THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609300208
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVID POYER
LENGTH: 65 lines
UNDER THE BLACK FLAG
The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates
DAVID CORDINGLY
Random House. 244 pp. $25.
You start Under the Black Flag with high hopes. What could be more exciting than an exploration of piracy in myth and reality, in romance and fiction, in art and the movies? What settings! - the Spanish Main, Juan Fernandes, Treasure Island, the pirate kingdom of Madagascar. What characters! - Captain Blood, Anne Bonny, Henry Morgan, your very own Edward Teach, a k a Blackbeard. D--n your eyes! Avast carping, and let's cast off!
But as seamen have found through the years, the voyage is far different from what the brochure promises.
David Cordingly's credentials augur well. Formerly with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, he there organized exhibitions on Capt. Cook, the Bounty and - the germ and genesis of this book - ``Pirates, Fact and Fiction.'' But the idea, perhaps better suited to CD-ROM, doesn't translate into a successful narrative, at least not in the hands, or at the hands, of this author.
Cordingly boards the subject with a ladder of theme-related divisions with titles such as ``Wooden Legs and Parrots,'' ``Women, Pirates and Pirates' Women,'' Torture, Violence and Marooning,'' and ``Hunting Down the Pirates.'' These may have stemmed from the original exhibition, since they seem to be groupings of icons, driven by imagery, rather than by investigation. The result is confusion and repetition, worsened by the uncritical use of word processing. You run into the same concept, if not nearly the same sentence, time and again.
Even with this drawback, however, the book might have stayed off the shoals, if a master of prose had been at the helm. One was not. Not that occasionally the pure horror and delight of the subject don't gleam through for a moment, like the glare of a burning ship through a dirty deadlight. But accounts of violence, marooning, torture, exploration and how the pirates faced execution can't help but fascinate.
Cordingly does some service by tracing the origins of the customs that swirl around piracy. Parrots were common gifts by pirates to prominent landsmen whose favor they curried to assure them safe haven, supplies and a place to retire. Many seamen in the age of sail were missing limbs and many of those unfortunates were indeed employed as cooks - as was Long John Silver. On the other hand, walking the plank is mentioned only once in all the extant literature from the period, and the idea of a map showing buried treasure seems to have originated ex nihilo from Robert Louis Stevenson's fertile brain.
In the end, though, the sheer narrative distance and plodding pace of Under the Black Flag vitiate its subject matter, and Cordingly's attempt to cover both fiction and fact in the same volume leads to simplistic generalizations that shed little light on either. There are far better books about pirates.
If you want to read the original sources, Exquemelin, Drury, Dampier, Barlow and others are available in reprint. If you prefer the fiction, Defoe, Stevenson, Barrie, Sabatini and Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor has the most shocking description of piracy I've ever read.) are ready at hand. Unless you've already read them all, best to give this one a pass. MEMO: David Poyer is a naval officer and novelist who lives on the
Eastern Shore of Virginia. His next novel, ``Down to a Sunless Sea,''
will be published by St. Martin's Press in November. by CNB