Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers ed. by Grace Moore (review)

Those of us who teach and research pirate history are well aware that most non-specialists associate piracy with the period from 1660 to 1730 when prize-takers of various hues—buccaneers, flibustiers, privateers, corsairs, and pirates—applied different business models in the diverse spatial and political contexts of the maritime world. We have learned from, among others, David Cordingly (in Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates [1996]) that such popular perceptions have been shaped by the ascent (or descent?) of the pirate from violent criminal to figure of fun in cultural products that range from Alexandre Exquemelin’s The Boucaniers of America (1678) and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724) to Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), Brian Henson’s Muppet Treasure Island (1996), and Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise. Pirate historians further recognise that their appreciation of this evolutionary process generally lacks the depth and insight of literary and cultural specialists.

Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century is therefore a welcome addition to the historiography of pirate studies. It makes three broad contributions. The first is slight, perhaps even negative, for this collection of sixteen essays is not strong on historical analysis; accordingly, it adds little to knowledge and understanding of how and why seafarers and others committed capital crimes at sea during the Victorian era. Rather, it tends to borrow uncritically from sources of dubious accuracy. Chief among these imported misconceptions is the erroneous assertion that robbery on the high seas had largely ceased by Horatio Nelson’s day. True, the book contains occasional allusions to the so-called maritime mayhem that raged around the Americas and across the Atlantic during the wars of Latin American independence in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and vaguely suggests that piratical activity jeopardised trade and shipping in Asian waters during the Victorian era. Yet most of the contributors to this volume follow in the wake of the editor, who contends in the opening sentence of the introduction that “piracy in the real world was on the wane” in the nineteenth century (1). However, as Robert J. Antony (in Like Froth Floating on the Sea [2003]) and I (in “Voluntaries and Sea Robbers,” The Mariner’s Mirror 97.1 [2011]), among others, have demonstrated, piracy was a very real threat to European and American shipping in Caribbean and Latin American waters, the eastern Mediterranean, the seas around Indonesia, and the East China Sea during the era of Pax Britannica. The book also embraces the exaggerated claim that “more than 5,000 pirates were [roving] the world’s seas” from 1716 to 1725 (48)—an oft-repeated figure based on a misinterpretation of Marcus Rediker’s analysis, which actually infers that a maximum of 2,400 pirates were active at peak times in a nine-year period during which a total of 5,000 people may have engaged, often fleetingly, in piratical activity (Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea [Cambridge University Press, 1987], 256). In essence, Pirates and Mutineers, like many other works, overstates the significance of piracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and understates its scale in the nineteenth century.

The second broad contribution made by this collection is far more positive and lies in the realms of literary criticism. As the editor points out, the book mainly addresses the “imaginary pirate” (2), the sea rover presented to Victorian readers and theatre-goers in the innumerable novels, short stories, poems, and plays in which pirates figured as heroes, icons, pariahs, or extra-societal beings. In so doing, it instils richness and subtlety into the interpretation of a...