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The History of Maritime Piracy

Cindy Vallar, Editor & Reviewer
P.O. Box 425, Keller, TX  76244-0425

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Books for Adults ~ History: Piracy


Cover Art: The Pirate King
The Pirate King
The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy
By Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan
Pegasus Books, 2024, ISBN 978-1-63936-595-1, US $28.95 / CAN $38.95 / UK £22.00
Available in other formats


Pirate
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He leads a mutiny in the last decade of the 17th century. He captures a ship belonging to the Indian emperor. The garnered treasure makes him very rich. As a result of this single act, he becomes the world’s first most-wanted criminal. Then he simply disappears. His name is Henry Avery, and these are the basic facts that appear in pirate histories. None satisfactorily answer the questions of who he was and what became of him.

Fast forward to 1978. Cowan and his wife are searching for a shipwreck off Orkney, and Zélide is doing a deep dive into the Scottish archives for information. One misfiled document catches her attention. It is a letter, partially encoded and written by “Avery the Pirate,” four years after he disappeared. She spends a decade tracking down its authenticity before other shipwrecks necessitate the Cowans’ complete attention. Then, in 2020, Kingsley mentions “pirates” during a visit with Rex Cowan. This book reveals what they discovered about Henry Avery and his connection to Daniel Defoe, a master spy and disseminator of misinformation, and Dr. Thomas Tenison, archbishop of Canterbury.

A Pirate King reads like a novel, even though it’s both a biography and a history. While the details on how the research was done are briefly covered, the primary foci are on the players, the influences that led them along the paths they took, and the wider picture of world events that had direct and indirect bearing on them. It is essentially a mystery story that convincingly reveals what happened to this most-wanted pirate, why he was never caught and punished, and how he fell in with a Dissenter who often found himself penniless and evading creditors.

In some regards, this depiction of Avery deviates with previously published books on the pirate. Instead, it portrays him as a more complex person and provides rationales for why he went on the account and why he joined forces with Defoe and Tenison. Using a 1709 publication (written by an author whose identity can’t be verified) to show Avery’s mindset during the pillaging of the Ganj-i-Sawai is somewhat questionable. It does, however, add to the smoke screen that the authors suggest was created to divert people’s attention away from the real Avery and his whereabouts.

The book includes a timeline, a center section of illustrations, a list for further reading, an index, and notes. The illustrations include photographs of the Avery letter, while one note includes an interesting hypothesis as to the identity of Captain Charles Johnson, the author of A General History of Pyrates (1724).

I have read several books on Henry Avery over the years, but The Pirate King is by far the most absorbing and compelling. It fills in the blanks that other volumes have, answering not just the who but also the why and how. Another key component is that the lives and deeds of Avery and Defoe are not related in vacuums. Instead, they unfold within the events and politics of the day to provide readers with a broader, more understandable perspective. In essence they have done what Richard Lawrence wrote to code breaker John Wallis in 1657: “If you can finde out a key whereby to picke this locke, you are able to reade any thinge.”



Review Copyright ©2024 Cindy Vallar

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