In chapter 20 of HUCKLEBERRY FINN, the king addresses the Pokeville camp meeting:

"He told them he was a pirate--been a pirate for thirty years, out in the Indian Ocean, and his crew was thinned out considerable, last spring, in a fight, and he was home now, to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he'd been robbed last night, and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it, it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean an fd put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all the pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there, without money, he would get there anyway ..." 

I've just learned of a draft history paper on early piracy in the Indian Ocean that opens with this HF passage. The paper's author goes on to speculate why Mark Twain used Indian Ocean piracy as an example. The person who told me about this paper (which I haven't seen) is himself an authority on the Indian Ocean slave trade. He tells me there was little true piracy in that ocean by the time Mark Twain was writing HF. This makes the king's speech more interesting. Michael Patrick Hearn's ANNOTATED HUCKLEBERRY FINN (2d ed., 2001, p. 235, n.55) says "The Indian Ocean was infamous for its pirates in the early nineteenth century ..." but offers no source for this assertion. The revised UC Press edition of HF doesn't comment on the subject. I'm inclined to think that Mark Twain knew nothing about the existence or nonexistence of piracy in the Indian Ocean when he was writing but used that region simply because its exoticness as a Christian missionary field would have appealed to mid-19th-century Protestants. He could just as easily have used Borneo or Tierra del Fuego as examples.

I'd like to hear from anyone who thinks there was more to Mark Twain's use of Indian Ocean piracy than meets the eye.

Kent