pauraque_bk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pauraque_bk) wrote2004-01-06 11:01 am
pauraque_bk) wrote2004-01-06 11:01 am
under the black flag
I've been reading Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly. I got this book quite some time ago, but have only read bits of it; Cordingly knows a great deal about pirates, but rather less about how to write a cohesive book. The information and anecdotes are fascinating on their own, but since they aren't organized into some kind of chronology or thesis, it's hard to read the whole thing straight through.
I've been particularly entertained by the adventures of John Rackam, "a bold and somewhat reckless character whose colorful clothes had earned him the nickname of Calico Jack."
There is no record of Calico Jack using torture or murder, and he seems to have gone out of his way to treat his victims with restraint. When he had finished looting a Madeira ship, he returned the vessel to her master and arranged for Hosea Tisdale, a Jamaican tavern keeper, to be given a passage home.
Among his crew were Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two women disguised as men.
It was around this time that Mary Read joined his crew. She too was dressed as a man[...]. Anne Bonny found herself strongly attracted to the new member of the pirate crew, and in a quiet moment when they were alone she revealed herself as a woman. Mary Read, "knowing what she would be at, and being sensible of her own capacity in that way, was forced to come to a right understanding with her, and so to the great disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know that she was a woman also." To avoid any further misunderstandings, Calico Jack was let into the secret.
The two women were said to be "very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any thing on board". Indeed, they seem to have been by far the most fearsome and cunning pirates on the crew. When they were boarded by the authorities,
The only resistance came from Mary Read and Anne Bonny. They were armed with pistols and cutlasses and shouted and swore at everyone in sight, but they failed to rally their shipmates, who tamely surrendered.
When brought to trial, the two revealed that they were pregnant, saving themselves from the gallows.
[EDIT: Further discussion here.]
I've been particularly entertained by the adventures of John Rackam, "a bold and somewhat reckless character whose colorful clothes had earned him the nickname of Calico Jack."
There is no record of Calico Jack using torture or murder, and he seems to have gone out of his way to treat his victims with restraint. When he had finished looting a Madeira ship, he returned the vessel to her master and arranged for Hosea Tisdale, a Jamaican tavern keeper, to be given a passage home.
Among his crew were Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two women disguised as men.
It was around this time that Mary Read joined his crew. She too was dressed as a man[...]. Anne Bonny found herself strongly attracted to the new member of the pirate crew, and in a quiet moment when they were alone she revealed herself as a woman. Mary Read, "knowing what she would be at, and being sensible of her own capacity in that way, was forced to come to a right understanding with her, and so to the great disappointment of Anne Bonny, she let her know that she was a woman also." To avoid any further misunderstandings, Calico Jack was let into the secret.
The two women were said to be "very profligate, cursing and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do any thing on board". Indeed, they seem to have been by far the most fearsome and cunning pirates on the crew. When they were boarded by the authorities,
The only resistance came from Mary Read and Anne Bonny. They were armed with pistols and cutlasses and shouted and swore at everyone in sight, but they failed to rally their shipmates, who tamely surrendered.
When brought to trial, the two revealed that they were pregnant, saving themselves from the gallows.
[EDIT: Further discussion here.]
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I pretty much have to agree with you about Cordingly's writing skills, having also read that book. It's a subject I find fascinating, but reading his book on it was harder work than it should have been. But damn, he got to put on an exhibition about piracy at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. I have to give him lots of credit for that.
Calico Jack Rackham is one of my favourite pirates (although I'm reasonably sure that I wouldn't want to take him home to meet my mother, no matter how much better he dressed than the other pirates). One of the things I noticed most particularly in Pirates of the Caribbean is that they used his pirate flag for the Black Pearl. Pirates tended to be a lot more individualistic about their flags than Hollywood would have you believe, and the skull and crossed cutlasses was his. :-)
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Next up on my list of things to read when I get to the end of the Sharpe novels - because I'm on a big historical fiction/non-fiction kick at the moment - is Richard Zacks' The Pirate Hunter. It's a biography of William Kidd, and does look pretty interesting.
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Rafael Sabatini quite cheerfully steals Henry Morgan's somewhat farcical adventures in and around Maracaibo and donates them to Captain Blood. (Basically, they got trapped in the lagoon, and had to stage a fake attack on the fort that guarded it from the landward side in order to get the cannon moved so that they could get back out again.) And I have a sneaking suspicion that the exact same tale in one of C S Forester's Hornblower novels as well, except that I appear to have mislaid my Hornblower and so can't go and check it. :-(
Darn it. You realise that I'm probably going to have to dig out my tape of the Errol Flynn Captain Blood and watch it tonight now, don't you?
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God knows what I'll do if they ever get around to releasing those two on DVD. Although The Adventures of Robin Hood is coming out later this month, so I guess that's now a possibility!
pimpage
i researched piracy while working on a peter pan comic....... >:} Don't ask me how, but all my interests of the past several years are suddenly being made into kick-ass movies..... i am more grateful to the movie gods than i can say...
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