Project Gutenberg's The Pirate and The Three Cutters, by Frederick Marryat

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Title: The Pirate and The Three Cutters

Author: Frederick Marryat

Illustrator: Edmund J. Sullivan

Release Date: July 2, 2009 [EBook #29291]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PIRATE

AND

THE THREE CUTTERS

[Illustration: Publishers mark]

[Illustration: _Cain._]

THE PIRATE

AND

THE THREE CUTTERS

BY

CAPTAIN MARRYAT

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDMUND J. SULLIVAN
AND AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID HANNAY

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1897

_All rights reserved_

INTRODUCTION

Among the few subjects which are still left at the disposal of the
duly-gifted writer of romance is the Pirate. Not but that many have
written of pirates. Defoe, after preparing the ground by a pamphlet
story on the historic Captain Avery, wrote _The Life, Adventures, and
Piracies of Captain Singleton_. Sir Walter Scott made use in somewhat
the same fashion of the equally historic Gow--that is to say, his pirate
bears about the same relation to the marauder who was suppressed by
James Laing, that Captain Singleton does to Captain Avery. Michael Scott
had much to say of pirates, and he had heard much of them during his
life in the West Indies, for they were then making their last fight
against law and order. The pirate could not escape the eye of Mr. R. L.
Stevenson, and accordingly we have an episode of pirates in the episode
of the _Master of Ballantrae_. Balsac, too, wrote _Argow le Pirate_
among the stories which belong to the years when he was exhausting all
the ways in which a novel ought not to be written. Also the pirate is a
commonplace in boys' books. Yet for as much as he figures in stories for
old and young, it may be modestly maintained that nobody has ever yet
done him quite right.

Defoe's Captain Singleton is a harmless, thrifty, and ever moral pirate,
of whom it is impossible to disa