The Pirate and the Monk is a picaresque work of fiction intended exclusively for its entertainment value, written for the mature, enlightened reader, and no historical inference must be derived from the text. The story depicted in this book is a retelling of the Libertalia sketch published in The History of the Pyrates, second volume of A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, written by the supposed author Captain Charles Johnson, which was a nom de plume for either Daniel Defoe or publisher Nathaniel Mist: The two books contained biographies of real and fictitious pirates, and was influential in shaping popular conceptions of these colorful characters. Historians generally agree that the author used considerable poetic license in his accounts of pirate lives; especially in the second section, which appeared in 1728 as The History of the Pyrates featuring Captain Misson and his Crew, a pseudo biography later established as fictional. Considered a short novel, The History of Captain Misson and his Crew revealed many of the same techniques which Daniel Defoe used in his longer works; to establish an aura of verisimilitude the narrator pretends to be working from a manuscript, a device which Defoe employed in several of his works.
