About this story
Cup of Gold is John Steinbeck's first novel: a heavily fictionalized, swashbuckling retelling of the 17th-century pirate Captain Henry Morgan, from a Welsh farm boy chasing a dream to the buccaneer who sacked Panama, the fabled "Cup of Gold," and on to his strange, gilded undoing. Hand-illustrated engraving-style art and an editorial pulp framing carry you across five chapters of sea, plunder, and ambition.
Read it straight through as a faithful port of the public-domain text. Ported from Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History by John Steinbeck (1929), in the US public domain. Pulp adaptation by Public Domain Pulp, dedicated under Creative Commons CC0 1.0.