Coincidentally enough, when I was on the last chapter of this book I came across a great Substack article about Grace O’Malley, the Irish pirate queen and best friend of Good Queen Bess back in the day.
did a great job and I heartily recommend you check his site out if you like history.Black Flags, Blue Waters(2018) is the first book by Eric Jay Dolan I’ve read, and I was impressed. He focuses on pirates who operated out of, or upon, the American colonies during the Golden Age of Piracy from 1690 to 1726.
When I read a history book, I look for an analysis of the historical characters based on an understanding of the standards and material circumstances of their times, historical accuracy, how what happened then is relevant to at least some of what is happening now, and most of all a good story.
Dolan succeeded on all fronts. He described how in the beginning most pirates around America started off as privateers at the behest of the English Crown, and then turned to piracy after they were laid off in 17th Century fashion—no safety nets for you, lower class scum and higher class folks of questionable morality, you’re on your own!
And off on their own they went. From plundering mainly Spanish and French ships in the Caribbean to sailing all the way to the Bab al Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea to loot Mughal ships carrying wealthy Hajjis to and from Mecca, pirates went forth, plundered, terrorized, died, established republics, or took the money and disappeared from the historical record.
Dolan tells a series of great stories of individual pirates, and of some of their most noteworthy opponents. The book is roughly divided into two sections; the time between about 1690 and 1710 when pirates were more welcomed and celebrated by the American colonists than not, and the latter years when this situation turned into its dialectical opposite.
At first, all trade to the colonies was required to go through England so it could be taxed, and unsurprisingly the colonists were quite willing to look for better deals, deals which pirates were happy to provide.
All sorts of cargos, from spices to sugar to rum to gold to slaves, were stolen and then resold or spent in colonial ports, usually with the cooperation of corrupt royal governors. So long as the colonists could buy for a lower price and then get a better deal on their own products than the East India Company or other chartered English merchants were willing to provide, they unhesitatingly traded with pirates.
By 1710 the situation had changed. The new British Government under Queen Anne repealed the most onerous of its trade laws, grew increasingly irritated by pirate attacks on shipping from Nova Scotia to Madagascar, and did something about it by increasing the number of Royal Navy warships available to hunt pirates and by offering incentives for the colonists to work through the legal trading system instead.
This worked, and by 1726 piracy had virtually disappeared from the colonial American. Dolan tells the story in considerable detail, using the careers of individual pirates, and pirate hunters, to illustrate how and why this happened.
The book tells a series of fast-moving stories about a dozen or so pirates who operated out of American waters, from those you’ve heard about such as Blackbeard to those you probably haven’t with names like Law, Lowe, and Bonnet. I won’t repeat them here, so you’ll have to just read a great book to learn about them.
The author is from Marblehead, Massachusetts, home of stubborn fishermen for centuries, and he went to many of the places which he brings to life in the book. An American, he taps into the American fascination with pirates and love of anti-authoritarian rebels, a love that goes all the way back to the first settlements and is reflected today in the near universal distrust of all of our established institutions.
If you like good history, or just a good pirate tale, I think you’ll like this book. Thanks for reading and have a nice night.
I lived on my sailboat in Salem/ Marblehead for 4 years. Pirates and Salem witches abound!😁 Sounds like a great book!
Sounds like worthwhile reading....also how it relates to Anglo world's sea-power dependence....Have read that none other than the vanquisher of the Spanish Armada Sir Francis Drake was once a pirate.