#david cordingly

Owned?: No, library Page count: 253 My summary: Woodes Rogers was the man who was supposed to solve the pirate problem. Sent out to Nassau to be the governor of the notorious pirate haven, Rogers already had a sailing career and a bestselling book under his belt at the time. When he arrived in the Bahamas, some of the pirates were ready and willing to accept the legitimate life - but others would be pirates to their deaths. This, then, is the story of Woodes Rogers, and what awaited him on the other side… My rating: 3/5 My commentary:

I don't like Woodes Rogers. I know, hot take, I've got beef with a man who died in the eighteenth century. But really, what I don't like isn't him, per se, it's his legacy and how he is discussed in the modern day. Woodes Rogers was meant to be the man who took down piracy, the arm of the law in the British Caribbean, the doom of pirates from the second his ship hit the shores of Nassau. The truth is…a little more pathetic than that. Rogers did bring word of the Act of Grace which pardoned pirates who had committed their crimes before a certain date, but 'King George signed a bit of paper' hardly equates to 'Rogers was a hero'. Many of the pirates just…accepted that pardon without a fight. And of those who did fight, Rogers wasn't the one who took them down; at best, he just deputised the people who did. But above all of that, what I hate about modern-day depictions of Rogers is that they tend to glamourise and lionise him for being on the side of good…despite the fact that the man was an active slave trader throughout his entire life, and gained his money by buying and selling human beings. It would be one thing if the books I read about Rogers acknowledged this. But the ones I've seen tend to just neatly brush his active role in the slave trade under the carpet, as though it isn't important or worth mentioning. For me, that's low. That's the cowardice of trying to create a 'good guys' and a 'bad guys', a hero and a villain, when the truth is that a lot of awful, immoral things were legal and widely practiced at this point in time. We shouldn't sacrifice the nuances of history when we speak about it. But we often do.

This book is another in a long line of books that conveniently ignore Rogers' part in the slave trade. I believe it's briefly mentioned, but nothing more than that. And what's left of Rogers to discuss is…well, not a lot really. The guy didn't do all that much. He found castaway Alexander Selkirk on an island - Selkirk's story is interesting. He sent people after pirates like Vane and Blackbeard - their stories are interesting. But Woodes Rogers was just sort of there the whole time, not doing much. His governance of Nassau left a lot to be desired, and wound up with him sick and in debt, falling into an early grave. This book struggles to keep its focus on Rogers because of that, straying away into other contemporary pirates and sea battles just to keep things interesting, but all that really serves to do is make Rogers look even more pathetic, because this book about him keeps refusing to be about him. And that's really all there is to say about that.

Owned?: Yes Page count: 334 My summary: The story of women in the Age of Sail has been condensed to a short one - there were no women at sea, women were not allowed to be sailors. And while women were, in fact, not meant to go to sea, that doesn't mean that none of them did. In this 2001 look at the history of women on the ocean in the Age of Sail, David Cordingly tells us about the women who pioneered sea life - the pirates, pro-stitues, wives, nurses, helpers, and others who took to the sea in this period. My rating: 3.5/5 My commentary:

I've been looking forward to rereading this. I think I got it at a charity shop, a long time ago. David Cordingley is meant to be one of the foremost authorities on pirates in his generation, and a lot of his information is solid. Even apart from that, he's writing about women in the sailing world, a demographic who often get ignored. Oh, sure, you have your Anne Bonny and your Mary Read. Maybe, if you're knowledgable on the matter, we can throw a Mary Anne Talbot in there. But women's roles in naval life tend to get overshadowed by the vaster majority of men who were out there, and the fact that none of them were there officially. And it's not just the classic 'woman dresses as a man to go to sea' trope. Lots of women went to sea as women, which was against the rules but was still tolerated, for certain classes of women. The wives of officers on ship could be brought on so that they actually got chances to see their husbands, and so that they could have something resembling a normal life even though their husband was at sea for many moths. This book spans the Age of Sail, so a lot of it wasn't useful for my setting (1711), but it was still really good, really interesting look at women's lives on deck in this kind of period.

Now, this book is from 2001, so both scholarship has advanced since its publication and some aspects of it are looking a bit dated these days. For example, the book is largely focused on women, but there's chapters where that focus slips, and we're back to talking about Important Men (one specifically is John Paul Jones, apparently a famous womaniser, but he gets more focus than the women he's with). Oftentimes women-in-general are discussed rather than specific examples, but to be fair I imagine that we don't have a lot of first-hand evidence of what it was like to be, say, a working class sex worker at a random dockside in the 17/1800s, so you have to generalise at least somewhat. In fairness to it, too, this book is pretty comprehensive, chronicling women across class boundaries and in different nautical settings - pirates, the wives of officers, the wives of common sailors both at sea and at home, the 'girls in every port', women who served in battle, women who kept lighthouses…there's a lot here for a relatively slim volume, and it's good to see! I did enjoy this book, and I'm glad I had the chance to reread it.

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The second surge in piracy took place in the years following the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which brought peace among England, France, and Spain. The size of the Royal Navy slumped from 53,785 in 1703 to 13,430 in 1715, putting 40,000 seamen out of work.”