Cup of Gold
’s subtitle is “A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History,” and the novel parallels the life so closely that some early readers skipped over the adjective “occasional” and mistook the fictional work for biography. Steinbeck’s brief intercalary chapters on the history of piracy in the Caribbean, his discourses on other pirates of the age such as Pierre le Grand, L’Ollonais, and Edward Mansvelt, further blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction for muddled readers. The
St. Louis Star
referred to “Mr. Steinbeck” as Morgan’s “biographer,” and proclaimed “[H]ere is presented Morgan’s complete life (including his loves) dealing with every phase, whether real or legendary.” Berton Braley, who published a doggerel epic titled
Morgan Sails the Caribbean
(1937), acknowledged
Cup of Gold
as a source, treating the novel as nonfiction.
For most of the “facts” of Sir Henry Morgan’s life, Steinbeck relied not on primary research in English and Spanish archives, but on a single source, Alexander O. Exquemelin’s
The Buccaneers of America
. Originally published in Dutch as
De Americaensche Zee-Rovers
(1678), Exquemelin’s work was first translated into English in 1684. While little is known about Exquemelin himself, he apparently went out to the Caribbean island of Tortuga with the French West India Company, and “through necessity” became a buccaneer, serving under Morgan at Panama. Exquemelin’s firsthand account of life among the buccaneers was a bestseller in its time and has been in print almost continuously since the seventeenth century. It is a classic sea narrative and the urtext of most pirate stories in our language.
As Darlene Eddy has observed, Steinbeck drew many of
Cup of Gold
’s striking images and realistic details from
Buccaneers of America
. Dafydd’s account of the Indian thorn torture, Merlin’s musing on the futility of keeping fireflies, Morgan’s encounter with a drunken pirate captain who orders him to drink or die, famished buccaneers coming out of the jungle at Panama and gorging on fresh meat, heedless of the blood running down their beards—these are a few of the images Steinbeck took from Exquemelin. More important,
Buccaneers of America
contributed to
Cup of Gold
’s portrait of the grim labor conditions that drove diverse men into joining Morgan’s gang of desperados, and to the novel’s graphic depiction of their cruelty, greed, and debauchery when unleashed on the cities of New Spain.
Buccaneers of America
, however, is also replete with questionable (and damning) statements about Morgan himself. Steinbeck almost certainly knew that in 1684 the historic Sir Henry had successfully sued Exquemelin’s English publishers for libel. Yet the novelist chose to retain aspects of Exquemelin’s account that contribute more to pirate legend and compelling fiction than to accurate history or biography. For instance,
Buccaneers of America
claims that Morgan began as an indentured servant in the West Indies, although most historians believe that he originally went to the Caribbean as an officer in an English military expedition against the Spanish in Hispaniola.
Steinbeck kept the legend of Morgan’s indentured servitude nevertheless, using it to transform
Cup of Gold
into a black inversion of a Horatio Alger story, as Morgan cheats his generous owner and exploits his fellow slaves to make his way from rags to riches. Steinbeck also retained Exquemelin’s claim that Morgan tricked his men out of their fair share in the booty from Panama. Historians have doubted this as well, believing that the take from Panama was simply less than expected because the city’s real riches, silver ingots from Bolivian mines, had been shipped out before the attack. Here again Steinbeck uses Exquemelin’s disenchantment with Morgan to expose the American success story as a climb up “a ladder to a higher, more valuable crime.”
Exquemelin also had some libelous things to say about the historic Morgan’s treatment of women captives during the sack of Panama:
The rovers had a way of dealing with those women who held out. . . . [O]nce a woman was in their hands they would work their will upon her, or beat her, starve her, or similarly torment her. Morgan . . . was no better than the rest. Whenever a beautiful prisoner was brought in, he at once sought to dishonour her.
Buccaneers of America
goes on to sketch the bare kernel of a story about Morgan and “a woman so steadfast her name deserves to live.” Ironically, Exquemelin does not name this “young and very beautiful wife of a rich merchant,” but says that “no lovelier woman could be found in all Europe.” Lusting after her, Morgan at first tries her virtue with kindness— with private quarters, a slave, fine meals, visits from friends, and gifts of jewels. The lady, “as chaste as she was well-bred,” persists in refusing him and tells Morgan that he will “have to let her soul go free” before he can “work his will on her body.” Enraged, he has her stripped, imprisoned, and starved, but she continues to refuse, saying she will never give in so long as she lives. Eventually, Morgan accepts defeat, returning the lady to her husband in exchange for a substantial ransom. Steinbeck transformed Exquemelin’s libelous little story into a major plotline in
Cup of Gold
—Morgan’s longing for and rejection by the captive beauty La Santa Roja.
STEINBECK AND THE ROMANCE OF PIRACY
Steinbeck was not simply writing a biography of Sir Henry Morgan, or an historical novel based entirely on period materials such as Exquemelin’s narrative. He was also keenly aware of the romantic representations of piracy in children’s literature and popular culture. A careerist from the start, young Steinbeck was as interested in winning a large popular audience as he was in critical acclaim and academic plaudits. While working on
Cup of Gold
, he gave this advice about writing in a letter to his friend Webster Street: “Always crowd the limit. And also if you have time, try your hand on a melo drahmar, something wild and mysterious and unexpected [...].” A story, Steinbeck felt, should be “as racy as you think the populace will stand.” He certainly understood and hoped to exploit the broad appeal of pirate stories.
Cup of Gold
seems to project a fantasy of its own hoped-for reception when “a multifarious population” crowds the beach at Port Royal “to see the Captain Morgan who had plundered Panama”:
Great ladies, dressed in the silken stuffs of China, were there because, after all, Henry Morgan came of a good family—the nephew of the poor dear Lieutenant-Governor who was killed. Sailors were there because he was a sailor; little boys because he was a pirate; young girls because he was a hero; business men because he was rich; gangs of slaves because they had a holiday.
Seeking such a reception, Steinbeck turned first to a novel that had held great importance for him as a boy—Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s classic,
Treasure Island
, first published in 1881. The years of Steinbeck’s boyhood were the heyday of
Treasure Island
’s popularity. In 1911, the year he turned nine, Simon & Schuster issued a deluxe edition with the immortal illustrations of N. C. Wyeth, whose portrait of peg-legged Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder now defines the popular idea of a pirate. In
Cannery Row
, Steinbeck remembered “with pleasure and some glory” that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived in Monterey, where Steinbeck’s parents owned a summer cottage in Pacific Grove. “
Treasure Island
,” he wrote, “certainly has the topography and the coastal plan of Point Lobos”—an opinion he may have formed as a boy playing at pirates and reenacting scenes from a favorite novel in the same terrain.
Set in the eighteenth century,
Treasure Island
tells the story of young Jim Hawkins, whose mother runs the Admiral Ben-bow Inn on the west coast of England. An old and dissolute buccaneer, Billy Bones, comes to stay, and when Bones drinks himself to death, Jim finds a map in the pirate’s sea chest showing the way to buried treasure. Soon Jim sets sail to the West Indies to seek this fortune, accompanied by two pillars of the community—Squire Trelawney and Doctor Livesey—as well as the trickster Long John Silver, a pirate masquerading as their cook. A narrative of thrilling fights and adventures,
Treasure Island
is also an initiation story. Coming to manhood in a world of treachery, violence, and greed, Jim nevertheless finds physical and moral courage as well as Captain Flint’s treasure.
Cup of Gold
reverses the moral tendencies of the children’s story, yet owes a number of elements to
Treasure Island
—the decision to begin with Morgan’s boyhood, the arrival of Dafydd (a burned-out buccaneer resembling Billy Bones), young Henry’s innocence and vulnerability among the hard-bitten characters of a seaport tavern as he seeks a passage, and the Irish sailor Tim, who like Long John Silver simultaneously befriends, teaches, defrauds, and exploits the boy.
Steinbeck was almost certainly indebted as well to Rafael Sabatini’s
Captain Blood
, a swashbuckling historical novel that became an international bestseller in 1922. Like
Cup of Gold
, Sabatini’s novel draws from the Henry Morgan story. In places (notably its description of Blood’s clever escape from the Spanish fleet at Maracaibo),
Captain Blood
so closely parallels Exquemelin’s narrative that Sabatini teasingly writes, “[T]hose of you who have read Esquemeling [alternate spelling] may be in danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things which here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. I think, however, that . . . you will reach my own conclusion as to which is the real plagiarist.” Yet not all of the similarities between
Cup of Gold
and
Captain Blood
are necessarily due to their common source. As Joseph Fontenrose points out:
Steinbeck’s Henry Morgan owes several traits to Peter Blood. . . . Both Blood and Steinbeck’s Morgan, forced into indentures, become valuable to their superiors (Blood as physician to the governor), gain fame as pirate chiefs, and finally become governors of Jamaica. Each named a ship after his ladylove, Blood’s “Arabella,” Morgan’s “Elizabeth” (and Blood had an “Elizabeth” under his command). In fact, simply considered as a story of buccaneering on the Spanish Main,
Cup of Gold
is fully as entertaining as
Captain Blood
.
Cup of Gold
differs from
Captain Blood
in many important ways, however. First published as a series of short stories in the magazine
Adventure, Captain Blood
is literally the stuff of pulp fiction. Despite Sabatini’s relative seriousness about historically correct background, Blood is a stereotypical hero— pure-hearted, just, and brave—a pacifist physician wrongfully arrested for treating a wounded man during England’s Monmouth Rebellion. Deported to Barbados as a plantation slave, Blood saves his fellow prisoners from wretched conditions by masterminding their escape into piracy. Unlike Steinbeck’s ruthless and ambitious Morgan, Blood is a reluctant if brilliant buccaneer, with no desire but to return to respectability as soon as possible, so that he may be worthy of the governor’s niece, the lovely Arabella Bishop. After shining in the obligatory series of piratical adventures, Blood regains his good name by saving Port Royal from the French and is rewarded with the governorship of Jamaica and Arabella’s hand.
Captain Blood
has a classic happy ending, whereas in
Cup of Gold
Morgan’s governorship and marriage are hollow and ironic victories, and the novel’s true conclusion is the pirate’s lonely death. Nevertheless, Sabatini demonstrated for Steinbeck that the Morgan story contained the necessary ingredients for popular success, if only the young author could unlock them.
Since its infancy, Hollywood had understood what Steinbeck called “melo drahmar” as well as the popular appeal of the wild, mysterious, unexpected, and racy. Pirate movies had it all—high adventure, picaresque heroes, duels and broadsides, exotic locations, opulent costumes, desperate deeds, drunken orgies, and romance flourishing on dark soil. Steinbeck came of age in the era of silent films and the swashbucklers of the time may have influenced his choice of subject. The years 1912, 1918, and 1920 each saw a film of
Treasure Island
, while
Captain Blood
first flickered onto the screen in 1924, in an early version not to be confused with the better-known 1935 rendition starring Errol Flynn.
Then, in 1926, the year Steinbeck began work in earnest on
Cup of Gold
, came
The Black Pirate
, a silent masterpiece that made cinematic history at box offices across America. An epic on the grand scale,
The Black Pirate
was filmed in an early two-tone color process and featured a lively orchestral score by Mortimer Wilson. The movie starred the athletic Douglas Fairbanks as yet another pure-hearted gentleman who after out-pirating the pirates wins the girl and is restored to his rightful position. Fairbanks performed the breathtaking stunts—swinging through the rigging and, famously, sliding down a sail—that have since become an obligatory part of a pirate movie. Billie Dove played the captive Princess Isobel; Steinbeck’s La Santa Roja, also Ysobel, may be her namesake. Whether Steinbeck had such films in mind as he wrote
Cup of Gold
is impossible to say, but in a letter dated November 1937 he would remind his agents: “If you get any request for stories for Hollywood remember there is still that old Cup which is the only thing I have ever done that would make a good movie.”
Thanks to Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol Henning, and her correspondence with bibliographer Robert DeMott, we do know that
Cup of Gold
was influenced by a contemporary play about Henry Morgan—
The Buccaneer
. Written by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings, popular playwrights best-known as the authors of the World War I play
What Price Glory?
(1924),
The Buccaneer
played for just a few weeks on Broadway in October 1925. Steinbeck never saw this obscure play on stage, but read it in a 1926 collection of Anderson and Stallings’s works,
Three American Plays
.