Our flag means a complex interrelationship with British imperial expansion

My June read for my Year of Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. I have my own copy of this one; I bought it at his Rebels at Sea talk at Hamilton Hall last November and was specifically keeping it til June so I could read it outside by the water, in the heat, which is the correct way to read most books about pirates. I got through this book in a record two days: Day 1 while at Crane Beach with my mother, being vigorously exfoliated by the blowing sand, and Day 2 by the lakeside in Maine with my Dad, testing out the brand-new porch. (Verdict: It’s a good reading porch.) I’m pleased I got in basically the perfect reading experience for this book.

If you’ve read a lot of other pirate books, which I have, some of Black Flags, Blue Waters treads fairly familiar ground. But Dolin does manage to sneak in a reasonably fresh angle, which–unsurprising if you’ve read much other Dolin–is piracy’s relationship to early American history specifically. The book explores not just the economic ties between the traditionally focused Caribbean piracy and early British America, but also how the changes in economic situation, balance of power among England and various other powers, and the targets preferred by the pirates themselves all shifted over time. England went from an enthusiastic sponsor of piracy in its “sea dogs era” through a period of benign neglect about it until, eventually, it became both an economic problem and politically embarrassing. As usual, the Crown decided that it needed to get law-n-order-y about this piracy business a bit before its American colonies did, as the colonies needed illegal trade to get around the onerous mercantile obligations placed upon them by the mother country. But eventually, they, too, turned on the pirates, as the “golden age” turned out scores of feral, unemployed sailors whose depredations sailed a little too close to home. In the interim, Dolan walks us through the sea dog era, the buccaneer era–together, the first big age of Caribbean piracy–the Red Sea Men era, and the final Golden Age (the second big Caribbean era). While the span of nautical hijinks is global, Dolan’s New England roots are visible in the focus on little-known stories out of Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester, and other East Coast seaports who loom far less large in general pirate history than Port Royal, Tortuga, Nassau, and Okracoke Island. I found this all very charming, and also was pleased with myself that I already knew the story of Philip Ashton, the Marblehead fisherman who was kidnapped by Edward Low and lived on an uninhabited island off the coast of South America until he was picked up by another ship from the North Shore. (This story is the subject of At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton, which I read in 2020.)

I also had some fun spotting names in the Pirate History Extended Universe–hey, there’s Dave Cordingly! And Colin Woodard! And the guy that wrote The Pirate Hunter!--but I found the book an enjoyable read for plenty of reasons other than personal smugness. The book gets deeper than I was familiar with into the stories of some of the big names in piracy, including the strange relationship between “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet and Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (the real history is very different than the playing-with-historical-Barbies romcom version portrayed in Our Flag Means Death, obviously, but Bonnet and Teach did in fact sail together for a while). I also didn’t know very much about the “Red Sea Men” era at all, which this rectified to some degree, which was quite useful stage-setting for the next pirate book I would read this weekend (Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind; review forthcoming).

Overall I thought this was a really good entry into the literature of Piratical Overviews for Grown-Ups, and I enjoyed it as both part of the Pirate History Extended Universe and the Eric Jay Dolin Extended Universe. I’d highly recommend it in either category.

Secrets in the berry fields

At a wedding in January I picked up several books as wedding favors; one of them was a copy of Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers. For plot-related reasons I decided to save reading it for Maine.

The Berry Pickers is not exactly light summer reading. It is sad and heavy and oppressive summer reading, but sometimes that’s what you want. The book concerns a Mik’maq family from Nova Scotia who migrate down to Maine in the summers to pick blueberries. The family has five children–at least, to start. One August, the youngest, Ruthie, is kidnapped off the side of the road by a white lady, who takes her home to their perfectly manicured suburb and raises her as her own child. The story has two viewpoint characters: Norma, formerly Ruthie, recounts her life growing up with her overprotective mother and her journey unraveling the family’s secrets; and Joe, the family’s second-youngest, recounts the fallout from Ruthie’s disappearance on the rest of the family and the trajectory of his own life.

Unsurprisingly, the fallout from the kidnapping is a bad time for everybody. Joe blames himself for being the last person to see Ruthie, no matter how many times people tell him it’s not his fault, and he develops serious anger issues and engages in a lot of self-sabotaging behavior. The death of another sibling compounds the family’s trauma and Joe’s tendency toward self-destructive decisions. Meanwhile, “Norma” is raised with a lot of material privilege and comfort, and is able to go to college, but has to navigate an emotionally oppressive environment, a miscarriage, a lot of walking on eggshells around her mother, and–once she starts figuring out what’s going on–several serious instances of betrayal by her few nearest and dearest. The book ultimately has sort of a happy ending, in that Norma/Ruthie is reconnected with her family of origin, but the road to get there involves five decades of family baggage in two very different families.

While the book is very engrossing and I found it difficult to put down while I was reading it, I’m struggling to discuss it–everything sort of feels like spoilers, since the plot really isn’t the point in the sense it is in a mystery or adventure story; the point is all the stuff that happens, so basically everything except giving away the ending feels like spoilers. Also I don’t read a lot of contemporary non-genre fiction so I’m not sure what sort of things you’re supposed to say about it. But at any rate, I will be sitting with this one for a while.

Every man for himself

The second pirate book of the weekend was Steven Johnson’s Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt.

Several years ago I read Johnson’s book The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was about a cholera outbreak in London and the scientist who tracked down where it happened, thus proving that cholera was a waterborne disease. I recall it was very fun and informative, although given that I read it 15 years ago I don’t recall as much else as I wish I did.

In this one, we aren’t chasing a disease, we are chasing a man–pirate captain Henry Every (or Avery, in some books), plus his crew.

The short version of Every’s career as a pirate is this: First, he had some sort of regular maritime career, which we don’t know very much about. Then, he signed on as first mate for an ill-fated business proposition called Spanish Expedition Shipping. Spanish Expedition Shipping was an English venture but due to inter-empire trade shenanigans got stuck at port in Spain awaiting some sort of licensing issue to be solved for like, weeks, when it was supposed to have taken only a few days. A bunch of the guys trapped on this fleet of ships going nowhere fast decided to mutiny, and stole the fastest of the ships, sailing out of Spain the dead of night to go “on the account.” Every was the head of these mutineers. Their plan was to become “Red Sea Men,” a term for pirates who skulked around at the mouth of the Red Sea and enacted piracy upon ships of pilgrims going from the Mughal Empire in India to Mecca in Arabia. The ships that transported the pilgrims were also full of trade goods, and many of the pilgrims that could make this pilgrimage in style were quite wealthy. In addition, European pirates had basically no respect for people of any other religion, so they figured that robbing “infidels” didn’t really count as bad behavior.

The Mughals, of course, disagreed, which put groups like the East India Company in an awkward position. At this point in the 1690s, the British East India Company was more like a normal actual trade partner, doing business with the Mughal Empire at the discretion of the Mughal Emperor. It would not take over the subcontinent for another several decades. As such, having other Englishmen pissing off their incredibly wealthy client was bad for business, as the devout Emperor Aurangzeb was too busy being the richest man in the world to draw distinctions between different groups of Englishmen. Bad behavior by Englishmen who were, in their own estimation, following in the grand patriotic tradition of sea dogs like Sir Walter Raleigh, were bad for business. This is where all the fun political dimensions come in.

I had just gotten out of reading a shorter version of this sea change (pun intended) in England’s economic and political relationship to piracy two days earlier when reading Eric Jay Dolin’s Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates. So it was fun to dig into the details, as well as to contrast the two authors’ reads on the political sophistication of pirates (Johnson is a little more bullish on the “radical democratic political theory” element; Dolin just chalks it up to a very basic and practical “not instantly recreating the exact same thing they were trying to escape” impulse). Johnson also ties in the story of the manhunt following Every’s capture and sack of the Ganj-i-sawai–a ship that, unfortunately for Every, belonged to the Grand Mughal personally–with the technological and political advancements of the day, including mass media, the speed of news (or the lack of it), the ambiguous delineations between state and corporate power, and the class splits within English views on pirates, “infidels,” and the importance of trade.

The last third or so of the book is also a frankly hilarious tale of misadventures in English jurisprudence. While Every was never captured, several of his crewmen were, and put on trial–twice, first for piracy, and second for mutiny. The second trial was necessary because the first trial did not go at all the way the English state had choreographed it to go. As a reader I found it very funny to see the East India Company and the English state get embarrassed in the first trial even though it was for such bad reasons that I think the prosecution was actually in the right. This is not really a story with a lot of good guys per se, just people that were victimized in specific instances. It’s especially interesting to see the way the working-class folk hero version of Every’s story glosses over most of what Every and co. actually did.

Anyway, the book packs a lot of food for thought into something that is both reasonably short and also definitely constitutes A Rollicking Adventures On The High Seas, so well done, even if I think the political intention Johnson credits the pirates with is a little overstated.

An ant's eye view of the revolution from rural Galway

Though Sad Irish Literature Month for me is traditionally March, I make an exception for Walter Macken’s Irish Trilogy. I read the first two at my dad’s cabin in Maine and I was going to read the third one there, too. The copies I have are ancient 1970’s editions from when my dad was living in London before I was born and as such I consider them to be Family Heirlooms and I will read them properly.

The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.

Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.

From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.

Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.

Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.

Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.

One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.

Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.

Giving myself voluntary homework like a very normal person

In an attempt to keep myself learned while my Irish classes are off for the summer, I decided to start working my way through some of the grammar textbooks I’ve had optimistically sitting around for years. I started with Éamonn Ó Dónaill’s Irish Grammar Your Really Need to Know: A Practical Course, on the basis that I hoped I would then learn all the Irish grammar I really need to know. I aimed to do one unit a day most days, including doing all the exercises.

The pros: This was in many ways exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, an old-fashioned grammar tutorial, organized by grammatical concept, that used the proper names for things (and defined them for you) and laid out what it was talking about in lots of tables and lists and with loads of examples, followed by exercises. Very traditional, very formal. The exercises helped a lot. If I couldn’t remember something by the time I did the exercises, the book was navigable enough that I could go back and look it up. I think even when I had to look up every answer, it was valuable and important for me to take the time to physically write them all down, even unintelligibly on scrap paper that I then threw out.

The cons: For some reason, while most of the answer exercises were in the back, each unit’ “Test Yourself” exercises ended with an exercise “In Context” which did not have answers in the back, but just had the instructions repeated in the answer key. Was this done on purpose or was it some sort of printing mistake? I would have really liked to have been able to check my work after I’d put all this time rewriting paragraphs in different tenses and stuff, since these were usually the hardest exercises and therefore I was the least confident I did them right. Knowing I’d not be able to check my work also made it a little too easy to skive off some of them, doing the answers just in my head and not writing them down. (This was also a lack of discipline on my part, and someday I should probably revisit this book and just do all the In Contexts again in a row, and possibly see if I can press-gang some kind of human into checking it.)

The verdict: Definitely not a read-once-and-be-done-with-it book, and certainly I will keep it around as a reference, but it was quite worth working my way all the way through it and familiarizing myself with what’s in it. Probably I forgot a lot of the finer points of grammar as soon as I was done with the chapter but they’ll be less foreign next time I run into them, or maybe I’ll at least remember that Hey I Read Something About That Once and go look it up. It definitely disambiguated some stuff I’d memorized but not understood via other more “naturalistic” learning methods like Duolingo or listening to dialogues.

I don’t know how the hell Yu Ming learned fluent Irish in six months no matter how bored the wee fella was stocking groceries. This shit is difficult. There are nine units here just on verbs. There are five declensions of nouns. And three separate systems for counting. I gotta step it up if I ever want to get a handle on this.