This fascinating travel and adventure book tells of pirate life and offers a rare look at the 17th-century botany and anthropology of Central and South America and the East Indies. 7 illustrations.
In 1674, it is three years since Henry Morgan’s pirates sacked Panama. England is now at peace with Spain, and soon France, Holland, and Spain will briefly be at peace among themselves. But soon buccaneers and their French counterparts, the filibusters, will seize the opportunity of material gain presented by the far-flung and failing Spanish Empire. And Spain will produce its own notorious pirates, whose depredations against the English and French will become legend. These men of opportunistic calculation and desperate courage live in a wilder, larger, and richer time and place than any other frontier in modern history—the Spanish Main. Unflinchingly, unhesitatingly, unabashedly, they will take to the peaceful seas for riches by force of arms. The world will witness piracy on a grand scale. While Benerson Little’s previous work showed brilliantly how pirates actually plied their trade, The Buccaneer’s Realm focuses on their cultural and physical environments. It describes not merely their deeds but their world—the New World of the Spanish Main and its many peoples, freedoms, dangers, and exploits that are the foundation of the Americas. A detailed and lively description of pirate life, it will especially appeal to readers with an interest in maritime, naval, military, and colonial history, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and armchair adventurers.
A global account of pirates and their modus operandi from the middle ages to the present day In the twenty-first century piracy has regained a central place in Western culture, thanks to a surprising combination of Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as well as the dramatic rise of modern-day piracy around Somalia and the Horn of Africa. In this global history of the phenomenon, maritime terrorism and piracy expert Peter Lehr casts fresh light on pirates. Ranging from the Vikings and Wako pirates in the Middle Ages to modern day Somali pirates, Lehr delves deep into what motivates pirates and how they operate. He also illuminates the state's role in the development of piracy throughout history: from privateers sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth to pirates operating off the coast of Africa taking the law into their own hands. After exploring the structural failures which create fertile ground for pirate activities, Lehr evaluates the success of counter-piracy efforts--and the reasons behind its failures.
Explores the sexual world of the one of the most fabled and romanticized character in history--the pirate Pirates are among the most heavily romanticized and fabled characters in history. From Bluebeard to Captain Hook, they have been the subject of countless movies, books, children's tales, even a world-famous amusement park ride. In Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, historian B. R. Burg investigates the social and sexual world of these sea rovers, a tightly bound brotherhood of men engaged in almost constant warfare. What, he asks, did these men, often on the high seas for years at a time, do for sexual fulfillment? Buccaneer sexuality differed widely from that of other all- male institutions such as prisons, for it existed not within a regimented structure of rule, regulations, and oppressive supervision, but instead operated in a society in which widespread toleration of homosexuality was the norm and conditions encouraged its practice. In his new introduction, Burg discusses the initial response to the book when it was published in 1983 and how our perspectives on all-male societies have since changed.
During his stay in the West Indies as a Dominican missionary, pere Labat was able to observe buccaneers and their ships. His adventures in this turbulent period are varied, but it is in the descriptions of the lives of the different races that the value of his memoirs resides.
Investigating the fascination pirates hold over the popular imagination, Peter Earle takes the fable of ocean-going Robin Hoods sailing under the "banner of King Death" and contrasts it with the murderous reality of robbery, torture and death and the freedom of a short, violent life on the high seas. The Pirate Wars charts 250 years of piracy, from Cornwall to the Caribbean, from the 16th century to the hanging of the last pirate captain in Boston in 1835. Along the way, we meet characters like Captain Thomas Cocklyn, chosen as commander of his ship "on account of his brutality and ignorance," and Edward Teach, the notorious "Blackbeard," who felt of his crew "that if he did not now and then kill one of them they would forget who he was." Using material from British Admiralty records, this is an account of the Golden Age of pirates and of the men of the legitimate navies of the world charged with the task of finally bringing these cutthroats to justice.
The Pirate Encyclopedia, as the essential companion for scholars, students, and a general audience intrigued by tales and facts, offers the most complete body of data available on the legitimacy of more than 7.000 adventurers as subjects of investigation.
Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.