pirates

Book Review: The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye

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Sorry I have been away, but I have had a few health issues, so my mind has been elsewhere. On the plus side, as I needed a distraction, I have been doing a lot of reading. 

The first novel I have been reading is The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron. When I first picked up this book, I must confess that despite my love of all things pirate, I had never heard of the legend of Jacquotte Delahaye. Maybe due to the fact that I wanted to be Anne Bonny when I was child, I refused to look at any other female pirates. 

Now there is no evidence that Jacquotte Delahaye existed, but her story exists through folklore and oral storytelling. It is said that Jacquotte was born in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to a French father and a Haitian mother in the Seventeenth Century and took to piracy after the murder of her father. Known as ‘Back from the Dead Red’ due to her striking red hair and that she faked her death to escape her enemies, the legend has it that Jacquotte was the leader of gang of pirates that took over the island of Tortuga in 1656. 

Briony Cameron takes this legend and weaves a brilliant story about loss, identity, colonialism, friendship and love. Her Jacquotte is intelligent, multilingual and a skilled shipwright, who despite her many talents and aristocratic father, is not fully accepted by society due to her mixed heritage. But when the treacherous plotting of her father and the ruling Spanish come to head, Jacquotte must take to the High Seas with her band of friends and families, who are also outsiders on the island they call home. 

The story of Jacquotte is told as flashback, as the battered and broken Jacquotte lies in a prison cell awaiting the hangman’s noose. Whilst the book contains a fair amount of tragedy, it reminded me slightly of Thelma and Louise as the despite the pain, amongst it there is strength and beauty as Jacquotte, friends and those they meet along they away, breakaway from the constraints for society and find a voice for themselves. The plight of women is a particular focus and I adored and cheered the moments, when the female characters found their strengths and their voices. 

If you love swashbuckling adventure with romance and feminism then you will love this book!  

Why We Love Pirates: The Hunt for Captain Kidd and How He Changed Piracy Forever

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By Rebecca Simon, PhD

Fun, informative and entertaining, Rebecca Simon’s book is a great introduction to everything piratey. Looking at the Golden Age of Piracy, which is between 1650-1726, Simon traces what first got the public hooked on pirates and uses the adventures/misadventures of Captain Kidd to find the answers. 

I really enjoyed reading this book as Simon not only has an engaging writing style but she also clearly knows her subject inside out and her passion for it comes across in her writing. Simon is someone who has the ability to write in an enjoyable and engaging manner, without the need to bog you down with facts and figures. Please be assured that your brain will not be hurting and you will find yourself gripped by the life of late Seventeenth and earlier Eighteenth Centuries pirates.  

The book uses the life of Captain Kidd, who was executed for piracy in 1701, to guided readers through pirate’s lives and the various communities and governments that helped their enterprise succeed and become part of popular culture. One thing that I discovered from reading this book is how much communities in the Caribbean and the then Thirteen Colonies, relied on pirates when trade blockades were in place. Pirates were almost everywhere in the New World and as Simon shows it was not just in famous pirate enclaves such as Port Royal and Nassau, but ‘respectable’ places as well. Another thing that I could kick myself for not knowing, is that those hanged for piracy were hanged at Executions Dock in Wapping, rather than Tyburn. Their hands were also tied in front of them rather than behind to make them appear repentant to the gathered masses. Were they truly repentant though?… you will need to read to find out. 

One thing that I found really came a across in the book, the links between the reasons why people became pirates and their emergence in popular culture. These men and women, for a variety of reasons, were rejected by or rejecting society and its conventions and choosing to sail under the Black Flag. But this rejection was to see pirates be catapulted into glamorous figures of fascination and entertainment. They gave people of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries the chance to dream about escaping the drudgery and conventions of their everyday lives. It is idea of escaping society, that sees us still fascinated with pirates today. I mean, who doesn’t spend their morning commute daydreaming about sailing off into the sunset in search of adventure? 

Rediscovering Treasure Island: A Timeless Adventure

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To get me back into the habit of reading regularly, I went back to my favourite book as a child and the one that started my love adventure stories- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. 

(Photo is my original copy, which is nearly 30 years old and my newer once, which was a present from my partner-can you tell, which is which?)

Robert Louis Stevenson came up with idea of pirates and buried gold, when trying to keep his stepson entertained during a wet, summers day-no DisneyPlus in 1881. It tells the story of Jim Hawkins, a boy in his early teens, who lives at the Admiral Benbow Inn with his mother and father on the South West coast of England. One day an old sailor, called Billy Bones, turns up at the Inn looking for a place to stay and the rest as they say is history. What follows is everything is everything you need in pirate story, perhaps because it is where we get most of our lore about pirates from. There is a map, buried treasure, mutiny, a tropical island, a parrot and the most famous pirate of all, Long John Silver. It is also where some of supposed ‘folklore’ regarding pirates come from, such treasure maps, walking the plank and black spots, from.

What I loved about the book and what I still love to this day, is that throughout you feel as you yourself are going on the adventure. You can feel the excitement building as Jim gets ready to leave for the island, only for the excitement to be replaced dread once people start showing their true colours. Maybe because when I first read the book it was on a particular hot day in Canada, I have always felt the obsessive heat of the island coming right off the page.  

Long John Silver is perhaps the most famous character from the book and is the inspiration for all future fictional portrayals of pirates. However, Silver in the book is a lot more than ‘Aha Jim lad’ caricature and is actually a character, who is both charming and sinister. Also, whilst many movies play on a father/son aspect of Silver and Jim’s relationship, I feel it is more ambiguous in the book. 

One thing that annoyed a child and still annoys me now, is that lack of female characters. There is only three-Jim’s mum, Silver’s wife, who is never seen and Dr Livesey’s maid (who thanks to watching endless Catherine Cookson adaptions as a child, I was convinced her and Doctor were sleeping together), who appears and disappears after one line. Jim’s mum does give a very good speech denouncing the cowardness of the men in the village but then later faints at the sight of trouble.

It is worth mentioning that when you read the book as an adult you may have a slightly different view on some of Jim’s actions. As a child doing rash, impulsive things can make perfect sense in to you. But reading them as I an adult, I did spend a lot of time thinking of ‘what the Hell are you doing’ and imagining Dr Livesey and the Squire muttering ‘for f***sake’ under their breath throughout the book. This that in mind, I can see what author, John Drake was going when he made Jim the rival in his retelling The Traitor of Treasure Island but that’s a review for another day. But I don’t think Jim is the villain, it’s more that I am kind of despairing of him! However, if you have not yet read this novel, do not despair of him too much and enjoy this classic adventure tale.