Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly

Last year I achieved one of my lifelong dreams – I now have a shelf on my bookcase purely devoted to pirates.

I’ve had a fascination with pirates ever since I first read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Still to this day I can remember how petrified I was when, in the early hours of a morning, twenty years ago, I first read the chapter where Blind Pew first appears and the tapping of his wooden stick echoes along the roads of the English coast.

With such rich and violent imagery to work with it would be quite an achievement to write a dull history of piracy, and in Under the Black Flag, David Cordingly expertly acknowledges the importance of Treasure Island, Peter Pan and Errol Fynn’s swashbuckling adventure pictures. Pirates due to the popularity of these works have now become a franchise, he explains, there are rides in DisneyLand devoted to pirates, you can dress up as a pirate for Halloween and there are even toys/lunchboxes/stationery available at all local retail outlets (although they are mainly aimed for young boys). Yet, Cordingly points out, the real life pirates are actually more interesting than the fictional ones.

Long John looks like a tame pantomime villain next to China’s Mrs Cheng, a ferocious warlord who terrorised the South China coast with her stepson turned lover and a fleet of hundred ships. She also had a particularly nasty way of dealing with any of her crew who disobeyed her.* Cordingly repeatedly reveals the brutish realities of pirate life, and if you really want to know about the blood, guts and gore, Chapter 7 will satisfy your curiosity, if you have the stomach for it.

All the big names in the pirate community make an appearance in Under the Black Flag; Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Calico Jack, Mary Read and Anne Bonny have pages devoted to them, and Cordingly smoothly provides a run through of their misdemeanours in wild and exotic lands such as Cuba, Haiti, Madagascar and Jamaica, and their not so glamorous demises.  

Cordingly also aims to dispel the myths that are commonly associated with pirates, for instance, they were too busy whoring and gambling to invest in a shovel and treasure map, while the pirate havens often fell apart from bankruptcy or disease; Port Royal was hit by an earthquake in 1692, and the raiding of ships did occasionally result in some large sums of dosh (British privateer Francis Drake pinched around £68 million from the Spanish fleet), but often pirates simply saw food provisions and skilled workers such as carpenters as a good haul.

I hate to produce a review which is in fact a list of everything described in the book, as you might as well read the book, however this book is packed full of such interesting facts that after reading you’ll be itching to tell anyone who will listen the difference between a buccaneer and a privateer.

Definitely worth a read, and, if you don’t have room in your bookcase for a whole shelf of pirate history books, I would recommend just buying this one.

*if you want to read more about the brutish pirates of the South China coast, Cordingly recommends a book by Dian H. Murray, which unfortunately comes with a £100 price tag!