The Republic of Pirates (2007) by Colin Woodard

Nonfiction, arrr!

Reality is sometimes more exciting than fiction. In the case of pirates, this may be hard to imagine, because pirate stories are already known to be swashbuckling. But it is true. Pirate fiction tends to downplay a lot: the danger, the squalid conditions, the excitement and the unique political situations that the whole pirate infestation engendered. Strap on your belt, me hearties, because in Woodard’s nonfiction account of Caribbean pirates around the year 1700, we are given a riveting account of life in that age, of the reasons why people turned to piracy, and of the life histories of four exceptional people through whose eyes we observe the events of that time.

Life of a sailor sure was miserable. Woodard explains about the poverty washing over the English countryside, drawing many young men to the cities. To Bristol and London. Only to get press-ganged into the navy in a shockingly rude manner. Being a sailor was little better than being a prisoner, slaves to the whims of domineering captains and investors, at risk of disease and death, and many sailors never received any money. No wonder that sometimes entire crews mutinied and turned rogue. Woodard tells us about Henry Avery’s awesome Arabian adventure, in which he turned pirate and captured the Mughal treasure fleet sailing from Arabia to India. Stories like that inspired others.

Others such as Edward “Blackbeard” Thatch, “Black Sam” Bellamy and Charles Vane. The book follows the rise of these captains and the Pirate Republic they established in Nassau, Bahamas. We also follow Woodes Rogers, a one-time privateer who became the governor of the Bahamas and was tasked to root out those pirates. His story also covers the rescue of the man who inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe from a dismal island in the pacific. Each of the four lives provide side tangents into other stories. For example, Blackbeard’s underling Stede Bonnet makes for an amazing story all on his own: an aristocrat who decided to become a pirate, a “gentleman pirate” who was totally unfit to lead a crew.

Most interesting to learn was that there were moral splits between pirate crews, depending on the geopolitical tensions of the day. Pirate Henry Jennings refused to capture English vessels and still saw himself has furthering the cause of the British Empire against the Spaniards. But his crew didn’t always agree with him. And the political movement of the time, the Jacobite revolt in Britain, lead to many pirates feeling sympathetic for the cause and perhaps seeing a role for their Pirate Republic in that movement. Local governors who shared that feeling may even have stimulated privateering. And the name of Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, was a direct reference to Jacobite sympathies. 

For a book named The Republic of Pirates I expected to learn more about their makeshift hideout on Nassau, but most of the book just follows ships around. For instance, Blackbeard first went to this island and then to that island and then to that island, and then he captured this ship of 300 tons and 12 cannons and then that ship of 250 tons and 8 cannons, and so on. It got a little tiresome, but for the pirates it was like a video game to capture larger ships to capture even larger ships and collect cannon on the way to build up your firepower. 

Eventually king George I wrote that every pirate would be welcomed back into society if they willingly asked for pardon and that split the community right through the middle, with some pirates like Charles Vane becoming die-hard villains and others becoming pirate hunters on the side of the government. That marked the end of the whole period, which lasted only a couple of years, really. I was glad to learn about this part of history as I knew little about it, and The Republic of Pirates makes for a great introduction to it.