Charles Johnson

Charles Johnson is a name on a title page, and almost everything the world thinks it knows about pirates comes from the book beneath it. A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates appeared in London in 1724, went through four editions in three years, and is the source for Blackbeard's lit fuses and his last fight, for Bartholomew Roberts's articles and his taste in clothes, for Calico Jack, and above all for Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who exist in almost no other record. The black flag with a skull, the marooning, the elected captain and the written articles of the company all reach popular culture through this one volume and through Stevenson and the films that read it. Nobody knows who wrote it. The publisher's records are gone. For most of the twentieth century the standard attribution, made by John Robert Moore in 1932, was to Daniel Defoe, and it was printed under Defoe's name in many editions; that attribution was demolished by Furbank and Owens in 1988 and is now generally rejected without a replacement candidate. Suggestions have included the publisher Nathaniel Mist, a former sailor himself. What is clear is that whoever wrote it had access to trial transcripts, newspapers and probably to seamen, and mixed that material with invention: the chapters on Captain Misson and his egalitarian republic of Libertalia are not history at all. Separating the two has occupied historians ever since. A second volume followed in 1728 with material that is markedly less reliable. The book was translated into Dutch, French and German within a decade. Modern editions generally print it under Johnson's name and say plainly that the name is unidentified, which is the honest course.

• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer