Buccaneers and Privateers: The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675-1725 by Richard Frohock (review)

In Restoration England the growing fascination with empire – as the growing influence of empire – had myriad manifestations, and modern scholars have increasingly exposed the ways in which matters imperial figured in culture as well as economics and politics. Richard Frohock contributes to this development in a study based on narratives of buccaneers’ voyages, which we would scarcely expect to be anything but crucially attentive to imperial projects. Indeed, the major strength of this book lies in its unpacking of the conflicting ways by which these narratives construe “voyagers and their histories, and by extension, the representation of English imperialism” (2), revealing these accounts’ roles in a discursive tussle that provided both endorsement and critique of empire.

Frohock’s book addresses these concerns principally by revealing the variable ways in which the sea rover was depicted in the publications that appeared in the so-called Golden Age of piracy. These works ranged from early sensationalist accounts that featured the word “pirate” or “buccaneer” in their titles to later “adventures” and (even more neutrally) “voyages.” The buccaneer figure served different purposes in these texts: as a criminal foil to lawful empire, as national hero and state agent, as scientific observer, as critic of the enormities of imperialism, and even as unapologetic criminal. After examining some sensationalist accounts from the 1670s, Frohock explains how histories of buccaneering in the 1680s and 1690s, although alike in casting buccaneers as violent and criminal, differ in their conclusions about the impact of these men’s exploits. In some accounts, the buccaneers’ greed, cruelty and exploitation of those they encountered were presented as characteristics of the imperial project itself. In other texts, buccaneer leaders, sometimes the authors of the narratives, appeared in ways that “[used] the story of the criminal voyage to imagine ways of moving beyond violence and roguery towards new, less objectionable, methods of establishing” empire. (95). And that depiction paved the way for early eighteenth-century efforts (not entirely successful ones) to distinguish privateer from buccaneer.

Because the nature of authority on the buccaneering ship was almost inevitably the subject of contention, Frohock carefully addresses the way his texts tackled it. He emphasizes that each of his voyage narratives discusses the way in which written documents served to define – and significantly to redefine – the nature and site of authority, whether locating it in the persons of oft-challenged captains or among (frequently mutinous) crews. In this context, the book opens strikingly with the story of George Cusack, who exemplified the anarchistic, marauding pirate not only because he threw overboard the writings and letters of the captain of a captured British ship but by jettisoning the captain’s bible as well.

By contrast, many of Frohock’s authors took on board – figuratively and even literally – their predecessors’ texts in crafting their own, and Frohock’s seven brief chapters argue effectively for the intertextuality of his chosen voyage narratives. He explores the ways in which authors both defined the meaning of being a buccaneer (or privateer) in relationship to one another’s definitions and, more significantly and often, how they impugned each other’s reliability as narrators. Frohock also makes clear the genealogical relationship between writers. Thus, Alexander Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (first appearing in English translation in 1684), which condemned the brutalities and treachery of buccaneers and served as a model for many later English accounts of buccaneering, was nonetheless appropriated by the bookseller William Crooke actually to recuperate the reputation of the pirate Henry Morgan, otherwise the target of general condemnation.

In a more striking example of his authors’ consciousness of generic lineage, Frohock reveals that the privateer George Shelvocke set out in 1719 on an expedition to the South Seas equipped with copies of Woodes Rogers’ 1712 account of his own earlier successful privateering voyage there, A Cruising Voyage around the World. At least one critic attributed Shelvocke’s unsuccessful expedition, culminating in a mutiny that converted...