Captain Jat

Captain Jat is a fictional sea captain created by English writer William Hope Hodgson. Captain Jat was another attempt to create a recurring character, like Hodgson's Captain Gault. Captain Jat is featured in the stories "The Island of the Ud" and "The Adventure of the Headland". Captain Jat himself is a tall, lean man, interested primarily in "treasure and women," who takes cabin boy Pibby Tawles into his confidence. In "The Island of the Ud" their relationship is described as follows:

It is true that the Captain appeared both to like the boy, in his own queer fashion, and to trust him; but for all that, he had with perfect calmness and remorseless intent, shown him the knife with which he would cut his throat, if ever he told a word of anything that his master might say to him during his drinking bouts.

Jat is abusive when drunk:

When he ran out of toddy, he would heave his pewter mug at the lad's head as he lay asleep, and roar to him to turn-out and brew him fresh and stronger...

Captain Jat's speech is written in dialect. Pibby Tawles is not actually given much spoken dialog, or much in the way of description. This serves to make the reader's impression of him somewhat vague; this is probably to allow the reader to mentally take his place in the story as the underdog hero. Lacking size, Tawles defends himself primarily with his quick wit:

...but this trick of the Captain's was no trouble to Pibby; for he rigged a dummy oakum-head to that end of his bunk which showed through the open doorway and slept then the other way about.

The stories are likely inspired by Hodgson's own experience with bullying while he himself was a young apprentice at sea. Several other Hodgson stories have similar plot lines, often involving wily apprentices who outsmart or take their revenge against abusive sailors.

Both Captain Jat stories involve narrow escapes from marauding natives of some sort while stealing valuable treasure, with Pibby Tawles managing to pocket some of the treasure for himself. The native inhabitants are, in both stories, portrayed in extremely negative terms: physically debased, bestial, and cannibalistic. In "The Island of the Ud" the hag-women are a caricature of degraded femininity; in "The Adventure of the Headland" the natives run with dogs and are said to practice cannibalism. Hodgson has Captain Jat use the pejorative terms Nigger although it is hinted that the natives are Spanish (he refers to a Dago village). In both cases, Hodgson depicts religious cults that make use of human sacrifice.

The Captain Jat stories, while they are exciting adventure stories and reasonably effective horror, do not represent Hodgson's best work. The characters in the Captain Jat stories are not as well-developed as Hodgson's Captain Gault or Carnacki; in both the Captain Jat stories, not only are the plots nearly identical, but there is little, if any discernible development in the relationship between the two main characters, and no other speaking characters to draw upon for interest. While writing the character may have been cathartic for Hodgson, readers may have found little to identify with in Pibby Tawles, given that his "heroism" seems to consist mostly of dodging blows and stealing, rather than gaining justice. To modern tastes the sexism and racism in the stories is off-putting, although it may not have been so interpreted by his contemporary audience.