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bloodygranuaileEvery year when I go to Maine I try to read at least one pirate-related book, which is pretty doable; I’m pretty sure I have enough pirate-related books to keep me going for a good long time. This year I started with one that had been sitting on my shelf for a few years: Colin Woodard’s The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down.
Though it obviously starts a bit earlier and runs a bit later than the duration of the infamous “Brethren of the Coast’s” pirate republic, this is the story of the rise and fall of the short-lived pirate’s republic in Nassau on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, a nominally English colonial possession with little development and less governance. The “republic” was really only in full swing for about 2 of the 10 years of the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1716-1718, but in its time it attracted what are still some of the biggest names in the history of buccaneering: Charles Vane, Sam Bellamy, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, “Calico Jack” Rackham, Benjamin Hornigold, and more. They were in part inspired by the legends of Henry Avery’s half-apocryphal “pirate kingdom” in Madagascar, an uncolonized island relatively well placed to harass Pacific shipping.
This book didn’t assume much prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and though I have probably a bit more prior knowledge than a lot of readers, it was never boring or condescending about it, either. As a deep dive into a relatively narrow slice of time in the history of armed robbery on the high seas, it was still plenty informative, especially as far as biographical material on the major players goes--we get the full life story of Woodes Rogers, usually relegated to a footnote in the saga of the various Bahamanian pirates; we get the full choreography of ships stolen, refitted, and abandoned over the course of each pirate’s career, in sharp contrast to the usual sorts of overviews that introduce each pirate as the captain of one (1) ship; we get the full embarrassing story of the hapless Stede Bonnet, who really barely ought to be called a pirate at all. And while popular culture’s depictions of Caribbean pirates like to stay in the picturesque waters of the Caribbean, the reality was that all imperial shipping was basically one big system--the infamous triangle trade, another thing that the Disney version likes to skip over--so a huge amount of the action from pirates “based in” the Caribbean takes place up the coast of North America, to Maine and even Canada, which is always very cool to read about when you’re in Maine, hence my reading habits. It’s fun to remember a time when New England was very important and Boston was the largest, most important city in all of North America.
Anyway, Republic of Pirates doesn’t shy away from all the things that were shitty about the pirate life, but neither does it shy away from all the things that were shitty about non-pirate life in the 1700s, so it’s pretty sympathetic to how the romanticization of pirates as anti-establishment folk heroes happened. Overall it’s fun, informative, and very readable.
Though it obviously starts a bit earlier and runs a bit later than the duration of the infamous “Brethren of the Coast’s” pirate republic, this is the story of the rise and fall of the short-lived pirate’s republic in Nassau on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, a nominally English colonial possession with little development and less governance. The “republic” was really only in full swing for about 2 of the 10 years of the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1716-1718, but in its time it attracted what are still some of the biggest names in the history of buccaneering: Charles Vane, Sam Bellamy, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, “Calico Jack” Rackham, Benjamin Hornigold, and more. They were in part inspired by the legends of Henry Avery’s half-apocryphal “pirate kingdom” in Madagascar, an uncolonized island relatively well placed to harass Pacific shipping.
This book didn’t assume much prior knowledge on the part of the reader, and though I have probably a bit more prior knowledge than a lot of readers, it was never boring or condescending about it, either. As a deep dive into a relatively narrow slice of time in the history of armed robbery on the high seas, it was still plenty informative, especially as far as biographical material on the major players goes--we get the full life story of Woodes Rogers, usually relegated to a footnote in the saga of the various Bahamanian pirates; we get the full choreography of ships stolen, refitted, and abandoned over the course of each pirate’s career, in sharp contrast to the usual sorts of overviews that introduce each pirate as the captain of one (1) ship; we get the full embarrassing story of the hapless Stede Bonnet, who really barely ought to be called a pirate at all. And while popular culture’s depictions of Caribbean pirates like to stay in the picturesque waters of the Caribbean, the reality was that all imperial shipping was basically one big system--the infamous triangle trade, another thing that the Disney version likes to skip over--so a huge amount of the action from pirates “based in” the Caribbean takes place up the coast of North America, to Maine and even Canada, which is always very cool to read about when you’re in Maine, hence my reading habits. It’s fun to remember a time when New England was very important and Boston was the largest, most important city in all of North America.
Anyway, Republic of Pirates doesn’t shy away from all the things that were shitty about the pirate life, but neither does it shy away from all the things that were shitty about non-pirate life in the 1700s, so it’s pretty sympathetic to how the romanticization of pirates as anti-establishment folk heroes happened. Overall it’s fun, informative, and very readable.