The Big Read: Plunder on the high seas

For the past four days I've been ill in bed with some niggling bug I picked up last week while walking the still, green canals of Amsterdam. If you're going to pick up a bug, I recommend this one.

It's a very Dutch sort of ailment - efficient enough to keep you confined and horizontal, not so demonstrative that you can't read and watch movies and daydream and refresh your quieter self. If I knew exactly where I acquired it, I would go back every year to top up, because a week of undebilitated bed-rest is a great gift to give yourself in this nagging modern world.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote A Child's Garden of Verses and Treasure Island, the greatest tale of adventure and escape you could ever press into the hands of a small, shy boy, ascribed his vivid imagination to the years he spent as a bronchial child, lying in bed through the damp Edinburgh winters and the even damper Edinburgh summers, reading stories and making them up, converting his dreary surroundings into something rich and strange: "I was the giant great and still/ That sits upon the pillow-hill/ And sees before him, dale and plain/ The pleasant land of counterpane."

It would take more than four days in bed for me to dream up Treasure Island, but there is obviously something about sickbeds and pirates, because yesterday I found myself thinking about Stede Bonnet.

Do you know Stede Bonnet? Probably not, and it's a damn shame. Everyone has heard of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard, but the real swashbuckling hero of mild-mannered blokes everywhere languishes in obscurity.

Stede Bonnet was a gentleman farmer living in Barbados who had no experience of sailing, let alone wielding a cutlass or firing a flintlock. He married young but not wisely. Charles Johnson, in his magisterial A General History of the Pyrates, informs us that Stede was dismayed by "the discomforts he found in the married state". Now, many a young fellow, feeling hemmed in by the cosy constraints of the domestic life, has turned his eyes to the window and his mind to the far horizon, but what Stede did makes him a kind of hero. He decided to be a pirate.

He bought a ratty old ship and called it Revenge, figuring that sounded sufficiently bloodthirsty, then hired a crew of cut-throats and brigands, mixed in with a couple of cousins and in-laws that he'd promised to help find a job, and set off for life on the high seas. History does not record whether he sewed his own Jolly Roger, or asked his wife to do it for him.

Stede Bonnet was not your typical pirate captain. He had a special room on board filled with books which he used as a library. He took vocabulary lessons every evening from his first mate to learn nautical terms and how to swear. He was given to wandering the deck after dark in his nightshirt, trying to make conversation with deckhands and reciting poetry to the albatrosses and the waves. He was probably hoping for a more ferocious nickname, but he soon came to be known as The Gentleman Pirate, which isn't terrifying but is better than The Blithering Idiot.

"Yes," I murmured in my sick bed. "I could be a Gentleman Pirate!"

At first Stede had a couple of early successes plundering merchant ships along the east coast of America, but perhaps a more experienced pirate would have been able to look through his telescope and tell easy pickings from a Spanish man of war. Astonished to discover a small scruffy vessel trying to board them, the Spaniards opened fire and killed half of Stede's crew.

He limped away to Nassau in the Bahamas, where all the cool pirates hung out. There, amazingly, he met Blackbeard, who smoothly agreed to captain his ship and crew for him while Stede recuperated on land, in bed with a good book. Regrettably, this gave his remaining crew the opportunity to see what a real pirate captain looked like, so most of them switched allegiances. Blackbeard abandoned the rest on a desert island and stole Stede's booty.

Stede set off after Blackbeard in the Revenge, a clear case of nominative determinism. He never did catch him, but in trying to do so he became such a skilled pirate in his own right that the government decided it was worthwhile to do something about him. They captured him and locked him up and, despite Stede offering to cut off his own hands and feet in exchange for his life, he was hanged in Charleston in December 1718.

I put down my book about Stede Bonnet and lay back on my pillow and coughed piteously and thought about his sad fate.

"Worth it," I thought.