Black Sails: 10 Pirates Who Should Appear In Season 2

7. James Hook

Real or storybook? Storybook Who is he? The nemesis of Peter Pan in the J.M. Barrie play of the same name, Captain Hook occupies a considerably more fantastical environment than either the historical pirates of Black Sails or Robert Louis Stevenson's well researched, relatively realistic world of Treasure Island. The Eton educated captain of the Jolly Roger, Hook unfortunately lived up to his name when attaching an iron hook as a prosthetic after his hand was bitten off by a crocodile. This creature still both pursues and haunts him, while Hook conducts a vendetta against Pan and his world of eternal children in Neverland. The character was originally written to be played by the uncle of Pan's inspiration Peter Llewelyn Davies, Gerald Du Maurier (Du Maurier's daughter, Rebecca author Daphne, also enjoyed a good pirate yarn and penned Frenchman's Creek because of it), and has entertained generations of children since in the guise of many other actors. Where would he fit into Black Sails? Hook's world of fairies and mermaids would obviously need a bit of tweaking to fit into the largely realistic Black Sails, but that doesn't mean there's no place for Hook himself, perhaps as a young man who loses his grip on reality on losing his hand to a savage creature. Like Edward England there is at least a canonical source for Hook's relation to both the Treasure Island pirates and the real world ones. Barrie and Stevenson were part of the same literary set and the playwright couldn't resist a reference to his friend's most famous creation, hence Hook is described as the only man feared by Barbecue (a nickname for Silver) as well as having been Blackbeard's bo'sun. The complicated rights issues around Peter Pan probably are as much of a stumbling block to this happening as the relative realism of the story worlds involved, but who wouldn't want to see the addition of the only fictional pirate more famous than John Silver?