Volume 44, Number 4 · March 6, 1997
Pirate Democracy
By Kenneth Maxwell
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates
by David Cordingly
Random House, 296 pp., $25.00
The first books about pirates appeared surprisingly soon after the piracy they described. The most successful of all the early pirates, Henry Morgan, who sacked the Spanish colonial city of Panama in 1671, was portrayed as a monster of depravity and cruelty in Alexander Exquemelin's best-selling Buccaneers of America, first published in Dutch in 1678, and in English in 1684. Morgan brought suit for defamation of character. He strongly objected to a passage which said that he had first gone to the West Indies as an indentured servant and argued that, because the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, authorized his raids against the Spanish possessions, he was not a pirate. The matter was settled out of court and Morgan received substantial damages.
Review, 5957 words
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