Captain James Hook is the main antagonist of J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan; or, 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. His two principal fears are the sight of his own blood (supposedly an unnatural colour) and the crocodile who pursues him after eating the hand cut off by Pan. An iron hook replaced his severed hand, which gave the pirate his name.
Hook did not appear in early drafts of the play, wherein the capricious and coercive Peter Pan was closest to a "villain", but was created for a front-cloth scene (a cloth flown well downstage in front of which short scenes are played while big scene changes are "silently" carried out upstage) depicting the children's journey home. Later, Barrie expanded the scene, on the premise that children were fascinated by pirates, and expanded the role of the captain as the play developed. The character was originally cast to be played by Dorothea Baird, the actress playing Mary Darling, but Gerald du Maurier, already playing George Darling (and the brother of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies), persuaded Barrie to let him take the additional role instead, a casting tradition since replicated in many stage and film productions of the Peter Pan story.
According to A. N. Wilson, Barrie "openly acknowledged [that] Hook and his obsession with the crocodile was an English version of Ahab", and there are other borrowings from Melville.
