‘Captain Morgan’ Is Not the Only Pirate Who Can Have Fun

“Under the Black Flag,” David Cordingly’s fantastic account of pirates and piracy, will not only keep any casual reader interested, but also provide its larger-than-life subject with a proper, scholarly history. This easy read will change anyone’s attitude from the safe, conservative “Pirates are sweet” to the knowledgeable, reflective “Hey, pirates actually were quite sweet.”

Those expecting a party-pooping exposé of the pirate lifestyle as boring or over-hyped will be pleasantly surprised. It turns out that guys like Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and Captain Kidd largely met or exceeded our cultural expectations.

The guns, currency, nutrition, legal troubles, religious beliefs, ships, codes of honor, and drunken revelries of pirates are thoroughly explained in a lively, yet detailed, prose.

Cordingly also dispels or confirms any stereotypes surrounding pirates. This includes buried treasure (largely untrue), walking the plank (total BS), wooden legs (sometimes), stealing ships (all the time) and bitchin’ swordfights (definitely), among many others.

The book’s highlights include the successful crackdowns and trials which ended piracy’s “golden age” in the early 18th century, the story of successful pirate-gone-legit Captain Sir Henry Morgan, and (of course) the chapter “Torture, Violence, and Marooning.”

As a whole, rather than dispelling the image of the stereotypical badass pirate, the book actually enhances the badass-ness of pirates by removing them from their mythological vacuum and placing them squarely in the middle of the history of the New World, focusing on the 17th and early 18th centuries.

For example, Cordingly argues that Sir Francis Drake almost single-handedly jump-started the rise of British naval supremacy because he was more or less a sneaky pirate bastard who repeatedly stole everything he could from the Spanish armada with tacit British approval.

Cordingly also shows how the so-called “triangle trade”, the lifeblood of slavery and European colonial development, almost failed because of buccaneer attacks. As the colonies of the New World grew, so did the pirate threat, until its abrupt end at the hands of colonial authorities in the late 1720s.

The most fascinating truth that the reader will take away from Cordingly’s book is not the fact that killer eye patches, the Jolly Roger, and screaming “Yaarrggh!” while pillaging a merchant ship for her booty were all indeed a part of pirate history.

Far more fascinating is the revelation that pirates, eye patches and all, greatly influenced “important” stuff—like the Age of Discovery and the founding of the modern world.

Johnny Depp, Errol Flynn, and Robert Louis Stevenson may have imbued the image of the pirate with intensity and legend, but what this unassuming little book adds—historical relevance—is what ultimately cements pirates as some of the coolest, most colorful characters in (actual) history.

—Reviewer J. Samuel Abbott can be reached at abbott@fas.harvard.edu.

Under the Black Flag
By David Cordingly
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Out Now