Matthew West. The Pirates. Boston: New Word City, 2015. E-book.

The last time I read a book that was a survey about pirates that was not a picture book or about a professional baseball team was probably in college (a LONG time ago) when I read Exquemelin. Matthew West’s The Pirates is a great, light overview of the Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1690-1720) when most of the sailors known as pirates today flourished. (The infamous Barbary pirates were more like privateers and naval raiders. They represented their North African governments.)

Well, flourished is not exactly the right word. Many disappeared, apparently returning to less unsavory professions under assumed names or perhaps lost at sea. Others died horrible deaths at the hands of the Royal Navy or the courts. And if the testimony of Captain Kidd is to be believed, the courts were not always exactly fair.

Interestingly enough, one of West’s primary sources is none other than Daniel Defoe. He wrote a fiction book, Captain Singleton, about a pirate, but in 1724 he published a nonfiction tome entitled A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates and a sequel in 1728.

Besides being a writer and editor, Defoe was also involved in the shipping business, and interviewed many sailors and consulted court records to write his pirate books, which were very popular at the time.

West tells us that there were two main areas where English pirates flourished, the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Both places had rich convoys of merchant vessels and remote islands with little government. So Blackbeard (a.k.a. Edward Teach, né Drummond) mostly sailed the Caribbean and Carolinas, while Captain Kidd was mostly in the Indian Ocean.

Chapters are devoted to some of the main characters and their associates as well as the beginnings and lifestyles of pirates. We learn that Kidd was probably unjustly accused of piracy. He had letters from the British government authorizing his vessels as privateers against the French. However, he got some powerful politicians back home upset at him and, if we accept the record, he was tried by a kangaroo court in England. Kidd, by the way, did bury some of his treasure, but all indications are that the authorities recovered it and it went to the King’s Exchequer.

We learn how Nassau in the Bahamas was practically deserted when an ex-pirate decided to rebuild it and make a go of it as a legitimate British colony, and how he and his greatly outnumbered people managed to beat back a Spanish attack.

Besides Captain Kidd, one of the most interesting characters is Blackbeard. West tells us that “Blackbeard was a master of psychology, who consciously managed his larger than life personality to suit the peculiar conditions of his chosen profession.” (1264) It is hard to exaggerate both his physical appearance and the manner which he intimidated most people.

Far and away the most successful pirate was Bartholomew Roberts, a.k.a. Black Bart. He truly roamed the seas far and wide. He attacked ports and vessels from Newfoundland to Brazil and along both the Indian and Atlantic coasts of Africa. To put things in perspective, though, his career of piracy lasted four years. That was longer than most pirates survived the trade, but hardly a lifespan. In those four years he captured 400 vessels and looted a number of ports as well. He had had experience as a line officer in the British Navy, so he knew more about sailing and about naval warfare than most of the other men who thought the pirates’ life was for them.

In addition to these well-known names, we learn about Woodes Rogers, another former naval officer and privateer. He sailed closer to Antarctica than nearly anyone at the time and rescued Alexander Selkirk who had been marooned for four years on an island off the coast of Chile. Selkirk is widely, and probably accurately, seen as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

(As an aside, while there were other marooned and shipwrecked men whom Defoe would have known about and possibly even interviewed, Robinson Crusoe the novel has one giveaway that Defoe relied on Selkirk’s story. The novel tells us that Crusoe occasionally saw penguins on his island. Of course, there are no penguins in the Caribbean where Crusoe was shipwrecked, but they are not uncommon along the shores of southern Chile where Selkirk was.)

One captain of a ship in Rogers’ South American privateering expedition was named Simon Hatley. Hatley’s ship was captured by the Spanish, and he was held by them for three years. He would later say that the difficulties with his ship began when he shot an albatross that had been following his vessel. This is told in more detail in The Road to Xanadu, but we know that Coleridge was familiar with this story and the superstition related to it.

Pirates were often treated well by local governments that appreciated their contributions to the local economy. More remote trading posts like some in the Caribbean and Africa often traded with pirates because there was no other governing or colonial body around. One such trader in what today is Guinea was a man by the name of Benjamin Gun, who became the inspiration for Stevenson’s Ben Gunn in Treasure Island.

The Pirates deals with the English pirates alone. Yes, there were Spanish and French pirates as well (L’Ollonais comes to mind immediately), but West focuses on the English ones. He notes well:

The Golden Age [of pirates] lasted barely thirty years, yet this brief flowering of villany on the high seas left a permanent mark on the Western psyche. For all their impropriety, pirates appeal to something deep in our souls. Their legacy, begun centuries ago, continues to capture our imagination with the lure of the far horizon, the promise of a different tomorrow, and, as ever, riches. (1758-1762)