Of Captain Mission

The book was an immediate bestseller, and an expanded edition with Volume 2 was published in 1726. Written when many of the pirates described were still roaming the sea, the stories included vivid descriptions of the famous rogues, Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, and Bartholomew Roberts, along with female pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. In much the same manner and at the same time that John Gay was satirizing Walpole's government in The Beggar's Opera, Defoe began to use his pirates as a commentary on the injustice and hypocrisy of contemporary English society. Among Defoe's gallery of pirates are Captain White, who refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to the corruption of government under Walpole. But the fictional Captain Misson, the founder of a communist utopia, is by far the most original of these creations.