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Title: The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down
ISBN: 0151013020
Author:
Colin Woodard
Publicate Date: 2007-05-07
Publish: 2007-05-07
List Price: $27.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $6.92
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.99
Amazon Merchant Price: $17.82
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1: Better than Expected
This book was very descriptive and detailed. All the pirates, their crews, and ships were all named, and a few of the ships were pinned down to the port they were made at and the type of wood they were made from. Somehow the author was able to compile all of this data and turn it into a real story.
I couldn't put it down.
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2: A Real History
Because of the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean, many books about pirates have been published in the past few years. Most are light-weight works.
The Republic of Pirates is a real history which puts the pirates of the early 18th Century in perspective, concentrating on the Bahamas.
This is one of several excellent books I've read recently about pirates.
My interest was originally sparked in 1995 with David Cordingly's "Under the Black Flag" because this book pictured the privateers/pirates as sea-going guerrillas.
Beside "The Republic of Pirates", the following are worth reading:
Peter Earle Pirate Wars
The Sack of Panama
Stephan Talty Empire of Blue Water
Benerson Little The Sea Rover's Practice
The Buccaneer's Realm
Richard Zacks The Pirate Coast
Frederick C. Leiner End of the Barbary Terror
Together these works cover piracy from the late 16th to the early 19th Century.
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3: "...to swing in the air and feed the crow...."
If THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES is the first book on historical pirating that one has picked up, it should be put right down again without being opened even a crack lest one be tempted to read it through. No, shelve it at once and pick up EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER instead, for it portrays the true beginning of the "Golden Age" of pirating in 17th century Caribbean waters. EMPIRE ends in the waning years of the century with the death of Henry Morgan and the destruction of Port Royal in a massive Jamaican earthquake, which is almost exactly where THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES begins. The two books complement each other perfectly and, between them, give us a comprehensive view of pirating from the 1600s into the early 1800s.
The writing styles of both authors are entertainingly readable. The historical events that they relate are as fascinating as any fictional novel could be, making their books both instructive and captivating.
REPUBLIC does develop occasional textual problems about halfway through. For instance, on page 168, we are told that the ships for one expedition were stocked with "enough salt, bread, flower, and preserved food" to feed its sailors and soldiers. I'd like to know how they preserved that "flower." Page 202 has sentences erroneously using "them" for "they" and "affect" for "effect." Page 209 has Blackbeard's men "ascribed to a number of attacks," whereas the intent is obviously to ascribe the attacks to the men. The syntax is utterly reversed! Pages 214 and 222 both misspell the Antilles islands as the "Antillies," a particularly ironic error in a book dealing with seafaring. Finally, I sm still searching for the definition of "paridor" that appears on page 236; granted, it is in a quotation dating from about 1718 and may now be an obsolete term, in which case, an explanatory footnote would have been valuable. Not counting the obscure quoted term, almost all the grammatical and syntactical errors occur in a span of 54 pages and do not afflict the remainder of the 332-page book (not counting the endnotes). Perhaps the proofreader somehow missed those pages.
I do not find the occurrence of grammatical errors so numerous or so frequent as to weaken the book significantly, but I would hope that the few that do exist will be corrected should the book be reprinted for future editions, for they are distracting when they do occur. The book also lacks a bibliography, and, while the reader can ascertain the author's sources by reading though 37 pages of endnotes, a concise listing of published sources and additional books on the subject would be potentially useful.
Despite its occasional flaws, REPUBLIC easily receives my rating of five Amazon stars. In addition to continuing the historical saga of pirates where EMPIRE leaves off, the book gives us glimpses into early bribery of colonial officialdom, affords us glances of life in the eastern seaboard of 18th century America (North, Central and South) and the islands off that seaboard, and even shows us the real-life source of Daniel Defoe's fictional Robinson Crusoe. Benjamin Franklin also makes an appearance as a youthful poet writing about the death of Blackbeard (a snatch of which comprises the title of this review). We are reminded of (or perhaps learn about) the English monarchical lines of the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, the Jacobite uprisings, the War of Spanish Succession and even the well-forgotten War of the Quadruple Alliance, and especially the impact that all of these had on the New World. Descriptions of the wildernesses that became today's Florida and the other seaboard states to the north remind us that an extensive history of settlement, trade, banditry, and the fluctuating fortunes of war played out on this continent long before the establishment of today's nations. Best of all, this intriguing history plays out before our eyes in an engaging manner that will captivate almost any reader.
I recommend both EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER and THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES (to be read in that order) to every reader who enjoys unusual history, tales of adventure, and generally well written narratives about the men-and a couple of women-who helped form the New World.
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4: Glorious, vainglorious, rotters
From the author's introduction I was prepared to find pirates of the golden age like the heroes of my childhood. Although some never abused or killed their victims, they were not nice in their theft of goods, impressments holders of needed skills, and wanton destruction of ships. Granted, as the author points out, they were rootless, onetime privateers, escapees of an exploitative merchant marine and cruel navies, but they were still thieves in the night bankrupting small merchants, and impoverishing townspeoples and farmers who were not their oppressors. Some may have been polite to their captors but others were vengeful sadists. Although I was tempted to romanticize the earliest of the golden age pirates, I ended up disgusted with them and feeling (though I have reservations about capital punishment) they deserved the gallows and gibbet.
Piracy is such a romantic topic, I would love to find a book that puts it in a world historical perspective. Woodard gives us a good tale of the golden age. I would love to know more about its rise with the coming of long distance maritime trade three thousand years ago, its role as an economic, political, and military weapon of leaders and political entities, like cities, or empire and piracy as a form of thievery. Woodard's book is an exciting read, but piracy has always been with us. What has it been all about?
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
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5: What you didn't know about pirates
You might think a person interested in pirates would get into the historical records to learn more about those rough wanderers. Colin Woodard came at it from the other direction: he has a fascination with history and "got into" pirates as a vehicle to bring U.S. colonial history to life. "The Republic of Pirates" is the fascinating product of his research.
Woodard focuses on what he calls "the Golden Age of Piracy," a ten-year period from 1715 to 1725. The few thousand men -- and a few women -- who populate this story were a different breed from the government-sanctioned privateers of earlier times. As Woodard describes them, they were " ... engaged in more than simple crime and undertook nothing less than a social and poitical revolt. They were sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves rebelling against their oppressors: captains, ship owners, and the autocrats of the great slave plantations of America and the West Indies." Some of them were set up as a rebel navy by supporters of James Stuart, the half-brother of Queen Anne, exiled after her death in 1714.
Woodard's three main pirate subjects -- Samuel Bellamy, Charles Vane, and Edward "Black Beard" Thatch, grew up in an England made harsh for the lower classes by the waning of feudalism, the enclosure of public grazing land, and the flight from rural regions to London. The fourth focus of the book is Woodes Rogers, a Bahamian governor and former privateer who would eventually be the downfall of the pirates' Golden Age.
Funded in part by the wreck of a great Spanish treasure fleet off Florida in 1715, the pirate bands began to congregate in the Bahamas and to grow in strength and daring. They roamed up and down the coast, finding safe harbor in Virginia, Long Island, Cape Cod, and the islands off the coast of Woodard's native Maine.
While the pirate bands were based on a model of democratic decision-making and equal sharing of booty, Woodard leaves us with no doubt that life on the main was harsh and dangerous. "The Republic of Pirates" is a lively look at the realities of life in England and America in the eighteenth century, and is a great example of dry records and correspondence giving up their treasure to one who knows how to search them out.
Colin Woodard is a native of the tiny Maine town where I live now and he spoke last year at the local library, a rare and precious event for the town. He lit the room up with his passion for those old days, both the wild adventures and the mundane relationships. Three hundred years ago -- but as real as yesterday in this wonderful book. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys seeing history brought to life.
Linda Bulger, 2008
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