The Real History of Pirates by Manushag N. Powell

The Real History of Pirates by Manushag N. Powell

This is a fascinating Great Courses text which explores primarily the Golden Age of Pirates in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in the Caribbean. It’s extensive, looking at myth, legend, and the reality as we currently understand it. From there it turns to eastern hemisphere pirates and shows how, like in the west, piracy depends tremendously on the political events happening on the land around it. Finally, and in some ways the most interesting, it offers a far too brief look at piracy today.

 

I enjoyed the book, but came away far from wholly satisfied. When a book called The Real History of Pirates has a blurb discussing Alexander the Great and his encounter with a pirate, I think it’s reasonable to expect the work to make a serious effort to discuss piracy throughout human history, not just in the last few centuries. While Powell does make the occasional reference to Vikings and historical acts of piracy, she doesn’t deal with these events in any serious way, which I think was a tremendous lost opportunity.

 

I also wonder why she would choose to include Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, as a “Pirate Queen”. Yes, she was a powerful ruler in Anglo-Saxon England, but that doesn’t make her a pirate. If we’re going to go down that road, almost any ruler with a fleet would qualify as a “Pirate Monarch” because Powell was quite effective in pointing out that the label “pirate” is often dependent on perspective. Victims often see their antagonists as “pirates” even if the antagonists would not use that term to describe themselves.