Real Caribbean Pirates: Rogues, Scoundrels, Heroes, and Treasures.

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Younger readers might find it difficult to believe, but there were pirates in the Caribbean before Johnny Depp. Dan Asfar, whose previous publications include Outlaws and Lawmen of the West and biographies of Metis rebel leaders Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, renews his interest in popular history and biographies under the Folklore Publishing label, noted for its lively pop histories of mobsters, gangsters, and rum-runners of the 1920s and 1930s.

Real Caribbean Pirates is written in a similar vein—straightforward, unpretentious, lively third-person narrative, with its larger-than-life protagonists given licence to express themselves in colourful, in-character monologues and dialogues, through the magic of narrative, without psychobabble or phony psychology. This entertaining history, which could be read as juvenile literature, is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Spaniards, Bucaneers and the First Wave of Piracy in the New World,” contains three chapters, devoted to Sir Francis Drake, the Queen’s Pirate, the three campaigns of Henry Morgan, and the rise and fall of Francois L’Ollonais. Drake (of Armada fame), perhaps the best known of the Elizabethan sea captains, was the terror of the Caribbean throughout the 1570s and 1580s, and the scourge of Spanish ships whose treasure and crew he treated with English scorn and entitlement, all in the name of the so-called Virgin Queen. Captain Henry Morgan (of rum fame), known for his cruelty and brutality, continually raided the Spanish Main in the late 1660s and 1670s, and became the provisional governor of Jamaica, before dying to receive a hero’s funeral. L’Ollonais, another monster who murdered and decapitated his victims in the 1660s, was himself captured, slaughtered and eaten by the Indians on the Darien coast. For once justice was done.

In Part 2, “The Golden Age of Piracy,” Asfar devotes Chapter 4 to “The Dread Pirate Blackbeard,” alias Edward Teach, who from doubtful origins turned to piracy (and some fifty wives) after the wars with France and Spain, before being captured and executed in North Carolina. Chapter 5, “Rackham, Bonny and Read,” is perhaps the strangest story, about Calico Jack Rackham (c.1718), and Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose secret lives as women pirates (disguised as men) became complicated romantically with men and each other, became pregnant, and… Rackham was deservedly hanged. Chapter 6, “The Wretched Edward Low,” paints the devilish character of a murdering psychopath who terrorized the Caribbean in the 1720s, then disappeared without trace, or sympathy, around 1724.

This easy-to-read informative collection of historical biographies is rounded out by a one-page list of sources.