Pirates of the North Atlantic

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University,
reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and the editor of Northern Seas.

In his preface, William Crooker explains that this book is a response to
“the remarkable absence of books about piracy off the east coast of
North America, and particularly off the shores of Atlantic Canada.” He
has therefore put together about a dozen chapters on pirates who
“pillaged and plundered along the North America coast” during the
17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Crooker ventures once or twice to
explain why piracy flared up at certain times during those centuries,
but, for the most part, his concern is neither analytical nor scholarly;
rather, it is simply to retell stories about pirates—and, generally,
the more gory, violent, and sensational the story, the better. Yet even
general readers may find the storytelling disappointing: the language is
at times ungrammatical (with the use of words like “sunk” instead of
“sank,” and “hung” instead of “hanged”) and details are
often poorly explained (in just two sentences, Crooker has Captain Kidd
shifting his cruising grounds from Newfoundland waters to the Indian
Ocean with no attempt to account for this change of venue). The result
is an episodic collection of indifferently told stories, arranged in no
particular chronological or thematic order, and with little insight into
or understanding of piracy in the North Atlantic.

Much of the weakness of the book stems from its superficial research.
Key historians and sources were never consulted—dozens of recent works
on piracy, by specialists and generalists alike, are conspicuously
missing. The one or two scholarly sources found in the bibliography are
not used well. Thus, Crooker misunderstands the link between wartime
privateering and the resurgence of piracy in postwar periods (indeed,
there is little awareness of the commercial nature of privateering), and
he misses completely the emphasis in the recent literature on the
class-based appeal of piracy among seafarers. Some of his
“piratical” activities are in fact better categorized as lower-deck
mutinies. In short, this book does not do a good job of introducing its
readers to piracy in the North Atlantic.