Book Review – David Cordingly’s “Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates”
There’s no doubt that the infamous Caribbean pirates from the 1600s and 1700s continue to fascinate people today. From toys to books to movies to theme park rides to even a Las Vegas casino, the pirate theme is still big business today.
My fascination with the seafaring villains began when I was a child and growing up watching classic films such as Treasure Island (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Swiss Family Robinson (1960), and later such films as The Goonies (1985), Hook (1991), and of course, the modern Pirates of the Caribbean films. This pirate fascination of mine continued with riding the “Pirates of the Caribbean” boat ride in the Magic Kingdom about a thousand times, and then when playing with the pirate-themed sets from LEGO. Pirates were just cool! They made terrific villains. Since the legendary pirates have been long dead for hundreds of years, you don’t mind cheering for them in the movies.
Apart from Hollywood and the theme parks, how much do people actually know about the classic pirates from yesteryear? We all know about the classic stereotypes such as the skull and crossbones flag, the quest for buried treasure, and a bloodthirsty and treacherous captain who walked with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder. But where do you draw the line between fiction and reality? What were the pirates really like back in the 1600s and 1700s?
That’s where David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates comes into play.
Under the Black Flag is an informative and fairly well-written introduction to the world of pirates and privateers. Cordingly takes us through several pirate-themed movies (this book was published back in 1996, so don’t expect to read about Captain Jack Sparrow or the Black Pearl ship) to establish the popular myths, and then he takes a look at a few pirates and what life was really like back in those times. The book’s final chapters involve the rapid decline in piracy in the 1720s along with some of the trials and executions of pirates.
After reading about the pirates of fiction in books, plays and movies, Under the Black Flag gets into the history of some real life pirates including Sir Henry Morgan, John Rackham (a.k.a. Calico Jack), Edward Teach (a.k.a. Blackbeard), and William Kidd (a.k.a. Captain Kidd). The book briefly goes into the world of female pirates as well, and we read about women such as Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and the most powerful of all female pirates, Cheng I Sao (a.k.a. Mrs. Cheng).
After reading about some pirates we learn about life and general operations involving members of the crew. This includes recruiting new crew members after seizing ships at sea, the required signing of the articles (set of rules), the pay scale and “insurance” payments for those injured in battle, the different flags flown on the ship, and of course, attacking merchants and sacking port towns. This is the meat of the book, and for the most part it’s a fascinating read. The only downside is that most of this material is brief and you’ll still be craving more information in the end.
In addition to reading about everyday life for the pirate crew members, and how most of them were highly experienced sailors with years of experience (not the generally stupid stereotypes that we see in the movies), we also learn a little bit about the exotic ports of call such as Tortuga, Port Royal (before it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1962), and even the island of Madagascar off the eastern coast of Africa. Again, most of this information is quite fascinating although fairly brief in this book.
As you progress through Under the Black Flag, you’ll notice that Cordingly frequently quotes and makes references to classic pirate history books such as Alexandre Exquemelin’s The Buccaneers of America, and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. In fact, so much of Under the Black Flag‘s material is taken from those two sources you’ll wonder why you’re not just reading that source material instead. Under the Black Flag feels at many times more like a graduate student’s thesis versus an actual history book.
Another downside to the writing style in Under the Black Flag is that the book generally does not progress chronically through the 1600s and 1700s. It generally flows in that pattern, but the material frequently jumps back and forth as you go through the different chapters. Some of the material is also repeated and you may read about the capture of Blackbeard or the different pirate-themed books and movies more than once in this book. Sometimes this repetition of material was so bad that I literally skipped a few pages without missing anything from the book.
As a whole, David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Amongst the Pirates is a fantastic STARTING POINT for those people wanting to learn more about those classic seafarers and legendary villains. To me, this book felt incomplete and fairly inadequate with much of the subject matter. I’ll have to seek out other sources to continue my quest for knowledge in this fascinating area of world history.
