The Pirate Who Wrote Invictus

A Poetry Tale about William Ernest Henley, told by Hello Doggo.

In eighteen eighty-three, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a confession to his friend, the poet William Ernest Henley.

It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island.

So yes. Long John Silver — one-legged, silver-tongued, utterly terrifying — owes his existence to a poet. Stevenson did add, in fairness, that Silver wasn’t like Henley in any other quality or feature. Henley, presumably, checked his pockets for doubloons anyway.

Here’s how they met. Henley had lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis of the bone as a young man. Then the disease went for his other foot, and he was told that might have to come off too. Instead, he went to Edinburgh, and put himself in the hands of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. He spent the best part of two years in the Royal Infirmary. Lister saved the foot.

In eighteen seventy-five, the critic Leslie Stephen brought a young Stevenson to the ward. Stevenson wrote that the patient sat up in bed, hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace.

That same year, Henley wrote a poem. Tradition says he wrote it there, in that hospital; nobody can quite pin it down. It went out into the world with no title. An editor later named it Invictus.

I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.

Which is very much the sort of thing a pirate would say.