FOREWORD

PIRATES, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea wolves
who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in present-day conceptions
in great degree as drawn by the pen and pencil of Howard Pyle.

Pyle, artist-author, living in the latter half of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth, had the fine faculty of
transposing himself into any chosen period of history and making
its people flesh and blood again--not just historical puppets. His
characters were sketched with both words and picture; with both words
and picture he ranks as a master, with a rich personality which makes
his work individual and attractive in either medium.

He was one of the founders of present-day American illustration, and his
pupils and grand-pupils pervade that field to-day. While he bore no
such important part in the world of letters, his stories are modern in
treatment, and yet widely read. His range included historical treatises
concerning his favorite Pirates (Quaker though he was); fiction, with
the same Pirates as principals; Americanized version of Old World fairy
tales; boy stories of the Middle Ages, still best sellers to growing
lads; stories of the occult, such as In Tenebras and To the Soil of the
Earth, which, if newly published, would be hailed as contributions to
our latest cult.

In all these fields Pyle's work may be equaled, surpassed, save in one.
It is improbable that anyone else will ever bring his combination of
interest and talent to the depiction of these old-time Pirates, any more
than there could be a second Remington to paint the now extinct Indians