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Because pirate tales as a genre are intensely intertextual and counterfictional, it is often befuddling when the historical record will not align with historical fiction. While it is assumed pirates may well have used prosthetic hooks, there is little reason to believe J. M. Barrie’s memorable villain wore a hook as an informed piece of historical continuity. What evidence we have as to the use of hook prostheses connects them to the laboring classes, not the Eton-trained menace of Jas. Hook and his iron appendage, and there is virtually no evidence at all of pirates using hook prosthetics. Rather than attempting to locate the pirate’s hook in historical antecedents among real one-handed adventurers—neglecting the importance of how disability was understood both in Barrie’s time and earlier—the piratical hook is better understood as a loose signifier for the pirate’s social perversity.