2005 non-fiction. Using mostly primary sources, the author attempts to
determine just what pirates, privateers, and other ne'er-do-wells of
the sea got up to in the Golden Age of Piracy.
Like any historian, the author also has a view. As an ex-SEAL
(which he mentions several times), he clearly feels some sympathy with
these men who made a living by violence on and from the sea, and while
he does a fair job of demolishing romantic myths he also has a fair
stab at replacing them. The successful pirate band is seen as an
irregular force of the sea, living and dying by intelligence and
clever tactics against superior opposition, and the whole theft, rape
and murder thing gets largely dismissed as just part of the tough
times.
There is good material here – particularly the way that many rovers'
reliance on accurate musket fire (with lots of training so that the
shooters could reach the limits of accuracy imposed by the weapons)
rather than big guns constrained their tactics but made them highly
effective if used correctly. But, alas, there are two major problems.
The first is that the writing style is dreary; this should be exciting
subject matter, but having extracted a number of relevant passages on
a subject Little goes on to explain what they'll say, then quote them,
then go on to the next matter, with no real sense of pace or progress.
Sometimes enthusiasms show: Little talks much more about muskets than
about pistols, for example. There's some effort to build up tension by
spending the first chapter on setting up Watling's attack on Arica in
1690, then waiting until the last chapter to describe what happened in
the fight, but this feels at best artificial (and if we've been paying
attention to the intervening chapters we'll have a pretty good idea of
how this fight is going to go).
The other problem is the level of trivial errors. If whatever
editorial process this book went through allowed "picaresque" for
"picturesque", "principle" for "principal", "Corteś" for "Cortés",
"free reign" for "free rein"… how can I trust any of the research that
went into the book to be represented correctly? If those errors
weren't noticed, who might have spotted transposed numbers or words?
Why would anyone let through a pair of sentences like this:
Under small arms fire from loopholes in the steerage bulkhead, the
boarders found a cannon still loaded and turned it against the
steerage, just as boarders on the quarterdeck above the steerage
fired their pistols into the powder chests arrayed on deck, piercing
them so that they would have little effect if fired. If fired, the
powder chests would explode, spraying the boarders with shrapnel.
rather than unravelling the latter part to say something like "powder
chests were arrayed on deck, to be ignited by the defenders so that
they would explode and spray the boarders with shrapnel; but on this
occasion the boarders on the quarterdeck shot the chests first, to
pierce them and reduce their explosive force"? I mean, it's 2005; we
have word processors; we can rearrange clumsy phrasing easily rather
than having to rewrite whole paragraphs in longhand.
As source material for historical games, which may not necessarily be
entirely accurate but must absolutely be consistent, it's not bad; but
it's a dull read that's surprisingly hard work. (One might indeed do
better to skip much of the prose and jump straight to the appendices,
with a handy lexicon and details of things like effective musket range
and the weight of a barrel of beef.) There are substantial gaps; for
example there's little sense of interface with the larger economy, of
where the loot would go after pirates had sold it at Port Royal or
Tortuga and how it could ultimately be converted into legitimate coin
to flow back the other way. Perhaps that's not considered part of the
brief; if you want to know what pirates did, then if you can trust
the book this is a decent source for it, but it reminds me of school
history, treating exciting things so flatly that they turned into a
source of boredom.
(Thanks to dp
for putting me on to this – I'll never read it again, but I may well
use it as a reference.)
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.