Pirates are the subject of many a dime novel and boys' stories, but they tend to be portrayed as one-dimensional. Such is the case here. The captain of The Avenger is a Byronic or even a Michael Scottish hero—an impossible monster, compounded of one virtue and a thousand crimes. Marryat drew on his recollections of the time when he was a midshipman with Cochrane in the Impèrieuse, for the figure of the old steersman, who sticks to his post under the fire of the Avenger. The Three Cutters w...