Captain Johnson's widely published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. It is the General History that gives us our (semi-)factual accounts of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Captains Avery and Kidd, and the famous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read; even now, nearly 300 years after its publication, Captain Johnson is the source for nearly all our pirate tales. The General History is an explicit act of British nation building. This "war against the pirates" was a peculiar kind of war, fought against a hazily defined group of people who were without nation or government and only loosely identified with one another. The question for Byron, and also for us, is what conditions can produce or enable this bottom-up building of government and society.
