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This introductory survey to maritime predation in the Americas from the age of Columbus to the reign of the Spanish king Philip V includes piracy, privateering (state-sponsored sea-robbery), and genuine warfare carried out by professional navies.
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About the Author:
KRIS LANE is Assistant Professor of History, The College of William and Mary, Virginia. He has written widely on piracy and witchcraft in the Americas.
From Kirkus Reviews:
paper 0-7656-0257-1 Lane (History/Coll. of William & Mary) offers an overview of the history behind the romances of piracy on the ``Spanish Main.'' Lanes thesis regarding piracy in American waters (his focus here) is that by and large piracy in the Caribbean (and, significantly, in the Pacific as well) had its roots in the response of the rest of Europe to Spanish and Portuguese imperial designs on the New World. The first Caribbean pirates were, in fact, French Huguenots, English ``privateers'' (the latter ostensibly acting on behalf of Queen Elizabeth), and Dutch sea-rovers, staunch Protestants all, who were particularly ill-disposed toward the Catholicism of the Iberian thrones. The best known of thesethe Englishmen John Hawkins and Francis Drakehave earned inflated reputations as scourges of the Spaniards, but the Dutch may have inflicted even more damage on Spanish interests in the New World, as Lane points out in detail. Yet our highly colored picture of the pirates and their crews derived more from the final and briefest cycle of piracy in the New World; in the aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, just prior to the beginning of the 18th century, a new breed of buccaneer emerged, anarchic, owing allegiance to no flag but his (and, in isolated cases, her) own, and robbing from Spanish, English, French, or anyone else's shipping without discrimination. The most valuable contribution of this book is to put these most famous marauders into a larger historical context and to point out how brief their reign of seagoing terror really was. How disappointing, then, to discover that our fabled swashbucklers were little more than waterborne bandits who practiced a particularly ruthless form of political expediency. Lane recounts his tale in an amiable if somewhat dry voice, and the resulting book is more interesting than stirring. A useful corrective to the mythology of the pirate, but one wishes it were a little more hearty. (illustrations, maps, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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- PublisherRoutledge
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0765602563
- ISBN 13 9780765602565
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages216
- Rating
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