The Pirate's Pact

[Matusalem]

I just picked up a copy of'The Pirate's Pact: The Secret Alliance Between History's Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America' by Douglas R. Burgess Amazon

It tells the interconnection of pirates and their associations with the colonial governors, outside the realm of privateering commissions during the GAOP.

All the usual characters : Blackbeard, Kidd, Every. Most of the content came from Brown University library in R.I.

[Fox]

Looks like it could be a very interesting book, he's certainly picked an interesting angle.

[meanalbert]

i just bought "Pirates' Pact" and read through the first few chapters. reads well so far.

i looked through the footnotes and there's quite a number of archive sources in there. did you mean the John Carter Brown Archive that he talks about in the sources? that isn't a regular library.

[Matusalem]

i just bought "Pirates' Pact" and read through the first few chapters. reads well so far.

i looked through the footnotes and there's quite a number of archive sources in there. did you mean the John Carter Brown Archive that he talks about in the sources? that isn't a regular library.

....more or less.

Somewhere up on college hill there.

[Matusalem]

i just bought "Pirates' Pact" and read through the first few chapters. reads well so far.

i looked through the footnotes and there's quite a number of archive sources in there. did you mean the John Carter Brown Archive that he talks about in the sources? that isn't a regular library.

....more or less.

Somewhere up on college hill there.

They got a 1673 map of the Caribbean and the east goast.

[Salty]

will have to look that one up ......sounds like a good reading...thanks for bringing it to attention

[Fox]

Anyone else read this yet?

As I said above, I thought the book covered a very interesting angle, so I went and bought a copy. I'm both impressed and very disappointed.

The pages in the book which deal with the conflict between different colonial governments, and those which cover the Board of Trade's efforts to stamp out pirate sponsoring in the colonies are well researched and pleasingly written. Those chapters will, I hope, become a widely used summary of the connections between piracy and colonial administration in the last decade of the seventeenth century.

Sadly, much of the rest of the book is so bad that it casts significant doubt on the accuracy of the good chapters. Some of it is even self-contradicting. For example: on page 56 Burgess writes "[Morgan was] born to a farming family in Wales", then on p. 132 "[Henry Every] appears to have been born in Devon, perhaps even in the same village as Henry Morgan" (my emphases). Quite apart from the fact that Devon is not in Wales, information about the birth places of Morgan and Every has been in the public domain for years.

His failure to differentiate between the Captain William Mace (or Mays), commander of the Pearl, and William May, steward of the Fancy, leads him to make connections which cannot be supported by evidence and renders a goodly chunk of his text spurious. I bring up this case particularly because a perusal of Burgess' sources shows that he had the information in hand which shows clearly that the two men were not one and the same, despite the similarity of name. It's not enough to list impressive sounding sources, one must also read them.

The fact that Burgess insists on confusing Captain Johnson with Defoe is a very personal bugbear, so I won't labour it here. What I will labour here is his use of Johnson's Misson story to fill in gaps in Tew's life. He acknowledges that "most historiography maintains" that Libertatia did not exist, but nonetheless expounds on the "bare facts" of the Misson story. Incidentally, he also calls the fictional French pirate "Mission".

Don't even get me started on his slip-shod treatment of Henry Every's story!

The book is vastly under-referenced. Again and again Burgess slips opinions, hearsay, error, and contradiction into the text with absolutely no indication of the origin of his information. For all we know he might just have made it up. Where references are supplied the referencing system leaves a lot to be desired. In recent years it has become fashionable to do away with foot- or endnotes, and instead give references at the back of the book related to page numbers (see Woodard's Republic of Pirates, or Konstam's Blackbeard for example). For a scholarly work it's not so satisfactory as endnotes, but at least it works... except in this case. The page numbers given in the references do not match up with the actual page numbers of the book, so to find a reference one has to trawl through the end-matter in the hope of finding the relevant note. This is an editorial error which we can hope will be corrected in future editions.

The trouble is that the poor referencing, self-contradiction, and outright error which characterises well over half the book throws enormous doubt on the usefulness of the rest.

It's sad really, because it could have been - should have been - an excellent book written from a new and interesting angle. As it is, its presence on the "in print" list will make it very hard for any other historian to publish a correction of Burgess' many errors for some time to come.

Buy this book by all means, but wait until it's in a remainder bin. It's not worth $27, but it might just be worth $10.

[Matusalem]

The trouble is that the poor referencing, self-contradiction, and outright error which characterises well over half the book throws enormous doubt on the usefulness of the rest.

Foxe, I would have to agree with you on this one. Somehow I knew someone such as yourself would actually come through. The author often made many claims, then goes and adds "I don't have the information to verify ___" . But, I think, in reality, the book just skims on the topic of pre-American Revolution colonial America, a topic I think so few Americans know much of. But as for the author, my impression was that the topic was meritable, but his effort was in haste. Most of these topics actually require years and years of research, not just a saturday visit to the John Carter Brown Library, which it looks like the author did....plus add some of his own bits.