Will the Real Captain Hook Please Stand Up?
An Examination of the Historical Figures Who Inspired One of Literature’s Most Enduring Villains
Illustration of Captain Hook and Peter Pan by F.D. Bedford featured in the First Edition of the Novel
Recently, I stumbled upon a post that has been going around that made a rather intriguing connection between Peter Pan’s Captain Hook and Treasure Island’s Israel Hands. The author makes the claim that Hook, who was said to be Blackbeard’s bosun and the only man Barbecue feared, may, in fact, be Israel Hands reborn under a new name. Per the original post:
“Barbecue” is Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Jas. is short for James, but in “Captain Hook at Eton,” he's also called Jacobus. The biblical figure Jacob was renamed Israel.
Blackbeard’s historical boatswain, and also a character in Treasure Island, was Israel Hands.
I’m just saying, if I got a hand chopped off and my last name was Hands... I might want to change it.
It’s a postulation I had never heard put forth and a tantalizing one at that. However, while it is well-known that Barrie greatly respected and exchanged letters with Robert Louis Stevenson, on closer examination, the theory doesn’t appear to hold up. Stevenson’s fictional version of Hands is an ill-spoken, uneducated drunkard—a far cry from the elegant Etonian that is James Hook, even if he had somehow managed to survive a gunshot wound (and apparent subsequent drowning) at the end of Stevenson’s narrative. As for the historical Israel Hands, he was not Blackbeard’s bosun at the time of the infamous pirate’s capture—that title belonged to Garrat Gibbens—but did play a vital role in Teach’s fleet and was made captain of The Adventure after Blackbeard deposed the former captain, David Herriot, and forced him to join the crew. Little else is known about Hands except that he was permanently disabled by a gunshot wound to the leg (from Blackbeard himself) and as a result, was not present at the final showdown off the coast of North Carolina that cost the infamous pirate his life. Instead, Hands was offered a pardon and probably lived out the remainder of his days as a beggar on the streets of London.
So, if Hands wasn’t the primary inspiration for Hook, who else might we consider in our search for the man behind the myth? There has been much speculation over the years by both Barrie scholars and casual fans, and though we will likely never definitively pin down one single historical figure as the inspiration for James Hook, there are several possible contenders. Here, I will examine the five I consider most plausible.
1. Stede Bonnet, “The Gentleman Pirate”
If Barrie knew of Blackbeard and Israel Hands, it is likely that he also knew of Stede Bonnet. Most of what we know about Blackbeard, Bonnet, and their contemporaries comes from the 1724 work A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson (likely a pen name).
Stede Bonnet was born to English parents on the island of Barbados and grew up with a pretty standard, normal life for a gentleman of the time, though he did suffer the loss of both parents and a guardian at a fairly young age. He was a wealthy landowner who wore stylish clothes, had a liberal education, and even served as a major in the British army at one point. Life was good. Then, one day, seemingly out of the blue, he decided to turn pirate. Some speculate that he had a sort of mental break—possibly related to the loss of a child—while others think he just got bored of domestic life with his wife and had what we might call today a “midlife crisis.” Whatever the case may be, Bonnet ended up purchasing a vessel which he named the Revenge and hiring on a crew. The only problem was…he knew absolutely nothing about sailing. It didn’t take long for the crew to figure this out and become rather discontent with their choice of captain. Bonnet, aware of his limits, decided to partner up with Blackbeard when the opportunity arose, but Blackbeard quickly became frustrated with Bonnet’s ineptitude and more or less ended up holding him hostage on his personal ship and placing one of his own men in charge of the Revenge. Bonnet was treated well on Blackbeard’s ship but didn’t do much actual pirating while aboard. According to one Captain Codd who was attacked by Blackbeard’s fleet, Bonnet “walks about in his morning gown, and then to his books, of which he has a good library on board.” He was prone to bouts of melancholy during this time and was known to have expressed regret at turning pirate. When he was eventually offered a pardon and allowed to work as a legalized privateer, Bonnet changed his own name to Captain Thomas and renamed his ship the Royal James. (Bonnet may have been a Jacobite, as many pirates were—more on the Jacobites later.) However, his new attitude about piracy didn’t last long and he eventually ended up back in his old ways. Bonnet was eventually captured by the authorities off the coast of North Carolina after a fight in which he had threatened to blow up his entire ship rather than surrender…but the crew overruled him and raised the white flag. Bonnet was hanged for his crimes in Charleston, South Carolina, in December of 1718.
Christopher Newport was an English privateer during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I who worked alongside men like Sir Francis Drake during the Anglo-Spanish War. It was said that he led more attacks against the Spanish than any other English privateer. In one battle off the coast of Cuba, Newport lost his right hand and later replaced it with a hook. Newport brought back countless treasures and curiosities from the Caribbean, including a pair of baby crocodiles which he presented to King James I in 1605. A few years later, Newport would go on to captain the Susan Constant—the largest of the ships owned by the Virginia Company—and helped establish Jamestown in 1607 along with John Smith and others.
3. Charles II’s Illegitimate Son or Nephew
In Barrie’s novel, Hook is said to have borne a striking resemblance to Charles II. Add to that the fact that Hook was educated at Eton (a boys’ school often attended by the social elite, including royalty) and that Barrie notes, “to reveal who he truly was would even at this date set the country in a blaze,” and it’s possible to conclude that Hook may have, in fact, been a member of the royal Stuart family. What gives this theory even more credence is the fact that Hook tells the Darlings that if they join his crew, “You would have to swear, ‘Down with King George.’” This is particularly interesting because of the potential double meaning: Hook could be either referring to King George V of the Darlings’ time period or King George I of the House of Hanover who ruled during the early 1700s (the time of Blackbeard and the height of the Golden Age of Piracy) and took over the throne from the Stuart line due to some Catholic/Protestant controversy. There were multiple James’ in the Stuart line, so hang tight and pay close attention because it’s about to get confusing. There are two relatives of King Charles II, in particular, who I think might make good candidates for Hook.
James Scott, Duke of Monmouth
When Charles II was still a teenager, he and one of his mistresses named Lucy Walter had a son. James was born in the Netherlands in 1649 and closely resembled Barrie’s Hook in both appearance and personality, though his education was a bit spotty compared to that of other noblemen. He was a military officer who was known to be vain and violent-tempered. Once, he ran a man through for a minor insult but his ties to the royal family got him pardoned. Charles had no legitimate children and as his oldest son, James was brought up to believe that he should be the rightful heir to the throne. “Better for Hook, perhaps, if he had had less ambition.” Better, too, for James Scott if he had been less ambitious. James, a Protestant, led an unsuccessful attempt to take over the throne from his Catholic uncle (also named James) in 1685 and was ultimately beheaded for it. It was a gruesomely memorable affair; the executioner did a botched job, and it took several whacks for James’ head to finally come off.
James Francis Edward Stuart, “The Old Pretender”
The other James who might make a good candidate for Hook is James Francis Edward Stuart, cousin to James Scott and son of King James II (who had James Scott beheaded) by his second wife. James Stuart, a staunch Catholic, had two Protestant half-sisters, Mary and Anne. Mary, along with her husband, William of Orange, first took the throne from James II. When they both died without producing an heir, Anne was considered the next in line. Anne, too, died childless and when she passed, the throne went to her second cousin and closest Protestant relative, George of the House of Hanover. James Stuart hated George for taking what he felt was rightfully his place as king and was quoted as saying of George, “we have beheld a foreign family, aliens to our country, distant in blood, and strangers even to our language, ascend the throne.” He led an uprising known as the Jacobite Rebellion in 1715 in an attempt to gain control of the monarchy but was unsuccessful. Ultimately, this James lived out his days in exile in Rome, prone to fits of melancholy and eventually passing away in his 70s from a “lingering illness.”
While all authors inevitably put a bit of themselves into their characters, it is unusual for a writer to give a main character his own first name. And James Barrie was, in many ways, like his character James Hook. When Barrie was still a young boy, his older brother David was fatally injured in an ice-skating incident right before his 14th birthday. The boys’ mother was said to have made a comment about how David would remain a little boy forever, now—always frozen in her memory at age 13. Barrie’s mother adored David, and his loss hit her extremely hard. She became more or less bedridden from her deep depression, and the only thing Barrie could do that seemed to make her happy was to dress up in his older brother’s clothes and pretend to be David instead of James. James was not enough, it seemed. It’s likely Barrie held both some reverential awe and some resentment for this perfect eternal youth of a brother, not unlike Hook’s feelings toward Pan. Much later on in his life, when acting out stories with the Llewelyn-Davies boys that would become the inspiration for Peter Pan, Barrie would occasionally take on the role of the pirate, “Captain Swarthy,” a sort of precursor to Hook. Barrie even shared in Hook’s disability. Though he still had both hands, Barrie frequently suffered from severe writers’ cramp and had to learn to write with his left hand when his right hand troubled him too much. Indeed, his play Mary Rose was written entirely in his non-dominant hand.
This name won’t likely be readily familiar to most people, but Headmaster Wilkinson (sometimes given the derogatory nickname “Milky” by his students) is one of the few people we can definitively say influenced Barrie in his creation of Hook. Mr. Wilkinson ran a boys’ preparatory school in Orme Square near Kensington Gardens that George Llewelyn-Davies attended. He was a strict man described as having a long, pointed nose and golden mustache and who didn’t seem to care much for children. He often referred to his students as “blithering little fools.” Wilkinson first shows up as Pilkington in Barrie’s precursor to Peter Pan, The Little White Bird.
He may be conceived as one who, baiting his hook with real knickerbockers, fishes all day in the Gardens, which are to him but a pool swarming with small fry.
Abhorred shade! I know not what manner of man thou art in the flesh, sir, but figure thee bearded and blackavised, and of a lean tortuous habit of body, that moves ever with a swish. Every morning, I swear, thou readest avidly the list of male births in thy paper, and then are thy hands rubbed gloatingly the one upon the other. ‘Tis fear of thee and thy gown and thy cane, which are part of thee, that makes the fairies to hide by day; wert thou to linger but once among their haunts between the hours of Lock-out and Open Gates there would be left not one single gentle place in all the Gardens. The little people would flit. How much wiser they than the small boys who swim glamoured to thy crafty hook. Thou devastator of the Gardens, I know thee, Pilkington.
The similarities to Barrie’s later character of Hook are uncanny, particularly when one considers Barrie’s early draft of the play with alternate ending in which Hook survives the initial crocodile attack and returns to England in the guise of a schoolmaster.
J.M. Barrie’s notorious pirate character, Captain James Hook, though likely not based upon one single historical figure, can have his origins traced back to many real men. From actual pirates and privateers to British royalty to J.M. Barrie himself and a haughty schoolmaster he knew, Hook is a complex villain composed of sometimes seemingly disparate parts of complex men. This grounding in reality allows us to peel back the layers of lace and brocade to reveal the very human heart of James Hook.
For more information on some of the historical figures mentioned, I recommend checking out the following books:
A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson
Why We Love Pirates by Rebecca Simon
Pirates of the Southern Coast by Sandra MacLean Clunies and Bruce Roberts
Captain Christopher Newport: Admiral of Virginia by A. Bryant Nichols Jr.
The Royal Stuarts by Allan Massie
J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys by Andrew Birkin
