Piracy (Latin American Studies)

Introduction

From early colonization in the 1490s to independence in the 1820s, piracy, or larceny at or by descent from the sea, plagued Latin America. Although some native peoples such as the Caribs raided by sea and even held hostages for ransom, most pirates in colonial Latin America were northern Europeans hoping to poach on Spanish and Portuguese gains—mainly gold and silver on its way to Europe or Asia—but also enslaved Africans, sugar, alcohol, and tobacco. French pirates were first to raid Iberian American ships and towns, from Columbus’s first voyages to the late 1560s. Next came English corsairs in the era of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1604), then Dutch raiders between the 1590s and about 1650. Sovereigns or state officials sponsored many of these pillagers, and most set out from European ports. The next wave of piracy, led by multinational marauders between about 1650 and 1700, was different. This was the heyday of the Caribbean buccaneers, motley crews of out-of-work soldiers and ex-indentured servants who used bases in Jamaica, St. Domingue, and elsewhere to launch their raids and launder their gains. Welshman Henry Morgan became a celebrity after leading an amphibious raid on Panama City in 1670–1671, an act that won him knighthood and the lieutenant governorship of Jamaica, but the international tide soon turned against the pirates. Spanish, English, and French repression in the 1680s drove many buccaneers into the eastern Pacific, where they raided until the early 1690s. The 1702–1713 War of the Spanish Succession absorbed many buccaneers, but survivors returned to lead another great wave of pillage lasting from 1713 to 1730. This Golden Age of piracy produced Blackbeard and Bartholomew Roberts, plus legendary female pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read. “Black Bart” stole Brazilian gold, but much piracy in this period damaged English shipping, provoking harsh reprisals by the British admiralty courts and fledgling Royal Navy. A century of privateering, or state-sponsored private raids in wartime, followed, and some of the biggest prizes of the colonial period were taken by British privateers, mostly in the Pacific. Uninhibited piracy resurged in the Americas during the Napoleonic Wars and independence struggles. By this time the British navy used antipiracy laws to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. Scholars of colonial Latin America have been interested in piracy for many years, and some of the most balanced studies of the topic have been written by Latin American historians or others capable of comparing the Spanish and Portuguese documentary records with those produced by foreign marauders.

General Overviews

Early modern piracy in the Americas has been frequently glossed, but few scholars have treated it in the perspective of overall Spanish and Portuguese developments, or worked with primary sources. A pioneer historian of piracy who used Spanish manuscript sources to balance the narrative was Haring (Haring 1910). Other historical works that have blended Spanish sources with those produced in France, England, and the Netherlands include Gerhard 1990, Andrews 1978, Earle 2003, Moreau 2006, and Lane 1998. Lucena Salmoral 1992 offers a sound narrative in Spanish, mostly drawn from secondary sources. Latimer 2009 places English piracy, much of it dependent on Spanish treasure, at the center of his history of the rise of the British Empire.

Andrews, Kenneth R. The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.
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A thorough examination of corsair activity in the early Spanish Caribbean, mostly comparing English and Spanish accounts, along with some French and Dutch material.
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Earle, Peter. The Pirate Wars. London: Methuen, 2003.
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A rich narrative of early modern piracy in the Americas by a venerable historian of the topic. Earle argues, prefiguring Latimer 2009, that not only English piracy but also English suppression of piracy helped establish the British Empire. The precious metals came mostly from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
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Gerhard, Peter. Pirates of the Pacific, 1575–1742. 2d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
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Originally published in 1960, this remains a valuable and carefully researched examination of corsairs, buccaneers, and other raiders of the Spanish Pacific.
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Haring, Clarence Henry. The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVIIth Century. London: Methuen, 1910.
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A pioneering work blending archival materials from England and Spain to round out the history of buccaneering in its 17th-century heyday. The 1655 English seizure of Jamaica proved a fateful loss for Spain and its circum-Caribbean colonies.
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Lane, Kris. Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998.
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A long-range and hemispheric narrative of early modern piracy that emphasizes Spanish responses and the overall economic and social effects of two and a half centuries of pillage. Also published under the title Blood and Silver: A History of Piracy in the Caribbean and Central America (Oxford: Signal, 1999).
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Latimer, Jon. Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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A serious examination of mostly English buccaneers, emphasizing the shifting blend of nonstate and official violence in relation to Caribbean trade and plunder.
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Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. Piratas, bucaneros, filibusteros y corsarios en América: Perros, mendigos y otros malditos del mar. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.
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A good general overview of early modern piracy in the Spanish American context, based mostly on secondary sources.
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Moreau, Jean Pierre. Pirates: Flibuste et piraterie dans la Caraïbe et les mers du sud, 1522–1725. Paris: Tallandier, 2006.
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An especially valuable study of French corsairs and buccaneers in the Americas that makes use of Spanish and French archival sources.
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National and Regional Studies

The study of piracy has often been framed and skewed by nationalist assumptions or viewpoints, many of them anachronistic, yet pirate attacks have also fostered regionalist and nationalist responses. English corsairs and pirates in the Pacific, as treated by Williams 1997, were intensely aware of their “Englishness” in the face of “Spanish” enemies and targets, although the latter hardly presented a unified front. Goslinga 1971 and Goslinga and van Yperen 1985 show the Dutch to have taken a similar posture when facing the Spanish and their diverse subjects in the Caribbean. Along with raiding, there was considerable trading—and switching sides. Local identities were critically important, and pirate attacks tended to foster colonial disunity as often as not. This is one of the topics of Gerassi-Navarro 1999, its study of pirates in Spanish American literature. Ramírez Aznar 2001 shows how the diverse citizens and Spanish subjects of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, including Maya peoples and so-called colored militiamen, responded to repeated pirate attacks, and Apestegui 2000 offers a larger, Spanish Caribbean view. Some pirate land targets, as Kupperman 1993 demonstrates in the case of Providence Island, off the Nicaraguan coast, were bounced back and forth between imperial powers. Providence became Spanish Providencia, now a Colombian territory. For the 1710 corsair-led French attack on Rio de Janeiro, see Boxer 1962.

Apestegui, Cruz. Piratas en el Caribe: Los ladrones del mar: Corsarios, filibusteros y bucaneros 1493–1700. Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2000.
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A well-illustrated and scholarly study of piracy in the Spanish Pacific from the time of Columbus to the end of the buccaneer heyday.
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Boxer, Charles. R. The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
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A wide-ranging book on Brazil that treats the French siege of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the great Minas Gerais gold rush.
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Gerassi-Navarro, Nina. Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
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A fine literary examination of Spanish and Spanish American texts on piracy from the 16th to 19th centuries, often circling back to the touchstone figure of Francis Drake.
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Goslinga, Cornelis. The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971.
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A foundational study of Dutch trade and plunder in the Spanish Caribbean, with solid coverage of corsairs such as Cornelis Jol, a.k.a. Houtebeen (Peg-leg), and Piet Heyn.
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Goslinga, Cornelis, and Maria J. L. van Yperen. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680–1791. Dover, NH: Van Gorcum, 1985.
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Continues Goslinga’s thorough examination of Dutch privateering, trade (including contraband), and colonization in the Caribbean and Wild Coast of South America.
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Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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An entirely original work, with Puritans as pirates struggling to survive on a tiny island off the eastern shore of Nicaragua.
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Ramírez Aznar, Luis. De piratas y corsarios: La piratería en la península de Yucatán. Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2001.
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A scholarly study of this chronically vulnerable region of Mexico, site of repeated attacks by mostly 17th-century buccaneers.
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Williams, Glyndwr. The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
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A magisterial treatment of English corsair, pirate, and privateer voyages in the Pacific in the age of sail, from Drake to Anson.
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Collections

Pennell 2001 offers a useful mix of pirate studies from different disciplines, ranging from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Requemora and Linon-Chipon 2002 provides a similar mix, with an emphasis on French trends.

Pennell, C. R., ed. Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
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A kind of pirate studies “all-star” collection, with essays on pirate codes, global raiding patterns, sexuality, and much more.
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Requemora, Sylvie, and Sophie Linon-Chipon, eds. Les tyrans de la mer: Pirates, corsaires et flibustiers. Paris: Sorbonne/CELAT, 2002.
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A valuable Francophone complement to collections that privilege Anglophone marauders.
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Primary Sources

Few pirates wished to leave records of their exploits, because this could incriminate them before various courts. Those who saw their acts as patriotic or heroic rather than criminal were less reticent, and a number of journals from the buccaneer and privateer eras survive, mostly in English and French. Other primary sources include accounts of attacks by Spanish subjects, some of them survivors or former captives. Charts were commonly made, stolen, copied, and destroyed, changing hands with each attack. None that we know of, however, marked buried treasure with an “X.”

Maps and Illustrations

Most sea raiders failed to illustrate their adventures, but many of them handled or drew up maps and rutters, or sea charts. These were often taken from captured Spanish or Portuguese vessels or drawn with the help of Spanish or Portuguese pilots. Some pirates offered these maps and charts to skeptical sovereigns or officials as “military intelligence.” Such was the case with the stolen “buccaneer’s atlas” finely edited and introduced in Howse, et al. 1992. More illustrations and maps are available from the earlier period of Atlantic piracy and corsairing, in part because these acts (at least against the Spanish) were less clearly defined as criminal. Drake’s 1585–1586 Caribbean expedition was thus lavishly mapped by Baptista Boazio c. 1587 (The Cultures & History of the Americas), and a much wider range of corsair acts was illustrated in de Bry 1596. More enigmatic is the so-called Drake Manuscript, a treasure trove of late-16th-century illustrations from the Caribbean, most of which have rather little to do with piracy (Kraemer 1996). Of special use to historians of piracy, however, are rare depictions of ports, indigenous vessels, and mining and refining activities.

The Cultures & History of the Americas. Online exhibition, Jay I. Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress.
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Baptista Boazio accompanied Francis Drake on his 1585–1586 voyage to the Caribbean, which included pillaging stops in the Cape Verde Islands, Santo Domingo, Cartagena de Indias, and St. Augustine, Florida. Filled with strange fish, caimans, and 16th-century sailing vessels, Boazio’s hand-colored maps are a fantastic resource.
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de Bry, Theodor. Historia Americae. Vol. 5. Frankfurt: 1596.
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Many copies of this influential Flemish engraver’s most reproduced work may be found online, including the US Library of Congress’s Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake. De Bry illustrated pirate attacks (none of which he witnessed) in various parts of the Spanish Caribbean in the 16th century. Outstanding are the engravings of French corsair attacks on Havana and Cartagena de Indias, related in the text by Girolamo Benzoni.
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Howse, Derek, Norman J. Thrower, Basil Ringrose, Tony A. Cimolina, and David B. Quinn, eds. A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner, a Sea Atlas and Sailing Directions of the Pacific Coast of the Americas, 1682. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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The introduction focuses on buccaneer adventures in the Spanish Pacific, where this atlas was captured from merchants, but Atlantic bases are also described. Of special interest is a brief treatment of late-17th-century geographic knowledge and navigation techniques.
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Kraemer, Ruth S., trans. The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Histoire naturelle des Indes. London: André Deutsch, 1996.
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A c. 1586 natural history of the Caribbean, apparently composed and illustrated by a French Huguenot corsair (the relationship with Drake is tenuous). It includes images of indigenous Carib raiders in canoes as well as pirate and Spanish vessels from the era of Drake.
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Letters and Narrative Accounts

Despite the problem of self-incrimination, a considerable number of pirates were willing and able chroniclers of their own deeds. Most surviving pirate journals or firsthand accounts were composed by 17th-century buccaneers. Many pirate journalists were surgeons or pilots who saw themselves as somewhat detached “participant-observers,” not hardcore cutthroats. Such was the case with Alexander Exquemelin (Exquemelin 2000), Lionel Wafer (Wafer 1970), and William Dampier (Dampier 2007). The better-known, early-18th-century accounts describe contemporary miscreants mostly from a distance, often with some ambivalence as to authorship. This was a time when aiding or abetting piracy could get you hanged, so pseudonyms were a good idea. Authorial distance is most evident in Johnson 1998 (or Daniel Defoe’s work, as some have argued), originally published in 1724. Sixteenth-century documents, by contrast, vary in tone and form but are mostly accounts from the victims’ side, usually in Spanish. Alsedo y Herrera 1883 is a rare Spanish history of piracy from the Golden Age, and Wright 1932 and Wright 1935 remain valuable Spanish document sources. Hampden 1972 pairs well with Wright 1932, offering English accounts of the same attacks.

Alsedo y Herrera, Dionisio de. Piraterías y agresiones de los ingleses y de otros pueblos de Europa en la América Española desde el siglo XVI al XVIII. Edited by D. Justo Zaragoza. Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández, 1883.
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Although Spanish and Spanish American writers routinely recounted pirate attacks and colonial responses from the 16th century onward, this is the first Spanish narrative history of the topic. The author was a colonial official in what is today Ecuador. First published in 1740.
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Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World. Introduction by Kris Lane. Warwick, NY: 1500 Books, 2007.
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An unaltered reprint of this classic buccaneer account of his global travels in the late 17th century, with many references to Caribbean natural history reminiscent of Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America. Many other editions of this work are available. Originally published 1697.
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Exquemelin, Alexander O. (a.k.a., John Esquemeling). The Buccaneers of America. Translated by Alexis Brown. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.
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Reprint of a 1969 translation of the original edition by Alexis Brown. First published in Dutch in 1678 and soon translated into many European languages, Exquemelin’s account is perhaps the single most influential source on the history of Caribbean piracy. A full-text, page-turning version of the original Dutch edition is available at the Library of Congress website for the Kislak Collection.
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Hampden, John, ed. Francis Drake, Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972.
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A valuable collection of materials, including many from Drake’s piratical exploits in the 1570s, when he allied with Panamanian maroons. Pairs nicely with Irene Wright’s translations of Spanish documents (Wright 1932 and Wright 1935) and other collections from the Hakluyt Society series.
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Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates. Introduction by David Cordingly. New York: Lyons, 1998.
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A large-format edition of this classic work, often attributed to Daniel Defoe (Cordingly explains why he questions this attribution). It constitutes a virtual bible of early-18th-century Anglo-American Atlantic piracy and is the main source of information on renowned figures such as Blackbeard, Sam Bellamy, Ann Bonny, and Mary Read. Markus Rediker, in Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates of the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon, 2004), has done the most to find corroborating documents. Originally published 1724.
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Lussan, Raveneau de. Raveneau de Lussan: Buccaneer of the Spanish Main and Early French Filibuster of the Pacific. Edited and translated by Marguerite E. Wilbur. Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1930.
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Venerable translation of a rare French buccaneer memoir (also available in a 1992 French edition). More than most English-speaking pirates in his day, Raveneau de Lussan writes frankly of the boredom and thirst for adventure that seems to have driven him more than anything to become a freebooter.
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Wafer, Lionel. A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America. New York: B. Franklin, 1970.
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A key narrative of this famous buccaneer and physician’s life among the Cunacuna Indians of eastern Panama, and partial inspiration for the failed Scottish Darien colony. Originally published in 1699.
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Wright, Irene Aloha, ed. Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–1580. London: Hakluyt Society, 1932.
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One of Wright’s several finely rendered and annotated collections of translated Spanish documents from the Archive of the Indies, regarding the corsairing activities of the Elizabethans.
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Wright, Irene Aloha, ed. Nederlandsche Zeevaarders op de Eilanden in de Caraïbische Zee en aan de Kust van Columbia en Venezuela gedurende de jaren 1621–1648(9); Documenten Hoofdzakelijk uit het Archivo General de Indias. 2 vols. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Kemink en Zoon, 1935.
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A fine collection of transcribed documents from Seville’s Archive of the Indies, pertaining to colonial defense against Dutch corsairs.
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Document Collections

Few authors have thus far attempted to put together “piracy readers” of the sort commonly assigned in history classes, although Antony 2007 is a fine exception. Jameson 1923, a venerable collection, is still quite useful, although many of its sources may now be found online. The most comprehensive printed collection of documentary sources for the Anglo-American pirates is Baer 2007.

Antony, Robert J., ed. Pirates in the Age of Sail. New York: Norton, 2007.
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A mix of introductory essays and documents regarding piracy worldwide, but with a considerable portion devoted to Golden Age piracy.
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Baer, Joel H. British Piracy in the Golden Age: History and Interpretation, 1660–1730. 4 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007.
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A massive facsimile collection of English-language primary sources on Golden Age piracy, with commentary and bibliography.
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Jameson, J. Franklin, ed. Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents. New York: Macmillan, 1923.
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Still a fine cache of English and colonial documents for piracy and privateering in the Golden Age.
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Archaeology and Geography

Archaeologists began to take a special interest in pirate sites in the 1960s, when new technologies enabled researchers to work underwater for the first time. The sunken city of Port Royal, Jamaica, continues to draw scholarly attention. A sampling of pirate-related archaeology since this pioneering era may be found in Skowronek and Ewen 2006. An archaeologist who has devoted most of his career to excavating pirate vessels is Barry Clifford. His popular books (Clifford 2002, Clifford and Kinkor 2007) have blended material culture, social history, and even the history of the slave trade to explore the meaning of pirate wrecks. Galvin 1999 highlights the geography of Caribbean piracy, centering on the fabled island of Tortuga.

Clifford, Barry. The Lost Fleet: The Discovery of a Sunken Armada from the Golden Age of Piracy. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.
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One of several books regarding pirate vessels by this celebrated marine archeologist, here in the Caribbean context.
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Clifford, Barry, and Kenneth J. Kinkor, with Sharon Simpson. Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007.
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This is the companion book to a popular National Geographic exhibition relating the story of the 1717 wreck of the Whydah, found and excavated by Barry Clifford off Cape Cod. Contains good pictures of artifacts recovered from this rare pirate wreck.
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Galvin, Peter R. Patterns of Pillage: A Geography of Caribbean-Based Piracy in Spanish America, 1536–1718. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
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A geographer’s take on early modern Caribbean piracy. Galvin ties piracy to rarely studied buccaneer subsistence and market activities such as turtle hunting and logwood cutting.
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Skowronek, Russell K., and Charles R. Ewen, eds. X Marks the Spot: The Archaeology of Piracy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
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An assortment of articles on key excavations (most of them underwater) from Port Royal, Jamaica, to Cape Cod.
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Defense

Historians of piracy have long debated the effectiveness of Spanish defense against pirates. Was it insufficient, excessive, badly deployed? Or was it adequate, appropriate to the threat, and largely well arranged given cost constraints, distances, and poor communications? Haring 1918, which traces the evolution of Spanish defenses at sea and on land, can still be read profitably a century after its initial publication. Hoffman 1980 offers a detailed accounting of Spanish defense costs in the era of early French and Elizabethan corsairs. As Haring also pointed out, the early Habsburgs put the burden of defense on colonists and shippers. This policy was all but reversed under Philip III and Philip IV, as shown by Phillips 1986 in its detailed study of Spanish shipbuilding in the aftermath of Piet Heyn’s 1628 raid in Matanzas, Cuba. Marley 1992 and Marley 1993 look at both sides to see how corsairs and their victims acted along the vulnerable coasts of Central America and Mexico. Sack of Veracruz (Marley 1993) is a tour-de-force reconstruction of a major buccaneer raid to compare with the better-known study in Earle 2007 of Henry Morgan’s raid on Panama, and Ojeda 1995 offers a similarly detailed look at coastal defense against buccaneers in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Earle, Peter. The Sack of Panamá: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007.
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Reprint of the 1982 edition (with a slightly different title). A gripping, blow-by-blow account based on primary sources from English and Spanish archives. Challenges the contemporary narrative of alleged eyewitness Alexander Exquemelin.
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Haring, Clarence. Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918.
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Essential background reading for anyone interested in the development of piracy in the Atlantic world. Pirates creep into the narrative at every turn.
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Hoffman, Paul E. The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
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An economic analysis of Spanish defense against 16th-century corsairs, based on original documents.
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Marley, David F. Pirates and Engineers: Dutch and Flemish Adventurers in New Spain (1607–1697). Windsor, Canada: Netherlandic Press, 1992.
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A small but valuable collection of stories regarding the Dutch corsairing heyday in Mexico and Central America, mostly based on Spanish documents.
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Marley, David F. Sack of Veracruz: The Great Pirate Raid of 1683. Windsor, Canada: Netherlandic Press, 1993.
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A gripping account of this important episode, based entirely on original documents, most from Spanish and Mexican archives.
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Ojeda, Jorge V. Mérida de Yucatán de las Indias: Piratería y estrategia defensiva. Mérida, Mexico: Departamento de Comunicación Social, 1995.
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A solidly researched examination of this pirate-plagued region’s efforts at defense, using mostly 17th-century documents.
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Phillips, Carla Rahn. Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
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A wonderfully detailed examination of Spanish shipbuilding in the era of the great transatlantic fleets, with emphasis on the cost of defense against corsairs. The Spanish captain blamed for the loss of the fleet to Dutch West India Company corsair Piet Heyn in 1628 in Matanzas Bay, Cuba, takes center stage. Fighting pirates was not cheap.
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Biographies

Piracy was a complex and shifting phenomenon, and many pirates lived complex and conflicted lives. A highly controversial figure is Francis Drake, who some are loathe to call a pirate or slavetrader even though the evidence shows he was both at different times in his career. Kelsey 1998 has embraced the notion of Drake as pirate, even when he was a licensed corsair after 1585. Sugden 1990 treats him with more ambivalence. Later figures from the Anglophone pirate world include William Dampier and William Kidd. Preston and Preston 2004 highlights Dampier’s accomplishments as a natural scientist, downplaying his buccaneering activities. Ritchie 1986, by contrast, uses the life of Kidd to explore the emerging project of pirate extermination by the English navy and admiralty courts. Williams 2000 is a solid study of the privateer Anson, arguably the most successful “pirate” of the colonial period. Marley 1998 is a wonderful reference work that includes capsule biographies of many famous and lesser-known sea rogues from the colonial era.

Kelsey, Harry. Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
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A carefully researched book that uses Spanish sources to reveal the darker side of the Drake legend.
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Marley, David. Pirates and Privateers of the Americas. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1998.
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The most thorough and carefully researched collective biography of early modern Atlantic pirates.
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Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker, 2004.
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The fullest examination of Dampier’s life to date, stressing his insatiable interest in nature.
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Ritchie, Robert C. Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
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The most scholarly treatment of William Kidd’s rise and fall around the turn of the 18th century, and also a lively and absorbing read.
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Sugden, John. Sir Francis Drake. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.
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Sugden’s dispassionate biography of this most famous of all corsairs contrasts nicely with the polemical approach taken by Kelsey.
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Williams, Glyndwr. The Prize of all the Oceans: The Dramatic True Story of Commodore Anson’s Voyage around the World and How He Captured the Spanish Treasure Galleon. New York: Viking, 2000.
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A gripping account of Anson’s capture of a silver-laden Manila galleon, one of only a handful captured by pirates or privateers on either side of the Pacific.
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