Mr. Bulkeley and the Pirate is a condensation of the diary of Mr. William Bulkeley, a Welsh squire of the 18th Century. For 26 years this pugnacious, high-spirited, cranky old landowner kept a day-to-day record of his affairs, with little more to note than the state of his crops, the weather, his many unsuccessful lawsuits, his trips to Dublin, his impatience with the government, his troubles with his irresponsible son. A widower, Mr. Bulkeley had a 20-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter when he began his diary. Blowing up about debts, lawyers and parsons, as methodically as a geyser erupting, Mr. Bulkeley seems a good deal like the individual Clarence Day pictured in Life With Father as he fumes about the "shrubs," "up-starts" and "Hypocritical Pharisees" who were trying to collect money he owed them.
But on March 21, 1738, a disquieting influence disrupted the pleasant round of Mr. Bulkeley's dissatisfactions. His daughter Mary, who was apparently not very bright, wrote requesting "speedy consent of her being marryed" to a stranger named Mr. Fortunatus Wright, a brewer from Liverpool. Precisely what happened remains unclear, for Mr. Bulkeley scratched out a long passage in his diary, but "in plain English," states Editor Roberts, "Mr. Wright had seduced Mary Bulkeley." The young couple came to live with the squire, disappeared, returned, left their daughter for him to raise. But by 1746 Fortunatus Wright was famed throughout Great Britain as a dazzling privateer, "the brave corsair" whose raids on French shipping had netted him 16 ships and prize money totaling £400,000. The boldest of English pirates, Wright operated in the hostile Mediterranean with such success that the King of France offered a title to the man who captured him, dead or alive. Back on his farm in Wales, Mr. Bulkeley commented little on his son-in-law's fame. He noted more unsuccessful lawsuits, letters from his daughter telling of her being mistreated, abandoned in Leghorn, cheated of her husband's fortune after his death. Fortunatus Wright, it seemed, had another wife. Presently Mr. Bulkeley's destitute grandchildren began to straggle back to Wales, first two, then their mother, then three more, until the old gentleman lamented his "troublesome days" and stopped writing about anything except the weather.
