Pirates and Prosthetics: Manly Messages for Managing Limb Loss in Victorian and Edwardian Adventure Narratives

Abstract

Many of us associate pirates with prosthetic body parts. From wooden legs to hook hands, prostheses have frequently appeared in imaginative representations of pirates, such as Captain Hook from J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan, Captain Barbosa and Ragetti from the Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–11) film series, the badges of the sports teams the Cornish Pirates and Pittsburgh Pirates, and the products and branding of the Woodenhand Brewery in Truro, Cornwall. Yet this prevalent association has not always existed. Its literary history is, in fact, curious. What we might consider the great age of pirate stories (c. 1858–1904) exhibits relatively few prosthesis-using characters, aside, of course, from one obvious example: Captain Hook. What we do, however, see in the fiction from this period, and what we today unthinkingly assume are wooden leg users, are a number of pirates who persevere with their deplorable duties in spite of disability.

The second quotation above, from Robert Michael Ballantyne's 1883 novel The Madman and the Pirate, exposes a rare example of a fictional pirate from this period who does use wooden legs – though it should be noted that this character, Captain Rosco, only loses his legs and begins wearing prosthetic replacements after his piratical career has ended.