Pirates: A New History, From Vikings to Somali Raiders by Peter Lehr, and: Captain Singleton ed. by Manushag N. Powell (review)

GLOBAL PIRACY AND THE LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MARITIME ACCOUNT

It is not until almost two-thirds of the way into Daniel Defoe’s sweeping and tempestuous novel Captain Singleton (1720) that the titular figure, Bob Singleton, fully embraces the role of pirate captain. When he does, Defoe makes it clear that Singleton’s long rise to leadership depends on his capacity to compass the “whole globe,” and to measure Europe’s piracies—its depredations and its narratives alike—against the world:

I took this Occasion to put into their Heads, some Part of my farther Designs, which were, to range over the Eastern Sea, and see if we could not make ourselves as rich as [Henry] Avery, who, it was true, had gotten a prodigious deal of Money, though not one-half of what was said of it in Europe. Our Men were so pleased with my forward, enterprizing Temper, that they assured me that they would go with me, one and all, over the whole Globe, wherever I would carry them.

(229)

Singleton’s marriage of narrative skepticism and capitalist, “enterprizing Temper” are exemplary: any account of piracy, literary or historical, needs to manage disciplinary and political boundaries. Newly in charge of a small fleet of pirate vessels at the “Bay of Mangahelly” (293) on the northwest coast of Madagascar, Singleton compares himself to the Henry Avery (or Every), the most famous English pirate of the day, in a self-conscious acknowledgement of the complexities at play in piratical myth-making and the international political intrigue from which pirate narratives emerged.

The edition of Defoe’s Captain Singleton that Manushag N. Powell has produced for Broadview Press (2019) is a remarkable work of scholarly curation. Nearly all the contemporary texts that one could wish for are included: the appendices swell to one-hundred pages (313–411); maps, title pages, and plates are judiciously doled out and contextualized; the bibliography is slim but serious (413–7). Powell handles the assembled materials with practiced dexterity, positioning them not only with respect to Defoe’s novel, but also in conversation with each other and with the larger scholarly conversation around Captain Singleton. Some of the volume’s best analyses emerge through Powell’s treatment of the supplementary literary-historical materials in the appendices. In a short introduction to The King of the Pirates, Powell straightforwardly acknowledges the text’s contested authorship—it was probably written by Defoe as a “Test-Run (?) For Singleton” (313)—before devoting argument to distinguishing a far “more salient point”: “not whether King of Pirates is trying to get at a reportorial truth about the pirate Avery but rather the way in which it takes a popular trope—pirate writing—and makes it very much the author’s own, moving it into the ethically and stylistically complex space at the intersections of romance, history, and emerging forms of prose fiction” (314).

This kind of editorial directness is refreshing, and it seems fitting throughout a volume that Powell describes from the outset as “meant for the enjoyment of classrooms” (9). In this respect specifically, the Broadview edition is a boon: other reliable editions, such as that of the Oxford English Novels series, have long been out of print, leaving Defoe’s novel a risky proposition on any syllabus. Yet, even if there were many other volumes of Captain Singleton available, I suspect that this would remain the edition of choice for undergraduate and graduate classrooms; it is similarly hard to imagine that this will not also be welcomed as the standard text for much scholarship on Defoe’s pirate writing. Powell’s edition makes strong claims about the novel as a literary text as well as a historical document, “offer...