“The buried treasure wasn’t that made up, it just didn’t happen that often,” he says while shutting the book again and slotting it back onto the shelf. Then he picks out a different history book on pirates, with a dramatic illustration of a man with a smoking beard on the cover. The Siege of Charlestown, the cover reads. “It didn’t feel so golden,” he says, “going through it. Mostly we were just trying to survive and not get hanged.”

And sometimes that didn’t work out quite as they’d hoped. Edward still remembers all the pirates swinging in gibbets in so many ports, their bodies rotting slowly away in their cages.

“Aye, and a damned good one,” he says. “I knew them all, the ones Johnson speaks of. I’ll tell you what they were really like, if you wish.” Someone ought to set that record straight, and it might as well be Edward. Maybe that’s the burden of being one of the last ones left—you carry the stories with you.