Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

The Pirate Chief in Salgari, Stevenson, and Calvino

The Pirate Chief in Salgari, Stevenson, and Calvino               Piracy entered modern Western prose narrative in the seventeenth century with the autobiographer Alexander Exquemelin, and in the eighteenth century with the novelist and biographer Daniel Defoe.1 But arguably the two most influential creators of fictional pirates worked at the end of the nineteenth century, presenting their singular inventions to the public almost simultaneously between  and : they were Robert Louis Stevenson in Britain and Emilio Salgari in Italy; the first book edition of Treasure Island in  coincided with the beginning of Salgari’s newspaper serial, La Tigre della Malesia (The Tiger of Malaysia), which in volume form would be rechristened Le Tigri di Mompracem (The Tigers of Mompracem ).2 Both novels unleashed a long history of imitation, parody, and intertextuality, and—in Salgari’s case—a lifelong series of sequels; each presented the figure of an extraordinary leader of pirates, destined to become part of his nation’s cultural mythology. Salgari, the Italian past master of adventure, would later, in , create a second piratical superhero in Il Corsaro Nero (The Black Corsair), with similarly seminal results. While the Black Corsair is a familiar type (indeed he is the epitome of the aristocratic European pirate), Salgari’s first pirate prince (created when the author was only twenty-one) is a markedly original creation, a character even more unexpected than Long John Silver, and one who appears to have nothing in common with him except—in the broadest terms—piracy. On the other hand, Salgari’s later pirate, the funereal and noble freebooter, and RLS’s silver-tongued ruffian do have one thing, or perhaps two, in  common. They both conduct their depredations in the general region of the Caribbean (or Spanish Main), the “Corsaro Nero” at the end of the seventeenth century and Silver in the eighteenth; originating in the lands of their first readers, both these Europeans voyage across the globe and are of no fixed abode, yet each has a special connection with a particular islet.3 By contrast, Salgari’s first pirate, Sandokan, was a Borneo sultan’s son dispossessed by British colonial activity, who, with his followers, has taken to the life of the exiled offshore sea-marauder, seeking vengeance and the restitution of his throne and territory. Though piracy was historically endemic there, indeed more so than in the West Indies since it was an indigenous way of life, in terms of the Western cultural mythology of pirates, Sandokan’s archipelago, the East Indies, was and still is the stranger and more exotic location. Set in the era of the White Rajahs of Sarawak, this was recent, almost topical, piracy: the action of the first novel opens with the date .4 Like Silver and the later Black Corsair, Sandokan, too, has a focal islet, Mompracem, off the northwestern coast of Borneo, like Stevenson’s an invented island in a region where many abound. However, the island was not a historical necessity for Sandokan’s way of life any more than it was for Silver’s trade, because the Dayak pirates of Borneo were more often than not river pirates, living in jungle villages inland: the pirate island in both cases is a cultural construct that links the pirate tradition back to Defoe’s other Great Idea, the castaway (consciously evoked by Stevenson in the figure of Ben Gunn, and by Salgari in a nonpiratical, later novel of the East Indies, I Robinson italiani, The Italian Crusoes).5 In each case, the writer makes the concept of the island integral to the character and role of the pirate chief: their mastery of their island’s advantages and dangers is ultimately compromised, even negated, by near-failure; throughout, the threat to this mastery comes not only from other humans but from the natural world, represented in the microcosm of the islands and their surrounding seas. The indissoluble link between pirate chief and island, and the ultimately superior power of the island, are implied by the changes of title adopted by both authors: the preliminary title identifying the central character (“The Sea Cook,” “The Tiger of Malaysia”) gives way to the definitive title emphasizing the totemic place (Treasure Island, The Tigers of Mompracem).6 Treasure Island and Mompracem, then, rather than representing historical pseudoreality, are symbolic spatial expressions of isolation, unreliable refuge, confinement, embattlement, danger, and fear without end because the means of escape from adversity may easily be lost. The narrative Lucas: Pirate Chief...