Peter Pan is a story created by Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie in 1902, featuring the adventures of Peter Pan as a boy who can fly and never grows up, as well as his friends Wendy Darling, John Darling, Michael Darling, Jane Hook, Captain James Hook, and Tiger Lily. The mischievous fairy Tinker Bell also appears in the story.

The pirate Captain James Hook, better known simply as Captain Hook, is a fictional character, the main antagonist of J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up and its various adaptations, in which he is Peter Pan’s archenemy. The character is a pirate captain of the brig Jolly Roger; Barrie identifies him as Blackbeard’s former bo’sun.

His two principal fears are the sight of his blood (supposedly an unnatural color) and one crocodile because said crocodile took his hand, which in return led to a lifelong fear of the species.

Captain Hook was originally a fictional character in Barrie’s play Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Barrie later decided that this was too cruel a fate for Peter’s arch-enemy and gloated nemesis, so he revised his work accordingly. Captain Hook is often depicted as having two hooks instead of hands due to an encounter with Peter Pan where he lost one hand – usually the left – to a crocodile, who then took his other hand.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Adventure of the English Gentleman starring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, British officer Lord John Roxton has lost one of his hands in a train accident while hunting in India.

In Disney’s animated version of Peter Pan from 1953, he’s a much more menacing figure with an alarming-looking hook and a short temper.

Captain Hook may seem rather comical but was quite the lethal man. He had a manipulative nature and an insatiable lust for power. Long before the crocodile came into his life, he was already responsible for several deaths. There’s no confirmed age given throughout Disney history or timeline documented in scripts or official film material, so it’s hard to pinpoint precisely when this pirate’s journey began.