Nathaniel Mist

Nathaniel Mist ran the most prosecuted newspaper in London and may have written the book that invented the pirate. He had been a sailor in the West Indies before he set up as a printer, and from 1716 published a weekly - Mist's Weekly Journal, later Fog's - that was openly Jacobite at a time when that was a hanging matter. He was prosecuted repeatedly, pilloried, imprisoned more than once, and eventually fled to France in 1728 after an issue that compared George II to a tyrant of Persia transparently enough for everyone to follow. His printers went to gaol for him. A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates appeared in 1724 under the name Captain Charles Johnson, which matches no known person. It is the source of nearly everything popularly believed about piracy: Blackbeard's smoking beard, the black flag as a standard rather than an improvisation, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and the articles that pirate crews were said to sign. The book was attributed to Daniel Defoe for most of the twentieth century, and that attribution was demolished by Furbank and Owens in 1988 without a replacement being agreed. Mist is the leading suggestion, on the grounds that he printed it, that he had been to sea himself, and that the book's politics are his - it is notably sympathetic to men who reject a government they consider illegitimate. The case is circumstantial and unproven. He died in 1737, still an exile's printer, and whoever wrote the book had access to trial transcripts and to seamen and mixed both with invention.

• Nationality: English
• Roles: writer