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Twelve year-old Jim Hawkins lives with his widowed mother who struggles to run the Admiral Anson Inn, which has fallen on hard times that are made all the more difficult when the Moehners, a wealthy and influential local family, decide they want to buy up the inn and redevelop it as part of a new tourist resort. Between overdue bills and the constant harassment of municipal and provincial inspectors, Jim and his mother wonder whether they can hold onto the inn over the lean months of winter, or whether Roy Moehner will foreclose on the mortgage and steal the inn out from under them. Jim is further harassed by the Moehner boys in his grade eight class, and terrorized by Grendel, a vicious dog owned by Klaus Moehner.
Then Captain Charles Johnson blows around Grey Rocks Point and into the harbour just ahead of a sou’wester aboard his old gaff rig sailboat, the Merry Adventure. Unable to complete repairs to his boat and set sail again before the winter gales begin, Captain Johnson rents a room in the inn and settles into the Hawkins family and the town of Grey Rocks. He calls himself a sailor and an historian, and travels on a British passport, but the Captain is otherwise vague about himself and his past. It is only on the subject of pirates that Captain Johnson becomes talkative, and when Jim approaches him for information, he agrees to help the boy with his essay on pirates.
So begin Captain Johnson’s lectures about the history of pirates, beginning with the cavemen, and working through the Viking invasions, the Irish pirate queen, Granuaile, privateers, and buccaneers. He seems to have read every book ever published on the subject of pirates, and possesses many pirate artefacts, which he shares with Jim, but he clearly believes that the best book about pirates in one entitled A General History Of the Robberies and Murders Of the Most Notorious Pirates, published in 1724 and written, oddly enough, by one Charles Johnson. Captain Johnson is a wonderful storyteller. As he instructs Jim about pirates, he often falls into a story, suddenly shifting from the past tense into the present, and drawing Jim into the tale until the boy can see and hear and smell and taste and touch the objects and events described to him.
As his friendship with Jim Hawkins grows, the Captain learns about the many sly attacks against the Hawkins family engineered by the Moehners, and secretly helps Jim undertake some of his own counter measures. His willingness to bend the rules and take the law into his own hands, suggest that Captain Johnson is more than a little pirate like himself. But it isn’t until he helps the Hawkins family overcome their greatest threat that Jim begins to realize that the truth about Captain Charles Johnson may be more fantastical than the most riveting of his pirate stories.
William Gilkerson’s Pirate’s Passage is an adventure story that will hold you long after you read the final page, and set you to thinking – and dreaming – about pirates. Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature in 2006, this book will appeal to experienced readers in Grades 6 and up.
FernFolio Editor