bloodygranuaile (
bloodygranuaile) wrote2020-08-03 07:33 pm
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A far-flung bit of local history
Several years ago--it’s somewhat embarrassing how many--when I didn’t know so many people in Boston and had more spare time to do stuff just because it seemed cool, I wandered into Porter Square Books for a book event for a book and author I had never heard of. But it seemed like the sort of thing I should stick around for, as the book was titled At the Point of a Cutlass: The Pirate Capture, Bold Escape, and Lonely Exile of Philip Ashton, by one Gregory Flemming. Mr. Flemming gave a lively talk in which he seemed like he’d had a ton of fun researching the book, which follows and contextualizes the unwilling exploits of one Philip Ashton, an early 18th-century fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, which borders Salem. The extremely short version is that Mr. Ashton’s fishing crew went up Nova Scotia way for the cod, got kidnapped by one bloodthirsty bastard name of Edward Low, was beaten up a lot and forced to do menial labor all the way to the Caribbean by way of the Azores, then ran away at a water stop and lived for nearly two years on an uninhabited island near Port Royal, Jamaica, until he was rescued by a ship from another little North Shore town right outside Marblehead. He then got home and, with the help of his local minister, wrote a memoir that became a bestseller, then went back to being a regular fisherman.
That is, of course, the extremely short version, although even the long version is a little skimpy on stuff that happened during the sixteen months or so he was living alone on the island, presumably because it was boring as shit and approximately five things happened over the entire year and a half. Much of the book is therefore padded out with the stories of the people around Ashton, like some of his shipmates, the stories of the various characters he runs into, his priest and every other priest his priest ever hung out with, and, of course, the career of the pirate captain who kidnapped him, Edward Low. In fact, Edward Low’s brief but bloody career probably gets the most page time of any one story arc in the book. This is a very good narrative choice, IMO, because Edward Low is one of the most absolutely fucked-up, brutal pirate characters of the Golden Age, and he doesn’t get nearly enough publicity. He was known for being extremely creative, torture-wise, and he and his fleet caused an enormous amount of havoc in a very short period of time up and down the Atlantic seaboard. He was great fun to read about.
At the rate of only one pirate book a summer it is unlikely I will get all my pirate books read anytime soon, but I really do tend to hang onto them so I can read them at the lake, and I will probably continue to do that because it is certainly the nicest situation for reading about pirate shit specifically.