Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with some help from Poe’s The Gold Bug, was a giant step in pirate marketing. Before Stevenson penned the immortal story, pirates had sailed the seas with an imperfect idea of how a proper pirate should act, knowing only to drink and plunder, ignorant of the finer points of the pirate life. Had Stevenson done nothing else but give pirates their parrots, his name would be immortalized in the pirate hall of fame but he also introduced the ubiquitous peg-legged pirates, which immediately became so popular that it was not uncommon for ships to sail the Main without a single dual-legged seafarer. At one time, limb-removal shops could be found in nearly every Caribbean port, though it was some time before amputation specialists began to fashion peg legs as well. According to historian William B. Stanhauser, whose Peg -legged Folkways: The Emergence of the Wooden Limb Trade in the Late Pirate Era is the standard study on the subject, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the “golden age of pirate prosthetics,” and though the craft nearly died in the early 1920s, there are several craftsman still plying the trade. If recent sales are any indication, interest in custom peg legs made using traditional woods and tools has been increasing.

Perhaps no more poignant reminder of the influence of Stevenson has occurred than in the speech of Captain Jabez Blacksoul after receiving the coveted “2009 Pirate of the Year” award when he said during his acceptance speech that “if it w’arnt for the long arm of Bob Stevenson, I’d be ‘fore you t’day with two legs – two legs and half a soul.”