Pirate Research
Sep. 20th, 2003 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmarleyPicked up four books on piracy from the libaray yesterday, just before coming down with this wretched cold. Still, it means I've had time to read. I just finished Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly, which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pktheater was kind enough to lend me.
I really liked Under the Black Flag. It's more of a cultural history than a names/dates/places history, and Cordingly chose to arrange it thematically rather than chronologically or geographically. That makes it a very easy and entertaining book to read, and also helps identify trends in pirate history. The drawback is that it's difficult to get a solid picture of any particular person or event or place or time, since Cordingly tends to skip around as it suits his current topic. This isn't really a drawback if one needs a good overview of pirates and pirate life, and intends to read the book all the way through. It's less easy to use as reference, though, since information about the same event may end up scattered through multiple chapters. Still, it's a really good book to start with, so thanks again,pktheater!
I've now started on Hans Turley's Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity, published in 1999, and have B. R. Burg's earlier (and somewhat questionable, I've gathered) Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition waiting. I read a little bit of Privates and Privateers of the Caribbean by Jennifer Marx to get an idea of what it was like, but I'm afraid that one might be slow going. The first couple of chapters were downright stultifying, and at no point in her life did anyone teach this person how to use a comma.
Turley's book, though, is proving to be really interesting. I'm not sure I'd recommend it purely as a Fun Facts to Know About Pirates reference, but as a fan fiction writer wanting to write about fictional pirates I'm pretty well fascinated. I'm only about halfway through at the moment, but the essence of Turley's thesis is to explore, not the actual factual history of pirates, but what the textual history/fiction about pirates says about how a culture perceives pirates. He isn't, like Burg, arguing that many pirates were in fact homosexual, instead he's "arguing that the literary and historical representations of the pirate are rife with homoerotic imagery, and that imagery infects our conceptions of the pirate." We'll see how that goes. :)
So far, the research has been fun. I've never known what the heck a sloop or a brigantine or a carrack was before now, and it's really kind of cool. I also found out that the local blacksmith was in charge of custom-making the iron cages that hanged pirates were displayed in, so that's a brand-new little morsel for thought. So many trivial facts, so little time....
pktheater was kind enough to lend me.I really liked Under the Black Flag. It's more of a cultural history than a names/dates/places history, and Cordingly chose to arrange it thematically rather than chronologically or geographically. That makes it a very easy and entertaining book to read, and also helps identify trends in pirate history. The drawback is that it's difficult to get a solid picture of any particular person or event or place or time, since Cordingly tends to skip around as it suits his current topic. This isn't really a drawback if one needs a good overview of pirates and pirate life, and intends to read the book all the way through. It's less easy to use as reference, though, since information about the same event may end up scattered through multiple chapters. Still, it's a really good book to start with, so thanks again,
pktheater!I've now started on Hans Turley's Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity, published in 1999, and have B. R. Burg's earlier (and somewhat questionable, I've gathered) Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition waiting. I read a little bit of Privates and Privateers of the Caribbean by Jennifer Marx to get an idea of what it was like, but I'm afraid that one might be slow going. The first couple of chapters were downright stultifying, and at no point in her life did anyone teach this person how to use a comma.
Turley's book, though, is proving to be really interesting. I'm not sure I'd recommend it purely as a Fun Facts to Know About Pirates reference, but as a fan fiction writer wanting to write about fictional pirates I'm pretty well fascinated. I'm only about halfway through at the moment, but the essence of Turley's thesis is to explore, not the actual factual history of pirates, but what the textual history/fiction about pirates says about how a culture perceives pirates. He isn't, like Burg, arguing that many pirates were in fact homosexual, instead he's "arguing that the literary and historical representations of the pirate are rife with homoerotic imagery, and that imagery infects our conceptions of the pirate." We'll see how that goes. :)
So far, the research has been fun. I've never known what the heck a sloop or a brigantine or a carrack was before now, and it's really kind of cool. I also found out that the local blacksmith was in charge of custom-making the iron cages that hanged pirates were displayed in, so that's a brand-new little morsel for thought. So many trivial facts, so little time....