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Captain James Hook is a fictional character, from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Hook is a pirate captain and Peter Pan's nemesis. It is said that he was Blackbeard's bosun, and that he was the only man Long John Silver ever feared. He wears an iron hook in place of his right hand, which was cut off by Peter Pan and eaten by a crocodile; the crocodile liked the taste of him so much that it followed him around for the rest of his life, hoping for more.
(Lest anyone think Hook's name too convenient, Barrie notes that "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze".)
In Barrie's novel, the crocodile catches up with Hook in the end, and Peter, with the callousness of youth, quickly forgets him and finds a new nemesis; but Hook made a stronger impression on the public, and most if not all sequels bring him back one way or another.
It is hypothesized that Captain Hook is modeled after the famous English captain Christopher Newport. Both were dark-haired captains of dubious pasts, and were missing their right hands which were replaced by a metal hook. Christopher Newport commanded the ships that landed the settlers at Jamestown in Virginia.
Smee is Captain Hook's right hand man.
The version of Captain Hook who appeared in the Disney animated film adaptation of Peter Pan has subsequently appeared in a number of other Disney productions. He sometimes appears in comic book placed in the Scrooge McDuck universe of comic books as the nemesis of Moby Duck, a whaler cousin of Donald Duck.
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