BUCCANEERS, BANDITS, AND BAD GUYS IN THE OZ BOOKS

by Barbara S. Koelle

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 54, no. 2 (Autumn 2010), pgs. 16–23

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Koelle, Barbara S. “Buccaneers, Bandits, and Bad Guys in the Oz Books.” Baum Bugle 54, no. 2 (2010): 16–23.

MLA 9th ed.:

Koelle, Barbara S. “Buccaneers, Bandits, and Bad Guys in the Oz Books.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 54, no. 2, 2010, pp. 16–23.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with illustrations that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)

Last year I set myself the task of re-reading all forty of the canonical Oz books. In the course of that enjoyable journey I became aware for the first time of the existence of a certain sub-set of Ozian villains.

While we are all familiar with the usual suspects—the Nome King, the witches of the East and West, Mombi, the various petty wizards, those who stumble onto magical toys and misuse them as does Kiki Aru—there are also a number of not-so-prominent characters who indulge in definitely questionable acts. (Yes, Virginia, there is anti-social behavior even in the Ozian Utopia.) I identified them as bandits, pirates, and rogues, using for my own satisfaction these criteria:

The characters must appear in the standard Oz canon.[1]
They must have committed or tried to commit unfriendly acts against persons or places outside of their own immediate dwelling-place (such that the Kings of Crystal City or the Island of Isa Poso, who are all too willing to assimilate unwary travelers but do not venture beyond their boundaries, are not included).
They cannot be magic workers themselves; no witches, wizards, sorcerers, Yookoohoos, Magical Mimics, or bad fairies (name your favorite) need apply. Thus, although the Nome King leads an army toward Oz, he is a magic worker so does not qualify. Nor can they be creatures created by magical means (such as the Flatheads in Glinda of Oz or the partly invisible Blanks of Blankenburg), home-grown oddities or grotesques.
Animals—talking or not—are out, which eliminates the beasts of the Forest of Gugu, who consider Ruggedo’s proposal to change places forcibly with the Ozians.
What remains are ordinary-looking humans or denizens of Oz or the Borderlands of Oz who, because of their behavior, would be considered outlaws, rogues, pirates, highwaymen, rascals, vagabonds, or freebooters. They range from the mildly humorous to the truly menacing—and three of them are female. Finally, they are all attached to—or have been attached to—one of three groups, as outlined below.

Buccaneers

Buccaneer (n.): “A pirate; one who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea without commission from a sovereign nation.” —The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

The first pirates, according to the above definition, whom we meet in the Oz books are definitely sinister. In Rinkitink in Oz, King Gos and Queen Cor, from the islands of Regos and Coregos in the Nonestic Ocean, are described as being “at war with all the rest of the world . . . Other islanders hated and feared them.”

This city (of Regos) was inhabited by thousands of the fierce warriors of Gos, who frequently took to their boats and spread over the sea to the neighboring islands to conquer and pillage, as they had done at Pingaree . . . (The Island of) Coregos was ruled by Queen Cor, who was wedded to King Gos; but so stern and cruel was the nature of this Queen that the people could not decide which of their sovereigns they dreaded most.

Gos is described as big and powerful; Cor as cunning with “flashing black eyes and the dark complexion you see on gypsies. Her temper . . . was something dreadful.” While Gos has his overseers beat prisoners working in his mines, Cor is quite ready to use her whip with the seven lashes on the boy, Prince Inga (fortunately, to no avail). Eventually these two malefactors escape from Inga’s magical powers to the country of the Nome King, but later are drowned at sea in a storm. Warren Hollister, in a thoughtful article in the Baum Bugle,[2] has pointed out that many of Baum’s villains were capable of being reformed, but evidently Baum considered Gos and Cor as beyond redemption.

Aside from the presence of an old pirate ship in The Gnome King of Oz, the next bunch of Nonestic buccaneers we meet are in Pirates in Oz, and they are quite another story. Ruth Plumly Thompson describes Samuel Salt, the ex-chief pirate, as physically a “monstrous seaman,” not unlike King Gos. But he has attractive attributes. “There was something fresh and hearty about him that the cutlass swinging from his belt and the blunderbuss held in his hand could not dispel.” Though practicing being “rough, bluff and relentless,” Samuel’s ambition is to be an explorer. His ambivalence is developed further in his own book, Captain Salt in Oz, whereas his fifty-six crew members remain “bad to the end,” easily seduced by the Nome King’s villainy and refusing to abandon their devotion to acquiring illegal treasure and tossing victims into the sea. “Pirating,” muses Captain Salt, “is all they know about.” But with pirate names like Peggo the Red and Binx the Bad, Thompson makes it hard to take them seriously, and the reader feels that Ozma has been jut when she turns them into sea gulls at the book’s close.

Samuel Salt is one of Thompson’s most interesting characters, because while renouncing his former illicit career, he seems to cling sentimentally to some of his previous attributes. Or could he be having an identity crisis? Having achieved his lifelong dream by having been named The Royal Explorer of Oz, why does Samiel in Captain Salt continually refer to himself as a pirate and Thompson refer to him alternatively as the Pirate or the ex-pirate? Why is Roger the Read Bird “missing the gay and carefree life” he had led as a buccaneer, and why is King Ato so anxious to retrieve his old pirate suit? “In some ways,” sighs the King of the Octagon Isle, “pirating was easier than discovering, Sammy.”

Although in his previous existence Samiel had demurred at throwing captives overboard, he did not deny that he and his crew had amassed “treasure”—which presumably came from victims of robbery, either on the sea or the land. Plundering is illegal in any country, whether off the coast of Africa or in the Land of Oz, unless you notice the qualifying dictionary phrase: “one who robs . . . without commission from a sovereign nation.” Samuel has been designated Explorer and Discoverr Extraordinary to the Crown of Oz. Does this mean that he is entitled to bring back “treasure” along with his scientific discoveries to Oz, and is that part of the appeal of his new job? Consider these passages from Captain Salt in Oz:

“When we set the flag of Oz on lofty mountains and rocky isles, when we bring savage tribes and strange races under the beneficent rule of Ozma of Oz, we must look like Conquerors. . . .”

“Anyone can see that Oz is overpopulated and needs new territories. . . .”

“You are now part and parcel of the great Kingdom of Oz . . . from this day and henceforth on, an island possession and colony under the protection and puissant rule of her Majesty Queen Ozma of Oz.”

It all sounds like empire-building to me, and as such must have a potent appeal to an ex-freebooter, especially a calm and good-natured one like Samuel Salt.

Bandits and Highwaymen

bandit (n.): “A robber, an outlaw, a gangster.”

highwayman (n.): “A robber who holds up travelers on a highway.”

L. Frank Baum does not refer to bandits or outlaws in his Oz books, but Ruth Plumly Thompson describes two such groups, the first in Grampa in Oz:

Completely surrounding the blue tree stood a company of bandits. They were tall and terrible, with great slouch hats and blue boots. Pistols and daggers by the dozens bristled in their belts and nothing could have been fiercer than their whiskered faces and scowling brows.

Grampa, Prince Tatters and Bill the weathercock are conquered by this band and make the acquaintance of their chief, Vaga, and the eight-foot tall and muscular Skally. While Skally is ready to hang them, the chief—calmly admitting that he is a law-breaker—is intrigued with Grampa’s stories and decides to swear them into his company. After agreeing to “break every law in Oz,” the captives manage to escape. Vaga and his robbers are intimidating at first and certainly a menace to travelers. But Vaga’s susceptibility to Grampa’s resemblance to the chief’s “old father” clues us to these bandits, while amoral, are not truly evil. Vaga even plans to retire eventually and open an inn; presumably they are still operating in the Munchkin Blue Forst.

This is not to be the fate of Thompson’s second band of bandits, whom we meet in Ojo in Oz. Led by the handsome and dashing Realbad, they “were robbers, brigands, bandits, outlaws,” each a “stout, rosy-cheeked rascal . . . armed with a long sword, a short sword, a bilbo, a brace of pistols and a hickory club.” With names like Tiny, Slayrum, Boldoso, and Smackembckack, these bandits (there are twenty-six in all) make their way with their captives, Oho and the bear Snufferbux, to a cavern in another blue forest, described by Thompson as old and beautiful. Here in a comfortable hideaway there is a certain amount of socializing between the bandits and their victims, similar to what happened between Vaga and Grampa. There is, too, a suggestion that the captives might want to join the band, but the good fellowship is spoiled by the bandits’ greed over the bags of sapphires offered for the delivery of Ojo. The character of the two bandit chiefs, moreover, could not be more different. The first description of Realbad is as “utterly unlike the other members of his burly robber band, and in his rough suit of blue leather, his greatboots and feathered hat, he looked more distinguished than the finest gentleman of Ozma’s court.”

This first impression is expanded by John R. Neill’s wonderful drawings of Realbad, supposedly based on the real life actor, Errol Flynn. But there is much more to this highwayman than his appearance. From his first encounter with Ojo, he has been exceptionally kind and even generous to the boy, presenting him with a gold ring, loosening his bonds, and making him comfortable in the hideout, as is evident to some among the bandits. Such marked favoritism continues throughout the book, as Realbad makes sure to accompany the boy and bear, saves them from the blue dragon and the denizens of Crystal City, and kills the Snoctorotomus. Something about Ojo, he realizes, has “brought back memories of older and happier days.”

Using Realbad’s ambivalence about his outlaw profession, Thompson develops his character to an extent unusual for Ozian heroes—let alone for outlaws. Though at first exhilarated by the seductive reward offered for Ojo, Realbad soon becomes, in the boy’s opinion, sorry and worried. When defending his present chosen career, with its excitements and danger, Realbad reveals unexpected bitterness about the laws of Oz, and lets slip that he is married and a former gentleman: “I have become an ignoble and ungentlemanly rascal, and shall continue to be one till I have taken from others as much as others have taken from me.” (p. 95) His close association with Ojo, however, leads him to meditate about his life before becoming an outlaw:

His life in the blue forest had been interesting and certainly gay, but now it seemed unreal and unprofitable and a verylong time ago. Since the disappearance of his band there was no zest in highwaying.

In the book’s climax, Realbad, in a moment of anguish, pays for his ignorance about his son, and there is every indication that he will be an excellent father to the boy once his wounds are healed. But when the whole party from the Emerald City joins Realbad and his family in the bandit cave, he still betrays some nostalgia for his law-breaking days. The bandits themselves were changed by Ozma into simple Winkie farmers—a fate arguably better than being turned into seagulls, but entirely evaded by Vaga and his men!

A self-depicted “highwayman,” Tobias Bridlecull, Jr. (High Toby), is one of the major characters in The Forbidden Fountain of Oz. As described by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, he is also a failed highwayman: a disgrace to the family name and traditions who relies on a false beard to look as fierce as his father, the Bordermoor Blackguard. That bandit had been exiled to an island in the Nonestic Ocean (near Ruggedo’s?) and their loot returned to their victims. Tobias Bridlecull, Jr., inherited only the Bridlecull Cave in the Bordermoor region of the Gillikin County of Oz, but has retained a fierce pride in his family band and their rascally traditions. Only upon meeting Lambert and the disguised Ozma does it occur to Toby that he is better off than his more ambitious and anti-social relatives.

Toby actually fires his pistols twice during the course of the story, but since his ammunition consists of stinging wasps rather than the customary powder and balls, he does not do much damage to either Kabumpo or the Purple Wolf. And although Kabumpo suspects that Toby is “an unreformed black-hearted villain,” he is actually on the road to reformation and tells the Elegant Elephant that he has turned over a new leaf: “I never was no better ‘n a pea goose at the trade anyhow.” After heroic services to Ozma, Toby completes his transformation into a solid citizen by being made her official bodyguard and presented with the sketch of a forthcoming Bodyguard’s Uniform.

Rogues and Gypsies

rogue (n.): “An unprincipled person; a scoundrel or rascal; a scamp; a person who is playfully mischievous; a vagabond.”

gypsy: (n.): “One of a nomadic Caucasoid people originally migrating from the border region between India and Iran to Europe in the 14^th or 15^th century; the Indic language spoken by this people, Romany.”

It is hard to take seriously two of the three attempts to conquer Oz by force rather than by magic. The first of the three, Jinjur’s coup in The Marvelous Land of Oz, might be classified as driven by an unprincipled person who does not hesitate to depose the lawful ruler of the Emerald City and who threatens with extermination all the non-human members of the Scarecrow’s supporters. After all, she says, “The throne belongs to whoever is able to take it. I have taken it, as you can see; so just now I am the Queen, and all who oppose me are guilty of treason. . . .”

This is a practical rather than an ethical view of power, but Baum undercuts it by immediately trivializing the actions of the four-hundred-strong female Army of Revolt. Jinjur declares that “. . . the City glitters with beautiful gems, which might be far better used for bracelets and necklaces; and there is enough money in the King’s treasury to buy every girl in our Army a dozen new gowns.”

Considering also that the girls conquer the Emerald City by means of their knitting needles, spend their time eating chocolate fudge, and are terrified of a few mice, there is no doubt that Baum did not intend to give Jinjur the same stature as his evil Queen Cor. As has been pointed out frequently, he uses Jinjur to gently satirize the feminist movement in America. That she is unprincipled, however, is further evidenced by her collaboration with the wicked witch, Mombi, and by her vain attempt to defend the Emerald City from takeover by Glinda the Good.

At the end of Marvelous Land, the Army of Revolt is defeated and sent home, the pilfered gems are restored to the Emerald City’s public streets and buildings, and the humiliated Queen is released upon promising to be good. And, according to her subsequent appearance in later Oz books, Jinjur is good, having married and “settled down.”[3]

Baum’s second female rogue/villain, Queen Ann Soforth in Tik-Tok of Oz, is even less scary; perhaps she could be classified as a “scamp.” Discontented with her role of ruling over eighteen men, twenty-seven women and forty-four children in the tiny Oz kingdom of Oogaboo, and disdaining (like Jinjur) to do housework, Ann has a “warlike spirit that preferred trouble to idleness.” But she has to be more or less taunted into the determination to raise an army and conquer Oz, and she does not to wish to shed blood. Nevertheless, after drafting sixteen unwilling male subjects and relying on her seventeenth, Private Files, Ann and the Grand Army of Oogaboo march out to subdue and plunder:

She wore a green soldier cap with a purple plume in it and looked so royal and dignified that everyone in Oogaboo except the Army was glad she was going. The Army was sorry she was not going alone.

Unlike Jinjur’s much larger band, the Oogaboo army carries swords and one gun, and Ann expects that by flashing these weapons they will easily intimidate the good citizens of Oz.

Of course events do not transpire as Ann and her Army expect. After being ignominiously subdued by the heels of Hank the Mule and diverted from conquering Oz by the prospect of conquering the Nome King, they join Betsy, Tik-Tok, Shaggy Man, and their fairy companions in the quest for Shaggy’s brother. The Oogaboos do not acquit themselves very well in the subsequent confrontation, even when Ann enlists Tik-Tok as her Private, instructing him not to use his gun “unless it is absolutely necessary.” She proves herself more courageous than her officers in the Nome kingdom, but it is a foolhardy kind of courage, and it is a tattered, sad, and homesick band that is rescued by Ozma and the Wizard. Ann admits that “the world is too big to conquer,” and she and her followers are returned to their homes, no doubt pacified by the possession of some of Ruggedo’s jewels. Like Jinjur and others of Baum’s villains, she apparently has dropped her ambitions, although I doubt if she ever learned to love housework!

“She’s gone with the raggle taggle gypsies, O!” runs the verse of an old song. In fiction, as in real life, gypsies are portrayed as talented singers, dancers, and palm-readers—and as thieves and kidnappers as well.[4] These attributes are certainly displayed by the gypsy band in Ojo in Oz, a Thompson book that is crammed with scoundrels of all kinds. Nowhere else in the Oz saga are gypsies to be found, with the exception of McGraw’s Forbidden Fountain of Oz, in which they are said to be located in the Gillikin country near the Deadly Desert; blue-eyed Tobias Bridlecull, Jr. has been invited to join the blue-eyed troop at their oasis, the Fountains of Romany, but he never reaches them.

Thompson’s gypsies are definitely black-eyed, characterized by Realbad (of all people) as “good-for-nothing thieving scalawag,” by Unc Nunkie as “rascals,” and by the captive bear, Snufferbux, as “thieves, robbers, cutthroats, villains.” Ojo is lured away from his home outside the Emerald City by the leader’s attractive wife, Zinato, who enlists his help. He is entranced by the spirited dancing and fiddle music that involves the whole band: “The castanets, now high, now low seemed to be really talking, laughing, teasing him, daring him to come across the road and join in the fun” He succumbs to curiosity when the old gypsy fortune-teller offers to read his palm, and thinks “how grand it must be to rove all over Oz in this gay and carefree fashion.” As old Noma sings:

“Oh, a gypsy’s life is gay and free—

He knows no law, no law knows he;

The wide world is his hearth and home!

The open road is his to roam.”

Too late Ojo realizes that he is the kidnap victim, and that his captors are cruel and heartless. He is taunted by the gypsy children, hit by Zithero, the brutal leader, and unable to understand his plight because he cannot speak the gypsies’ language. Ojo is thoroughly miserable, so it is quite comprehensible when he fails to warn them of the approach of Realbad and the bandits who were kindly by comparison.

The reader is never quite sure from where these rogues come. Were they indigenous, or had they somehow crossed the Deadly Desert and wandered in from Ev or the outside world? In either case, they are not mourned when Ozma eventually banishes them from Oz to wander through the countries of Southern Europe. Their fate is thus harsher than that allotted to Realbad’s group. Although the gypsy troop definitely can be classified as “scoundrels,” artist John R. Neill’s illustrated endpapers picturing them on the move are among his most evocations of life in Oz.

Reasons for the Rascals

Why do Baum and Thompson even introduce such seemingly ordinary, though flawed, humans into the enchanted landscape? After all, there are plenty of examples of “bad guys” among the magic practitioners and flamboyant magical personalities of the saga. Nor is the point a moralistic punishment: some, like Vaga, are untouched; Realbad’s bandits are transformed into farmers; Queen Ann and Jinjur and their followers are simply sent home; Captain Salt and Realbad are reformed; and the gypsies banished to the outside world. Only in the case of the truly wicked Queen Cor and King Gos does Baum find it necessary to destroy his villains. As Rinkitink sings:

“King Gos has gone to feed the fish

Queen Cor has gone, as well.”

We do not learn what has happened to the lawless warriors who comprised Gos’s raiding parties, though we hope they will become more law-abiding under new and more compassionate leaders. But, as Hollister has pointed out, most of Baum’s villains are capable of starting over.[2] Even Ruggedo, in Tik-Tok of Oz, seems ready to repent (though he relapses in later books). Certainly Jinjur, whom we meet again in The Tin Woodman of Oz, is thoroughly committed to the peaceful life of a farmer, albeit one who grows a lot of candy crops.

Thompson, in addition to pardoning her villains, introduces the element of ambivalence in those leaders who have broken away, as Samuel clings to his pirate outfit and Ree Alla Bad reminisces about the danger and excitements of his bandit life. These themes of reform and ambivalence humanize and enrich characters who might otherwise be merely stock images.

Another possibility is the element of contrast between these largely petty rogues and mischief-makers with the truly villainous. The Phanfasms of the Mountain of Phantastico are creatures of evil, as their leader declares in The Emerald City of Oz. “The chief joy of the race of Phanfasms is to destroy happiness . . . [we will] afterward go out to ravage and annoy and grieve the whole world.” Their Erb cousins, the shape-shifting Mimics, also hate all humans and immortals, because they feel that mankind has stolen the world from them (The Magical Mimics in Oz).

Compared with the creatures of the Nome King’s army, Vaga and his bandit band seem almost innocuous, and perhaps this is deliberate. The power of good (i.e. Ozma, Glinda) can sustain our interest against the wicked for only so long—but the power of evil must not be overwhelming. J. R. R. Tolkien uses the down-to-earth hobbits to anchor the cosmic forces of his Middle Earth; in a similar way, the lesser rascals in Oz are merely human, though wayward ones. As King Strut of Stratovania (himself a minor villain, though non-human) complains to Ozma in Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz: “It is neither fair nor honest for one ruler to destroy by magic the fighting forces of another.”

Strut wants his army back.[5] Realbad, Samuel Salt, and Jinjur abandon their groups, but they are all initially associated with cohorts who bring a touch of gray complexity into a black-and-white world. The insinuation into the Oz stories of ordinary vulnerable adults—who are swayed by the human temptations of greed, power, lawlessness, and perceived freedoms—heightens both the reality and the magic of these tales. To me, they are the richer for it.

NOTES

[1] The “canon” is defined as the original forty commercially published books. I have also included The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, because it was written by the author of the canonical Merry-Go-Round in Oz.

[2] Warren Hollister, “Baum’s Other Villains” Baum Bugle 14:1 (Spring 1970), pp. 5–11.

[3] Frank Baum, The Tin Woodman of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1918), p. 134.

[4] For example, see “The Story of Black Ferdie” in The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston (Harcourt, Brace, 1955) and an incident in Jane Austen’s Emma.

[5] In spite of his army of conquest, Strut is omitted from my list because he is not fully “ordinary” in appearance. Similarly the bad Baron Mogodore in Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz does not qualify because he uses and instrument of magic (Ozma’s Magic Belt).

Authors of articles from The Baum Bugle that are reprinted on the Oz Club’s website retain all rights. All other website contents Copyright © 2025 The International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc. All Rights Reserved.