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Moonraker or the Female Pirate And Her Friends
1927. Jesse, journalist and author, is the grandniece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Moonraker tells the story of Jacky Jack's adventures as cabin-boy on a pirate ship, in 1801 and 1802, from the time he was captured out at sea to the sinking of the Moonraker in the Caribbean. One of the most exciting episodes of all is the captive's experiences in San Domingo, when the ship comes on the scene of the war between the French and Toussaint l'Ouverture, the Negro liberator. The ability to unravel unusual motives behind unusual events and adventures-so brilliantly manifested in Tom Fool, finds perfect material in this story.
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First published January 1, 1927
About the author
F. Tennyson Jesse
85 books19 followersFull name: Fryniwyd Tennyson, an English criminologist, journalist and author (she also wrote as Wynifried Margaret Tennyson)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2023
Moonraker is an adventure novel written by an author with the wonderful name of Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse. Published in 1927 it wished to capture the same spirit as Treasure Island and the similarly named Moonfleet. It’s a short novel that covers a lot of material, from pirates, to women’s liberation and the betrayal of Toussaint L’Overture.
It’s framed as a yarn being told by an old salt, with the first few chapters being a peculiar mix of purple prose and seaman’s slang. Our hero, Jacky Jacka, not only has a girl’s name but is often described as being particularly feminine in his beauty with his long golden hair, rosy cheeks and ‘eyes of the greenish-blue of the deep water near the rocks.’ Not much is done with his prettiness, which is surprising given the twist towards the end of the book. He’s also sensitive and saves a witch from being stoned. She lets him glimpse his future and he sees images he’ll then encounter in the course of the book.
He sets sail on the Picksie, a ship whose captain has a deep relationship with. The ship is attacked by pirates on board the Moonraker, and rather than build up any tension, the ship is attacked and exploded within a paragraph. Jacky is then forced to live among the pirates where he develops a fixation with their captain, Lovel. He is also sick to the stomach to now be a pirate, though when the pirate attacks a French ship, he ‘could not but enjoy it’, which is described as ‘a thing not to be wondered at’. They capture a young French man called Raoul, whose presence changes Captain Lovel and sets them on a course to Santa Domingo and not the nearby island of Tortuga, where the pirates planned to search for Kidd’s treasure.
Santa Domingo is in a place of relative peace, having fought a number of slave uprisings and slave-owner backlashes, the country is now stable under Toussaint L’Overture and even building forward-looking architecture celebrating the now free island. However, Napoleon has sent a fleet with the instructions to lure and capture the ‘rebel’ leaders and bring the country back under the thumb of the French.
The next part of the book follows Jacky as he follows L’Overture in his last fights. He’s doing well but his generals are lured over to the French and he is eventually tricked into captivity. The events themselves, the military to-ing and fro-ing, the ambushes and battles, are all rushed through as quickly as possible in order to spend time with Jacky’s point of view of L’Overture and his struggle. He’s portrayed as the wisest and most authentic man Jacky has ever met, yet Jacky is constantly surprised to be admiring a black man. He regards L’Overture as ugly, brutish and compares him to an ape yet also recognises wells of humanity, goodness and even a shadow of divinity in him. It’s a strange mix and reads oddly ninety-odd years after the novel was published. A modern reader finds themself wondering if the surprise and recognising a ‘great’ person who is also black is supposed to be one encountered by the 1790s figure of Jacky, or if it’s a surprise expected in the 1920’s reader. Suffice to say there are also n-words thrown about the text by both characters and narrator.
There’s a lot of potential in the Toussaint L’Overture section, as there was in the forced piracy section but the book moves too quickly to properly develop them, a fault with much of the book. There are some wonderful sections, particularly when L’Overture compares Raoul’s political and idealistic conception with freedom with the genuine struggle for bodily freedom he has had to fight. It’s a good point and well made, but a slower, more fleshed out version of this book could have developed those points and differences far better (though maybe to the detriment of the book’s nippiness).
Raoul’s original plan was to evacuate L’Overture and his fancy-bit on the Moonraker and take them to America but with L’Overture captured, it’s just Jacky, Raoul, fancy-bit and fancy-bit’s friend who board the ship. Captain Lovel is acting even stranger, refusing to attack legitimate targets and seeming to risk everyone’s life on board the ship to take Raoul back to France. In a tense dinner scene, the captain invites the main characters to a dinner where Jacky is the waiter. The Captain enters wearing an elaborate frock and fancy-bit thinks he’s having a laugh and cross-dressing, declaring that as handsome a man as he is, he’s a really ugly woman. This is when it’s revealed that Captain Lovel is actually a woman called Sophy.
It’s a really striking scene, because Sophy/Lovel had picked the dress as the prettiest they’d ever seen and was hoping it could be a wedding dress - in a wedding with Raoul. There’s something so cruel in the description of her ugliness in it, the opposite of a romantic movie glow-up. Then the crew mutiny and all see the truth of their captain. She fights, bare-breasted, the dress stripped down to the waist, skewering numerous mutinous pirates. When a stale-mate ensures, she loads the named characters on a longboat and explodes the Moonraker…
…Jacky lives his life, becomes a captain himself and marries but he’s always haunted by the two realest people he’s ever known, Toussaint L’Overture and Sophy Lovel, who make his wife seem as insubstantial as smoke in comparison. When he feels this, he kisses his wife, who’s pleased by the act of affection but doesn’t understand why. It’s a surprisingly moving and sombre ending to an oddly perfunctory story.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this book would have been better if it had been expanded and deepened, there were so many interesting stories of freedom vs constraint in the lives of Jacky, Sophy and L’Overture that could have been compared. There was the whole element of Jacky’s prettiness, how he as a born male would have passed as a woman better than Sophy could. There was the whole tragedy of L’Overture and his betrayal, as well as the hidden love of Sophy for Raoul. If the book was bulked out, it would have lost its adventure story bracket, and perhaps Tennyson Jesse wrote it for a quick buck, but I couldn’t help but feel that this book could have been more. It was good, but there are seeds of great in it.
It’s framed as a yarn being told by an old salt, with the first few chapters being a peculiar mix of purple prose and seaman’s slang. Our hero, Jacky Jacka, not only has a girl’s name but is often described as being particularly feminine in his beauty with his long golden hair, rosy cheeks and ‘eyes of the greenish-blue of the deep water near the rocks.’ Not much is done with his prettiness, which is surprising given the twist towards the end of the book. He’s also sensitive and saves a witch from being stoned. She lets him glimpse his future and he sees images he’ll then encounter in the course of the book.
He sets sail on the Picksie, a ship whose captain has a deep relationship with. The ship is attacked by pirates on board the Moonraker, and rather than build up any tension, the ship is attacked and exploded within a paragraph. Jacky is then forced to live among the pirates where he develops a fixation with their captain, Lovel. He is also sick to the stomach to now be a pirate, though when the pirate attacks a French ship, he ‘could not but enjoy it’, which is described as ‘a thing not to be wondered at’. They capture a young French man called Raoul, whose presence changes Captain Lovel and sets them on a course to Santa Domingo and not the nearby island of Tortuga, where the pirates planned to search for Kidd’s treasure.
Santa Domingo is in a place of relative peace, having fought a number of slave uprisings and slave-owner backlashes, the country is now stable under Toussaint L’Overture and even building forward-looking architecture celebrating the now free island. However, Napoleon has sent a fleet with the instructions to lure and capture the ‘rebel’ leaders and bring the country back under the thumb of the French.
The next part of the book follows Jacky as he follows L’Overture in his last fights. He’s doing well but his generals are lured over to the French and he is eventually tricked into captivity. The events themselves, the military to-ing and fro-ing, the ambushes and battles, are all rushed through as quickly as possible in order to spend time with Jacky’s point of view of L’Overture and his struggle. He’s portrayed as the wisest and most authentic man Jacky has ever met, yet Jacky is constantly surprised to be admiring a black man. He regards L’Overture as ugly, brutish and compares him to an ape yet also recognises wells of humanity, goodness and even a shadow of divinity in him. It’s a strange mix and reads oddly ninety-odd years after the novel was published. A modern reader finds themself wondering if the surprise and recognising a ‘great’ person who is also black is supposed to be one encountered by the 1790s figure of Jacky, or if it’s a surprise expected in the 1920’s reader. Suffice to say there are also n-words thrown about the text by both characters and narrator.
There’s a lot of potential in the Toussaint L’Overture section, as there was in the forced piracy section but the book moves too quickly to properly develop them, a fault with much of the book. There are some wonderful sections, particularly when L’Overture compares Raoul’s political and idealistic conception with freedom with the genuine struggle for bodily freedom he has had to fight. It’s a good point and well made, but a slower, more fleshed out version of this book could have developed those points and differences far better (though maybe to the detriment of the book’s nippiness).
Raoul’s original plan was to evacuate L’Overture and his fancy-bit on the Moonraker and take them to America but with L’Overture captured, it’s just Jacky, Raoul, fancy-bit and fancy-bit’s friend who board the ship. Captain Lovel is acting even stranger, refusing to attack legitimate targets and seeming to risk everyone’s life on board the ship to take Raoul back to France. In a tense dinner scene, the captain invites the main characters to a dinner where Jacky is the waiter. The Captain enters wearing an elaborate frock and fancy-bit thinks he’s having a laugh and cross-dressing, declaring that as handsome a man as he is, he’s a really ugly woman. This is when it’s revealed that Captain Lovel is actually a woman called Sophy.
It’s a really striking scene, because Sophy/Lovel had picked the dress as the prettiest they’d ever seen and was hoping it could be a wedding dress - in a wedding with Raoul. There’s something so cruel in the description of her ugliness in it, the opposite of a romantic movie glow-up. Then the crew mutiny and all see the truth of their captain. She fights, bare-breasted, the dress stripped down to the waist, skewering numerous mutinous pirates. When a stale-mate ensures, she loads the named characters on a longboat and explodes the Moonraker…
…Jacky lives his life, becomes a captain himself and marries but he’s always haunted by the two realest people he’s ever known, Toussaint L’Overture and Sophy Lovel, who make his wife seem as insubstantial as smoke in comparison. When he feels this, he kisses his wife, who’s pleased by the act of affection but doesn’t understand why. It’s a surprisingly moving and sombre ending to an oddly perfunctory story.
I couldn’t help but wonder if this book would have been better if it had been expanded and deepened, there were so many interesting stories of freedom vs constraint in the lives of Jacky, Sophy and L’Overture that could have been compared. There was the whole element of Jacky’s prettiness, how he as a born male would have passed as a woman better than Sophy could. There was the whole tragedy of L’Overture and his betrayal, as well as the hidden love of Sophy for Raoul. If the book was bulked out, it would have lost its adventure story bracket, and perhaps Tennyson Jesse wrote it for a quick buck, but I couldn’t help but feel that this book could have been more. It was good, but there are seeds of great in it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 23, 2026
F. Tennyson Jesse, better known as the Queen of True Crime, is more famous for novels featuring the psychological aspects of crime. In ‘Moonraker, or the Female Pirate and her Friends’ (1926), she presents other angles to her writing: social and political history, feminism and knowledge of ships and sailing vessels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to give an idea of her range of interests.
Stripped of its subordinate story of piracy on the seas, and a lengthy journey aboard the Moonraker, a vessel that flies the Jolly Roger, the novel is set in the island of Santo Domingo, and the slave rebellion which led to the island’s independence from the French.
Without giving away too much, the Captain of the Moonraker is a woman in disguise, who has lived on the seas since she was a cabin “boy”, acted as a pirate, and finally won the Moonraker with the boy Jacky Jacka, the narrator, aboard her, which “Mr.” Lovel has captained ever since. Her men obeyed her implicitly, for she displayed great caring, and was never afraid to tackle vessels larger than her own, or better armed and manned, for the sake of the prize they carried.
Her disguise is never penetrated by the men; they respect her as they would any admiral of the Royal Navy, and indeed worship the loot that she led them to. In the course of one of their voyages, they light upon the island of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, and here a different kind of rebellion presents itself.
Jesse uses her characters to contrast different definitions of liberty: the escapist, lawless freedom of Captain Lovel’s pirates versus the existential, state-building freedom of Toussaint Louverture and his insurgent followers. When these two worlds collide on the shores of Santo Domingo, the narrative shifts from a conventional maritime adventure into a serious debate on human rights, loyalty, and the heavy price of systemic liberation.
Indeed, by centering the climax of the book on the Haitian struggle, Jesse subtly subverts the traditional European adventure genre. Where contemporary writers often cast colonies as mere exotic backdrops for white exploits, Jesse establishes the Black revolutionaries as the true moral vanguard of the story. The encroaching French forces, led by Napoleon’s ambitions, represent a corrupt old world order, forcing both the reader and the pirate crew to question who the true "outlaws" of the Atlantic world really are. Napoleon’s betrayal of Toussaint typifies the entire white race as a people without truth or honour.
This political upheaval mirrors the novel's underlying feminist undercurrents. Although in another of her books, Jesse denied that she was a feminist (feminism in those days being synonymous with suffragism), Jesse has always been thought of as one of the twentieth century’s early feminists. In ‘Moonraker’, she draws an intentional, sophisticated parallel between the literal, physical chains of the plantation slaves and the restrictive social codes binding women in Western civilization.
Through the true identity of Captain Lovel and the observations of young Jacky, the text suggests that the fight against tyranny on the island of Santo Domingo is fundamentally linked to a wider, universal yearning for autonomy.
For the rest, this is one of Jesse’s best novels, combining an unconventional view of history and adventure, romance and the law, politics and war.
Stripped of its subordinate story of piracy on the seas, and a lengthy journey aboard the Moonraker, a vessel that flies the Jolly Roger, the novel is set in the island of Santo Domingo, and the slave rebellion which led to the island’s independence from the French.
Without giving away too much, the Captain of the Moonraker is a woman in disguise, who has lived on the seas since she was a cabin “boy”, acted as a pirate, and finally won the Moonraker with the boy Jacky Jacka, the narrator, aboard her, which “Mr.” Lovel has captained ever since. Her men obeyed her implicitly, for she displayed great caring, and was never afraid to tackle vessels larger than her own, or better armed and manned, for the sake of the prize they carried.
Her disguise is never penetrated by the men; they respect her as they would any admiral of the Royal Navy, and indeed worship the loot that she led them to. In the course of one of their voyages, they light upon the island of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, and here a different kind of rebellion presents itself.
Jesse uses her characters to contrast different definitions of liberty: the escapist, lawless freedom of Captain Lovel’s pirates versus the existential, state-building freedom of Toussaint Louverture and his insurgent followers. When these two worlds collide on the shores of Santo Domingo, the narrative shifts from a conventional maritime adventure into a serious debate on human rights, loyalty, and the heavy price of systemic liberation.
Indeed, by centering the climax of the book on the Haitian struggle, Jesse subtly subverts the traditional European adventure genre. Where contemporary writers often cast colonies as mere exotic backdrops for white exploits, Jesse establishes the Black revolutionaries as the true moral vanguard of the story. The encroaching French forces, led by Napoleon’s ambitions, represent a corrupt old world order, forcing both the reader and the pirate crew to question who the true "outlaws" of the Atlantic world really are. Napoleon’s betrayal of Toussaint typifies the entire white race as a people without truth or honour.
This political upheaval mirrors the novel's underlying feminist undercurrents. Although in another of her books, Jesse denied that she was a feminist (feminism in those days being synonymous with suffragism), Jesse has always been thought of as one of the twentieth century’s early feminists. In ‘Moonraker’, she draws an intentional, sophisticated parallel between the literal, physical chains of the plantation slaves and the restrictive social codes binding women in Western civilization.
Through the true identity of Captain Lovel and the observations of young Jacky, the text suggests that the fight against tyranny on the island of Santo Domingo is fundamentally linked to a wider, universal yearning for autonomy.
For the rest, this is one of Jesse’s best novels, combining an unconventional view of history and adventure, romance and the law, politics and war.
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September 24, 2025A little free library find that fit the bill for a vacation read I could leave behind somewhere along the way.
Such a whiplashy reading experience in the Haiti sections - it seemed to go from saying something deeply admiring and thoughtful about Toussaint L'Ouverture and his freedom fighters to regurgitating some shockingly racist old trope, like, paragraph by paragraph. (I don't have a good sense of what background level racism to just expect from a 1920s white British author, but the contrast within one slim lil book was wild!)
The other story, about the pirate ship and its captain and crew, was a delightful adventure. Treachery, mutiny, courage, amusing references to poop decks! With little bursts of poignant emotion and profundity here and there. Heck of a closing paragraph about Jacky's life after his pirate adventures.
Such a whiplashy reading experience in the Haiti sections - it seemed to go from saying something deeply admiring and thoughtful about Toussaint L'Ouverture and his freedom fighters to regurgitating some shockingly racist old trope, like, paragraph by paragraph. (I don't have a good sense of what background level racism to just expect from a 1920s white British author, but the contrast within one slim lil book was wild!)
The other story, about the pirate ship and its captain and crew, was a delightful adventure. Treachery, mutiny, courage, amusing references to poop decks! With little bursts of poignant emotion and profundity here and there. Heck of a closing paragraph about Jacky's life after his pirate adventures.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews