Captain Charles Johnson was the British author of the 1724 book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, whose identity remains a mystery. No record exists of a captain by this name, and "Captain Charles Johnson" is generally considered a pen name for one of London's writer-publishers. Some scholars have suggested that the author was actually Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed.

A prime source for the biographies of many well known pirates of the era, Johnson gave an almost mythical status to the more colourful characters, and it is likely that the author used considerable artistic licence in their accounts of pirate conversations.

Character of the author

Johnson's identity is unknown, but they demonstrate a knowledge of the sailor's speech and life, suggesting that they could have been an actual sea captain. They could also have been a professional writer using a pseudonym who was well versed in the sea. If this is true, the name may have been chosen to reflect playwright Charles Johnson, who had a play called The Successful Pyrate performed in 1712. The play addressed the career of Henry Every, and it had been something of a scandal for seeming to praise a criminal. Following the book, many biographies and catalogs of criminals were published, including catalogs of highwaymen and prostitutes. This theory suggests that the "Charles Johnson" of the pirate catalog was merely taking part in a burgeoning industry in criminal biography.

Identity of author

The author has remained unknown in spite of numerous attempts by historians to discover his identity. There has been no record found of anyone with the name Charles Johnson serving as a captain in any capacity, save forty-two years before the publication of A General History. Some have suggested that the "Captain" was in fact a common pirate, but again, there is no record of this man.

Daniel Defoe

thumb|Daniel Defoe 1706

In 1932, literary scholar and writer John Robert Moore posited that Daniel Defoe be acknowledged the author of A General History.

Furbank and Owens' arguments against Defoe's authorship of A General History address the parallels that are drawn to other works of the time (often also attributed to Defoe) and the logical fallacies that are necessary to subscribe to such a large, diverse catalog. Many of the ideas and phrases that Moore points to as parallels, and therefore as proof of Defoe's continuity in his works, were commonplace in the eighteenth century. According to Furbank and Owens, Moore's attribution of A General History to Defoe was based on no external evidence and only those few circumstantial parallels.

Nathaniel Mist

The author could have been publisher Nathaniel Mist (or somebody working for him). Woodard considers Mist "far more likely" than Defoe, citing Bialuschewski's 2004 paper Daniel Defoe, Nathaniel Mist, and the "General History of the Pyrates". Specifically, Woodard's reasoning includes that Mist was a former sailor familiar with the West Indies, that he was a journalist and a publisher who lived near to and had a working relationship with Charles Rivington (the first publisher of record of A General History), that Mist was the man in whose name the book was registered at Her Majesty's Stationery Office, and Mist's Jacobitism (which perhaps gave him reason to write somewhat sympathetically about some of the pirates, as in A General History). emphasized the fact that the catalogue included stories of "the remarkable ACTIONS and ADVENTURES of the two Female Pyrates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny" A second edition came out within a few months, vastly enlarged and most likely assembled from writings by other authors. German and Dutch translations were published in 1725. These German- and Dutch-language versions greatly played up the salaciousness of the accounts of "Amazon" pirates.

A General History of the Pyrates continues to be reprinted in many different editions, often with additional commentary, sometimes published under Charles Johnson's name and sometimes under Daniel Defoe's name. Nova Scotian author William Gilkerson published the children's novel Pirates Passage (Trumpeter Books, 2006) which was inspired by the life and work of Charles Johnson, reissued as The Brotherhood of Pirates.

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Charles Johnson (1724), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates