Pirates and Privateers
The History of Maritime
Piracy
Cindy Vallar, Editor
& Reviewer
P.O. Box 425,
Keller, TX 76244-0425
Books for
Adults ~ History: Piracy
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
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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