Review: Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: The Adventurous Life of Captain Woodes Rogers

Pirate Hunter of the Caribbean: The Adventurous Life of Captain Woodes Rogers by David Cordingly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read almost nothing about the so-called "Golden Age" of piracy, and this book gave a fascinating and well-documented overview of the era. Ostensibly a biography of Woodes Rogers, a rather tragic figure tasked, in 1717, with defending and building the British colony in the pirate hotbed of the Bahamas, it casts a much wider net.
Cordingly writes like a researcher, and the book is heavy on facts, figures and dates. While it means the pacing bogs down in places, that same attention to detail can bring to vivid life individual sea battles, town raids, and arguments. Where documentation exists, Cordingly has found it.
The world was a bigger place in the 1700s, and despite the fact that the Spanish, English and French are colonizing like crazy, these are the stories of men (and occasionally women) who decide to throw off the yoke of government and society and seize control of their own fate. That being said, most of them are pretty awful people, inured to hardship and violence from their miserable sailor lives, but they're easy figures to romanticize. There are not many happy endings to pirating careers, but they are vigorously alive while they last.
Cordingly relies heavily on Captain Charles Johnson's "A General History of the Pyrates", first published in 1724, when these pirates were in the headlines. (Johnson is generally assumed to be a pen name for Daniel Defoe.) I was thrilled to discover that very book on my wife's bookshelf, so I'm looking that direction next.
On a purely linguistic note, I love how alive the English language feels in Cordingly's primary sources. The wild variations of spelling and punctuation from that time remind me that our so-called rules are nothing more than the societal consensus of an era that is already disappearing. I used to bemoan what I perceived as the degradation of the written word in the age of the internet. But language will evolve whether I endorse it or not, and as long as meaning is communicated, I think I can feel at piece.

View all my reviews