Cooper’s The Pilot and The Red Rover

Abstract

Just as Byron’s The Corsair (1814) influenced Scott’s decision to write The Pirate (1821), so too Scott’s The Pirate prompted James Fenimore Cooper to write The Pilot (1823). As Cooper politely phrased it in his preface, “The claims of Sir Walter were a little distrusted, on account of the peculiar and minute information that the romances were then very generally thought to display.” Further, “it was wondered whether a man of Scott’s habits and associations could have become so familiar with the sea.” The Pirate was, in fact, “not strictly nautical, or true in its details.” Having served as a mid-shipman, Cooper possessed the naval experience that Scott was lacking. He convinced himself that he might “produce a work which, if it had no other merit, might present truer pictures of the ocean and ships than any that are to be found in The Pirate.”¹ There was, however, yet a further dimension of Cooper’s rivalry with Scott. More was at stake than accuracy in describing shipboard conditions. Representing maritime history was also an issue. Scott had only loosely adapted the circumstances of John Gow’s career as pirate. Cooper took as his subject one of the most stunning sea battles of the era: the encounter off the Yorkshire coast on 23 September 1779 between John Paul Jones, in command of the Continental navy’s Bonhomme Richard, a 40-gun former East Indiaman, and Captain Pearson aboard the 50-gun British frigate HMS Serapis, in which Jones was victorious but at the cost of his flagship.