Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age.

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. By Marcus Rediker. (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2004. Pp. viii, 240. $16.00, ISBN 0-8070-5024-5.)

Nearly twenty years ago, in his Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (New York, 1987), Marcus Rediker changed the way we view mariners and piracy. In that book he created a detailed picture of life at sea for common mariners in the age of sail and showed how they suffered from the neglect and brutality of shipowners and captains. As a result of mistreatment the seamen often were driven to the courts, to acts of violence, or to piracy as means of avenging themselves against their tormentors. In becoming pirates, they also sought to be in charge of their own fates in a world of their making. Rediker's new work is focused on the last group of European pirates, who flourished in the years after Queen Anne's War (1702-1713).

During the war, piracy ravaged the Caribbean and Atlantic and spread as far as the Indian Ocean as thousands of men fled to the life of plunder. Merchants had sought the protection of their governments, but until the war was over governments could not afford to divert naval vessels to this effort. The war's end was an opportune moment for governments, especially the British, to use their navies to do away with the scourge of piracy. As navies hunted them down, the pirates became more violent and were noted for their willingness to inflict pain and suffering. This was the era of Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Anne Bonny, and other notable corsairs.

While describing the actions of pirates and how they extended their range and power prior to the intrusion of the navies, Rediker also analyzes their influence then and into the future. For instance, in discussing Anne Bonny and Mary Read--the archetypal female pirates--he traces how the image of Bonny, widely copied at the time, may have been the model for Eugene Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). While tracing the influence of images from one artist to the other is always problematic, Rediker makes the best case possible for the Bonny image as Delacroix's model. He also writes tellingly about the seeming death wish of pirates who found themselves being hunted down by the navy. In case after case he shows how pirates courted death rather than submit to authority and accept the gallows. These men who had lived by their own rules would rather decide their own fate than accept the dominion of the world they had sought to leave behind.

In returning to the world of piracy, Rediker has once again brought to life an era too often romanticized. He has brought meaning to the lives of mariners and especially to those who struck back at the system that brutalized them and sent them into piracy.

ROBERT C. RITCHIE

Huntington Library