But pirate stories were extremely popular in Continental Europe as well, especially in Italy, where Emilio Salgari (1862-1911) wrote as many as 200 adventure novels, mostly about pirates or colonial adventurers who might as well have been called such. We tend to think of pirate tales as mainly an English language thing, since the first early modern histories of pirates were in English, as were the genre-defining stories of Robert Louis Stevenson ( Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Rafael Sabatini ( The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood) and Howard Pyle.
