This is one of those "accessible" piracy history books in the vein of David Cordingly, Colin Woodard, Marcus Rediker. And it has the same kind of problems as those books. Namely, it can be a little deceptive/suspicious. First of all, I absolutely cannot stand this format of footnotes, where they are not numbered in the text, just like in Woodard's Republic of Pirates. I understand most people probably don't read footnotes, but I do, and it sure gets on my nerves when I go fact-checking in the fo

This is one of those "accessible" piracy history books in the vein of David Cordingly, Colin Woodard, Marcus Rediker. And it has the same kind of problems as those books. Namely, it can be a little deceptive/suspicious. First of all, I absolutely cannot stand this format of footnotes, where they are not numbered in the text, just like in Woodard's Republic of Pirates. I understand most people probably don't read footnotes, but I do, and it sure gets on my nerves when I go fact-checking in the footnotes and see that a claim is not even LISTED, much less sourced. That makes it very hard for me to trust any information presented to me. So that being said, this book does a much better job when it is working off real evidence--which is to say, the parts of the book about the government officials and politicians, who left enough of a historical paper trail to substantiate Burgess' writing. When he starts talking about the pirates, I have to check out. He leans HEAVY on the General History, which he attributes to Daniel Defoe. This is certainly not unique to Burgess--it seems like practically every piracy author does the same thing. The General History is a book that piracy scholarship really needs to disavow, and it honestly makes me cringe when I see authors relying on it as a source of information, just because they assume their readers will trust it. In a similar vein, it was extremely irritating to find an illustration in the book of Blackbeard fighting Maynard, which Burgess describes as a "surprisingly accurate" "contemporary woodcut". This despite the fact that Maynard is drawn in a waist-length waistcoat, cutaway coat, long trousers, and BICORN hat, dating this image to something like 100 years after the event it depicts! This image is as contemporary as the General History is trustworthy.


This isn't a bad book, but the topic is broad enough (spanning multiple decades in multiple different colonies) that it gets confusing remembering who is who and why they matter. There are countless governors, lords, customs agents, council members, etc etc etc, who can keep track? Burgess tries to help us with occasional ~novelized~ passages, such as the opening passage about Blackbeard, but I have to admit they kind of annoyed me. I don't need to read half a paragraph describing someone mailing a letter, nor do I want to hear an author presenting his interpreted attribution of emotional experience as fact. (No footnotes...and often not even a qualifier like "perhaps" or "it seems likely that") And bizarrely, sometimes information is repeated throughout the book...he writes on page 118 that John Hoar commanded a ship called the John and Rebecca, "named, touchingly, after himself and his wife". Later on page 208...he writes that John Hoar named a ship the John and Rebecca, "after himself and his wife". Did you forget you told us this already? This happens a couple times because the massive scope of the book means that Burgess picks a storyline to follow for a while, but then when he chooses another thread to follow, he has to go back in time a little to catch us up on this overlapping narrative, mixing up the timelines and plots.


Well anyway, this book does have some useful information in it. I was disappointed in some pretty niche ways, but I understand most people probably won't have the same issues that I do.