People: The Portuguese Poet

In the general vernacular of piratical events, the 1660s and '70s were the decades of Henry Morgan and his Jamaica buccaneers. Thumbing their nose at Spanish might, these men pounced on the Spanish Main whose strongholds had been weakened by the Frenchmen from Tortuga. They were a new breed of plunderer, successful, brutal, and facing very little in the way of obstacles on land or sea.

The truth of the matter is that Spain tried to turn the tables on Morgan during this very era and the spearhead of their privateering ventures was a man of Portuguese descent who would style himself the new Morgan. Brash, volital and at first surprisingly successful, Manuel Rivero Pardal would take up the flag against Protestant heresy on the high seas in the name of the Queen Regent of Spain.

Where Rivero came from - aside from Portugal - is open for debate. Philip Gosse lists him in The Pirate's Who's Who as "the vapouring admiral of St. Jago", which may give posterity its only clue to the pirate's origin. Stephan Talty, in his wonderful biography of Morgan Empire of Blue Water, fleshes out the elusive Rivero magnificently going so far as to call him the Don Quixote of pirates:

Rivero, at least, tilted at more than windmills and sailors' shacks. He'd taken the war to the English. He was attacking at will; he was exploiting the isolation of the Jamaican settlers; he was clearly as daring and independent as any of the privateers, not waiting for orders from Madrid. It was as if [the Jamaican buccaneers] were facing a Spanish double of Henry Morgan.

Rivero was setting up a new world order where sea captains holding a Spanish letter of marque and reprisal did not have to sit in port waiting endlessly for new orders from Spain. Orders which, it must be noted, might never come at all. They could strike when the English ship was at hand; they could ask forgiveness rather than permission. Rivero's bravado was the perfect foil for English hubris. After the sack of Portobelo, it was the shot in the arm that Spanish morale needed.

The latter day Don took his first English prize in the form of Mary and Jane, a former privateer commanded by a Dutch ex-patriot known as Captain Bart. Using the classic ruse, Rivero's San Pedro y la Fama flew English colors until she was within earshot. At that point, Rivero called out "Defend yourself, dog. I come as a punishment for heretics!" With that Fama opened fire. There was little Mary and Jane could do and, after a few cannon volleys and more than one casualty to the English crew, Bart struck. Rivero allowed many of the English sailors to row back to Jamaica with the word that he was on the hunt and then he sailed off to Santiago de Cuba with his prize in tow.

For a short period in 1670, no more than six months really, Rivero became the scourge of Jamaica. He attacked merchant ships and made raids along the shore of the island, taking not only goods but prisoners for ransom as well. He even left a written challenge to Morgan himself, saying he craved "that Morgan would come out upon the coast and seek me, that he might see the valour of the Spaniards."

The plantation owners on the outskirts of Port Royal worked themselves into a frenzy and demanded that Governor Modyford recall their hero and ersatz savior, Henry Morgan. The now Admiral had been whiling away his hours on his own large estate after "peace" with Spain had been declared.

Morgan and his men were, of course, all too happy to oblige and set off to punish the Spanish for sending their scourge. Rivero seemed to have it in for Morgan personally - something Morgan could not know at the time - for he left poetry, albeit bad, that addressed his spleen at a certain "monster":

I am the defender against this monster
I have been confirmed Captain of these coasts.
By Saint Peter, I wast the first.
My name alone is enough
To make the sea
And all these barbarians
Tremble.


Unfortunately not only for Morgan and Rivero, but for history as well, the two like-minded commanders would never meet and fight it out man to man. Coming into a quay off Cuba in hope of finding respite from a gathering storm, Rivero's Fama was surprised by Captain John Morris' Dolphin. The two ships recognized one another and engaged immediately. Almost as soon as the firefight began, Rivero's men panicked. While standing on deck exhorting his sailors to return to their posts, Rivero was caught in the neck by a musket ball. He fell, and bled out quickly, dying while all around him desperately tried to run away from what he had so eagerly sought throughout his career in the Caribbean.

Doctor Richard Browne would later write of Rivero in sarcastic terms, calling him that "vapouring captain" who was fond of "burning houses and robbing the people and sent that insolent challenge to Admiral Morgan."

A sad ending for a man who, even if half-mad, as Talty implies knew how to "die like a conquistador" and even a poet.

Header: Pirates! by Howard Pyle via Wikimedia

Home Ports: An End to the Wickedest City

On June 7, 1692, all Hell broke loose in what was at the time said to be the "very seat of Satan".  Virtually the entire island of Jamaica was rocked by an earthquake that today would be considered off the scale.  And the worst damage came to the town of Port Royal which, in almost Biblical fashion, quite literally sank into the sea.

According to those who lived through the disaster, the weather had been hot and literally without a breeze for several weeks.  When I lived in Southern California, we often referred to these kinds of conditions as "earthquake weather" and Port Royal's unfortunate experience seems to hold true to that superstition.  Even here in Alaska, our earthquakes tend to come as the weather warms; the devastation of Anchorage in 1964 occurred in an unusually warm spring.

If you click on the contemporary broadsheet above, it is easy to see how the earthquake mangled the city selectively.  Areas closer to the port were built on sandy ground which liquefied during the unbearably long six minute earthquake.  Houses collapsed, people were pulled down into the newly formed quicksand, and violent geysers of sand and water erupted hurling wreckage, animals and people up into the air only to send them crashing back to the rolling earth again.  Further back, on what could be called the high ground of the city - indeed High Street, the home of most of Port Royal's elite merchant class, was located there - a limestone bedrock prevented the liquefaction of the earth.  One can see that some homes, despite being built of brick in the English fashion, remained standing.  Three forts, including Morgan's Fort at the far right, also survived.

As the water receded from the sand, being pulled back toward the Caribbean to unleash the next round of terror, people were literally trapped in the now hardened sand.  Stephan Talty in his engrossing account of the life of Henry Morgan Empire of Blue Water quotes an eye witness:

That watery hiatus closed again the next moment, catching hold of some people by the Leg, of others by the middle of the Body, and of others some by the Arm, etc., detaining them in dismal torture, but immovably fixed in the ground, till they, with almost the whole Town besides, sunk under Water. 

And, as the anonymous writer noted, the "Water" was the next horror to hit Port Royal.  The tsunami that hurtled over those who were still alive was three stories high and traveling at an estimated sixty miles an hour.  Ships, becalmed in the harbor due to the recalcitrant weather, were forced up onto land.  In a happy accident Talty tells us that one, HMS Swan, fell upon the city but managed to remain upright.  Over two hundred citizens clamored aboard her and were saved from the following sea. 

Finally the lower part of the city simply collapsed into Port Royal Harbor.  Homes, storage warehouses, churches, people and livestock sank like stones.  Many were trapped in the structures with which they had sunk but many others floated up to the surface of the harbor. Over the course of the following week, corpses bobbed listlessly in the harbor, slowly rotting in the unrelenting heat.

Pestilence and anarchy fell over the city.  Port Royal, once labelled the "wickedest city in the world" for the number of pirates and whores who called it home, became even more wicked after the wrath of God apparently struck her down.  Once again it was the buccaneers, who had fallen out of favor now that Port Royal was full of "respectable" merchants trading in luxury goods, sugar cane, rum and human chattel, who gave the city a bad name.  Edward Ellyn, the receiver general of Jamaica, wrote home to England about the post-disaster environment that surrounded the survivors:

... Most of the seaman, English and Spaniards, contented themselves with what was floating in the water, tho' some instantly entered and riffled standing houses.  But the following nights and days those villains... robbed all houses, broke in pieces all scriptores, boxes, trunks, chests of drawers, cabinets and made spoil of all of value in the town, threatening to kill several inhabitants, if any durst be so hardy as to say, "This house is mine."  Our enemies could not have treated us worse than the seamen.

Even Cotton Mather, that scion of Puritan self-righteousness, saw fit to put his two cents in.  Calling the Jamaica earthquake an omen, he wrote "Behold an accident speaking to all our English America."  Get right with God, he said, or face the same fate.

Many of the British in Jamaica chose to head for home, or the North American mainland, rather than deal with the wreckage.  Others, in true colonial spirit, simply moved up and over.  They rowed across the bay and began to rebuild, eventually founding the city of Kingston.  Others clung stubbornly to Port Royal, but the great pirate capital would never be the same.  Today she is a tourist attraction more than anything else; a beloved sort of Mecca for those who crave the closeness of things touched and roads walked on by our buccaneer ancestors.

But what of Henry Morgan, arguably the most famous of Port Royal's citizens?  Dead and buried almost four years prior to the earthquake, Morgan's coffin spewed forth from the earth during the six minute tremor.  Carried out to sea, it was lost for ever in the blue waters.  And maybe that was the way it should have been all along.

Header: English broadsheet reporting the effects of the 1692 Jamaica earthquake via Wikimedia  

History: A Surgeon Aboard Us

I thank the Lord Serapis that when I was in danger at sea he straightway saved me through the good grace and constancy of our doctor… ~ letter from Roman sailor Apion to his parents, Epimacus and Philadelphia circa 100 CE.


As the above snippet from a short letter home shows, doctors have been sailing aboard ships of all kinds for centuries. Because it was not until the Napoleonic Wars that shipboard doctors were routinely recognized as part of the standing crew, many historians have glossed over or completely ignored the history that led up to that acceptance. Fortunately, some modern writers have endeavored to set the record straight.

As noted by Kevin Brown in his entertaining history of seafaring medicine Poxed & Scurvied, it may have been the Greek poet Homer who first wrote of naval surgeons in his epic Iliad. Here he mentions Machaon and Polidalirus, the medical professionals who sailed with Agamemnon’s fleet when that king set out to start the Trojan War.

As Brown notes, it was during the Imperial days of Rome that doctors aboard ship began to really become a fixture. So much so, in fact, that Caesar Augustus included them in his regulations against doctors going into battle. There were also regulations during his reign that navy physicians be over the age of 21.

In the Medieval period, a barber who could double as a surgeon – essentially, let’s face it, a puller of teeth, stitcher of wounds and hacker-off of limbs – was regularly aboard the merchant vessels of the Cinque Ports and Hanseatic leagues. It may be that at least some of the surgeons who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his post-1492 cruises to the New World were also spies for Spain. In Empires of the Atlantic World J.H. Elliott notes that Ferdinand and particularly Isabella sought to control the unruly mariner by inserting their own intelligencer on his ship in the person of royal doctor Diego Alvares Chanca y Salazar.

True finesse in medicine at sea had already bloomed in the Mediterranean with the era of the Crusades. Here the Knight of Malta and their counterparts, the Knights Hospitaller, began fitting out ships as floating hospitals to treat sick and battle wounded in the 15th century. Though the ships were merchant vessels repurposed as sick berths, they were a decided innovation that probably saved more than a few lives.

It should be noted that the Knights of St. John, an arm first of the Hospitallers and then the Maltese, extended treatment for injury or illness to their Moslem galley slaves. Brown notes that these men were treated, along with Christian sailors, at the Sacra Infermeria in Valletta. Here, such attentions as food service on silver plates and large, breezy wards were denied to no one regardless of societal status, religion or country of origin.

A tremendous amount of information regarding medicine at sea has come from the excavation of Henry VIII’s favorite warship Mary Rose. Launched in 1511 and sunk in 1545, she appears to have gone down with her entire crew (including the intrepid ratter known as Hatch) and all goods aboard. Since 1982, the Mary Rose Project has been revealing her history and what they have found tells us a good bit about the surgeon aboard.

He seems to have occupied two cabins, one perhaps for his own use and the other for any assistants he may have had and/or examinations and surgery. He seems to have been doing a good job too for, as Brown notes, most of the crew of over 400 men “… were large-boned, strong, and fit …”

Brown also gives us a somewhat chilling list of the instruments found in Mary Rose’s surgeon’s kit:

… copper alloy mortars, spoons, bandage rolls, pewter syringes for urethral irrigations in the treatment of gonorrhea and for the irrigation of wounds, wooden needles, spatulas, a maplewood feeding vessel, a leather wallet for storing instruments, ear scoops for cleaning out the ear, razors, a brass shaving bowl, and the handles of surgical instruments.

As Brown points out, the metal portions of those instruments have rusted away but they certainly included saws, forceps, probes, cautery irons and a trepan for removing parts of shattered skulls. The brutality of such necessary treatment is easily imagined, and thankfully avoided in this day and age.

Of course things were none too pleasant on the Spanish Main of a short 100 years later. Stephan Talty in Empire of Blue Water tells us that Henry Morgan shipped a surgeon on his raids of both Portobello and Panama City. Little good they seem to have done, however, as they turned up drunk and incapable on more then one occasion. Slap dash amputations by carpenters and careless cauterizations with swords led to gangrene and death, more often than not, in the humid heat of the jungle. Only the very strongest could survive the treatment, much less the injury.

As medicine improved so did its availability at sea. The surgeon became the physician, falling eventually into the general group known as warrant officers. And long before Nelson’s navy, the scientist-physician epitomized by real men like James Lind and fictional characters like Stephen Maturin was already starting to take to the sea. Morgan himself, as an aging pirate made good with gout and cirrhosis, was treated by Dr. Hans Sloane. Sloane was the epitome of the physician cum naturalist in 1687 and, though he could not save the decrepit Morgan from himself, he would go on to treat English royalty.

The history of medicine at sea continues to fascinate on so many levels. To each their own, of course, but I always wonder how one would manage to remove a cataract aboard a sailing ship at sea around 1810. The thought that it could be – and was – done is just another example of how hardy and capable our ancestors really were.

Header: Mary Rose by Bill Bishop via The Mary Rose Project

History: About Those Cannon

The big buzz in the piratical world on Tuesday was that archaeologists have found some of Henry Morgan’s guns. This article from dailymail.co.uk, whose title shouts: The REAL pirate of the Caribbean (caps theirs), whizzed around the blogosphere like a speedboat in the Gulf of Aden, loudly proclaiming in the first paragraph that scientists have:

… revealed that six cannons that belonged to the bloodthirsty British pirate Henry Morgan have been recovered from a river in Panama.

It isn’t until five paragraphs into the article that this little morsel of information is revealed: the archaeologists don’t know whose cannon these are. They’re not even sure what century they come from yet. In old fashioned newspaper journalism that’s called “burying”; putting the facts so far back in the article that they don’t detract from the splash of the headline. It’s a time tested tactic since every good newspaper man knows readers usually don’t get past paragraph three. The Brethren, however, are a little less gullible and it seems past time to set the record straight.

Morgan led his famous campaign across the Darien Gap to Panama City in 1671. This was his last great expedition and one that brought him a tremendous amount of wealth. It also put him at odds not only with the British crown (he would eventually be called to England by the Charles II to answer for his egregious attack on an ally city) but also with his vast army of multi-national buccaneers. Some of these last actually sued Morgan after the expedition, saying that he had withheld booty that was rightfully theirs. The march across Panama was itself a heinous misery for everyone involved with men literally boiling and eating their leather munitions sacks in order to stay alive. Morgan’s “success” at Panama is forever tainted by rash decisions, over-the-top cruelty and – in the case of the cannon in question – horrible seamanship.

Stephan Talty, whose book Empire of Blue Water is surely the definitive modern biography of Morgan, describes the incident at Panama’s Chagres River quickly and colorfully:

… just below the surface of the water near the river’s mouth was a notorious reef, called Laja. Morgan never saw it. Exquemelin tells us what happened next. Five of the ships, led by Morgan’s Satisfaction, slammed into the razor-sharp coral, tearing huge holes in their hulls and throwing men into the water. A powerful north wind kept the ships impaled on the reef, raking them over the coral until they were unsalvageable. Morgan had never been much of a sailor, and now he simply moved his men and materiel off the stricken vessels and packed them into the remaining ships. As long as he had men, he could get other ships.

The shipwreck would have led to the loss of cannon, of course, and these may be the guns recently extracted from the Chagres which is south and east of the Panama Canal. The problem with any crowing about that possibility – for now at least – is two fold.

First, the Laja is a horribly dangerous area to this day. The coral reefs that chewed up Morgan’s ships have done the same without discrimination to other buccaneers, pirate and privateers as well as Navy ships, merchants, fishermen and pleasure craft. The number of artifacts in the area is staggering for that very reason and it has become a prime target for illegal treasure hunters. Archaeologists have known about the cannon since 2008 and only brought them out of the water because of the damage being done to them by these poachers.

Second is the complete lack of any evidence that the guns are Morgan’s. While, as the article notes, the “… size and shape of the cannons [sic] appear to be a close match with the characteristics of small iron cannon of the Seventeenth Century” there is no indication that carbon dating or any other reasonable evaluation has been done. The final word for me comes from Tomas Mendizibal, a local archaeologist, in a quote to the LA Times:

Every school kid learns about Morgan’s activities, but we have never seen any of his materials. If these are indeed his cannon, it would be a first.

The guns may very well be Morgan’s given that his is one of the few documented wrecks in the area. If so there is no question that they are worth as much, historically speaking, as any cache of doubloons. But let’s wait and see. The waters hold more secrets than we can ever know.

Header: AP photo from the dailymail.co.uk article: one of the Chagres River cannon being brought to the surface by divers

Books: The Short List

It flatters me somewhat to have had more than one request to have a list of nautical books I would recommend posted here at Triple P. Being of the writing persuasion myself, I’d hope that someone in my shoes would recommend my book (when it comes out that is) and I’m heartened to know that someone wants my opinion on such a very dear subject.

In the interest of simplicity, here’s the short list in three categories. A brief explanation of the book’s inclusion on the list accompanies the title (hopefully I can keep it brief; I want very much to sing about some of these).

Nonfiction:

These are books I use for research for my novels and for my fact-based writing including Triple P:

The Searover’s Practice, The Buccaneers Realm, The Pirate Hunters, all three by Benerson Little and published by Potomac Books. Little is not only an accomplished writer and researcher but a former Navy Seal as well. His insight into pirating is superb although his descriptions of much of the technical end of sailing and weaponry could be a little hard to follow without some background knowledge of both. While the first two books are personal favorites the last one was a bit disappointing for me. Any book about pirate hunting that 1) calls the Laffite brothers and their associates sorry excuses for freebooters, writing them off in one paragraph and 2) does not even bother to mention David Porter and his Mosquito Fleet is missing the boat. Pun intended.

The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf by William C. Davis published by Harcourt. I’ve said it before: this is far and away the best book ever published on the Laffite brothers. If there is a fault here it’s Davis’ overt “pro Pierre” stance by which he almost turns Jean into a knuckle-dragging thug good only for keeping the riff raff in line, but that may be a symptom of how very little attention history has given Pierre. Well written, exhaustively researched and a must for anyone interested in the Baratarians.

Under A Black Flag by David Cordingly published by Harcourt Brace. Cordingly’s book is the final word on Golden Age piracy, easily separating fact from fiction. The only drawback here is the author’s clear contempt for the rogues he’s writing about.

The History of Pirates by Angus Konstam published by The Lyons Press. There’s a lot of information here so the individual profiles of pirates are necessarily short but Konstam is an excellent writer and knowledgeable historian and his book is a great jumping off point for further research. As an added bonus, it is full of wonderful illustrations.

She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea by Joan Druett published by Touchstone. Druett is a sailor of the first order and her book is crammed with interesting historical tidbits about women at sea, from pirates to lighthouse keepers to prostitutes.

Jack Aubrey Commands: An Historical Companion to the Naval World of Patrick O’Brian by Brian Lavery published by Naval Institute Press. This is the definitive book on the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic wars and it is written without the unnecessary use of “sailor speak”. The illustrations are also gorgeous.

Empire of Blue Water by Stephan Talty published by Crown. The book that changed my mind about Henry Morgan, Talty’s biography is part history, part imagination and all swashbuckling good time. Excellent reading for any fan of adventure, history, buccaneers and/or the sea.

Fiction:

The Matty Graves novels by Broos Campbell published by McBooks Press. Written in the spirit of Marryat, Forester and O’Brian, but translated to America. Campbell’s novels follow the adventures of their narrator, Lieutenant Matthew Graves, USN, beginning around 1802. These are stay-up-all-night novels with strong characters, gripping action and accurate detail.

Anything by Frederick Marryat, C.S. Forester and in particular Patrick O’Brian. Marryat is, of course, the original. He entered the Royal Navy in 1806 under then Captain Thomas Cochrane and wrote of his adventures in a number of novels with great names like Mr. Midshipman Easy and Peter Simple. Forester created Horatio Hornblower and followed his exploits through 11 books. O’Brian, it goes without saying, wrote the Aubrey/Maturin novels and, in my humble opinion, nothing has matched them since.

The Pirates Own Book by Charles Ellms published by The Marine Research Society and online via Guttenberg. Rip roaring, old time pirate action full of spice and bloodshed. A book to lose yourself in.

For Kids and Parents:

What If You Met a Pirate? written and illustrated by Jan Adkins and published by Roaring Book Press. I love this book for the illustrations alone but the history is accurate, easy to understand and great for preschoolers as well as younger readers. The sketch of the guy on the head always makes me chuckle.

Eyewitness Pirate from Dorling Kindersley. As with all the Eyewitness books, great illustrations, good information and an easy to use format. My daughters have used this and other Eyewitness books for reports and papers more than once to great success.

Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stephenson available from various publishers. Seriously, if you and your children haven’t read this one it’s time for a trip to the bookstore. Like now.

Looking back on this list it is obvious to me that it is lacking, but that’s enough for now. Remember, real books with pages are not without benefit. Libraries and local bookstores and shelves in homes with real books in them lead to a life long love of reading and a memory of history. Those are two things the whole World could use, I reckon.

Header: Illustration by Howard Pyle for his Book of Pirates c 1896

Books: Cochrane And Cordingly

Finding David Cordingly's exhaustive biography of Thomas Cochrane was entirely serendipitous for me. I was wandering the stacks on a hunt for a completely different type of research material and there it was. With my penchant for all things Patrick O'Brian and the fact that my own historical novels include more than a brief brush with the Royal Navy of the era, I couldn't resist the purchase. Frankly, that's where irresistible stops on just about all levels.

Cordingly is nothing if not a consummate historian. As discussed previously, his book Under A Black Flag is considered the preeminent work on pirates of the Golden Age. Nothing is missed in that one and I would be lying through my teeth if I didn't tell you that my tattered and dog-eared copy of that book is referred to at least weekly to verify my own research.

Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander is an entirely different kind of animal however. Full of every possible detail about the man who many firmly believe was Patrick O'Brian's inspiration for his hero Jack Aubrey, it reads more like a doctoral thesis than a lively biography. Given the vast scope of the life in question that is both understandable and disappointing. There are a lot of names, dates and places in this book but not a lot of heart or soul. You will learn everything about Cochrane - or just about. By the time you come out of the rabbit hole, however, you won't like him very much. And you'll probably need a nap.

Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald was the first son of Archibald Cochrane, a down-at-hand Scottish Lard whose penchant for dabbling in scientific experiments didn't help the family fortune along. As the eldest son, young Tom was sent to sea where he could make his own fortune and bring it home to Culross Abbey House. Cochrane joined the ranks of the British Navy as a midshipman and had the good fortune to be assisted not only by his shipmates (he was old for a mid at 17 and knew virtually nothing about sailing when he showed up in his shiny uniform) but family "connexions" as well. Though Archibald angered the Admiralty with letters about promotions his son wasn't getting, Thomas made Master and Commander fairly quickly.

The now famous taking of the Spanish frigate El Gamo by Cochrane's sloop Speedy in 1801 was the turning point for his career. Though it took a few months, Cochrane was made Post and quickly got on with the business of serious heroic exploits in and around the Mediterranean. Sailors considered Cochrane lucky and fights broke out for a berth on any ship he commanded. He was well liked and capable, but his own personality, which lead him to balk at discipline from "lubbers" at the Admiralty, didn't win him any points. He got involved in politics and made enemies in Parliament. Things came to a head when he was struck from the roles of Post Captains after being convicted (though many historians, including Cordingly, say unjustly) of "jobbing" the stock exchange in 1814.

By this time, 32 year old Cochrane had married the sixteen year old orphan Katherine Corbett Barnes and as Lady Dundonald she became a regular fixture in her husband's exploits. Unlike Sophie Aubrey in the O'Brian books, Kate was not one to stay at home and wait for her man. Cochrane starts a new life at sea commanding the Chilean navy for the revolutionary leader Bernardo O'Higgins. Kate and their very young children are along for the ride. Indeed, it is in this portion of the book that Cordingly really shines, giving us some more intimate information about the Cochranes that makes even Thomas seem far more human than he has before.

But while he shows us Lady Dundonald on the gun deck - unfortunately fainting away and having to be carried below - and tells us of the death of her eleven month old from fever, Cordingly leaves a lot out. What did Kate think of one Maria Graham, for instance, who exults about the heroic Thomas in poetry and seems to follow him all over South America? Cordingly never tells us what the two's relationship really was and given the level of his abilities as a researcher, one has to wonder.

Cochrane returns to England and, something like Byron, gives his all for Greek independence later in life. The failure of the Greek revolution seems to be the last straw and, though he buys a fine home outside London and tries to make a go of parties and balls, his world is crumbling. He and Kate eventually split permanently and Cochrane is left with a small townhouse in the city where he takes the air with his housekeeper. Cordingly, in his usual crisp fashion, assures us that though Kate and the children imagined Thomas and the housekeeper were lovers, they were not. Cochrane dies in the townhouse in 1860, a well traveled if broken man and quite elderly at 85.

Given the huge mountain of information presented in this well written and impeccably researched book, I was disappointed in the end by what was left out. Maybe it's because I'm a woman but I don't think so. The private lives of our heroes are just as valid as - and sometimes more telling than - their public exploits. Unlike Stephan Talty with his salty, grumpy and all-for-success vision of Henry Morgan in Empire Of Blue Water, Cordingly offers us very little that is human in Cochrane. Lord Dundonald comes across, at least to me, not as heroic but as selfish, grasping and too ready to lay blame. And I'm not sure that was the intent.

Whatever Cochrane was, he was surely no Jack Aubrey. But then how many of us are?

Books: "Being A Ruthless Bastard"

Your humble hostess has never been shy about her disdain for Henry Morgan. He always struck me as more General than Admiral and he never came across as much of a sailor. Then, Brethren, the First Mate presented me with Stephan Talty's deliriously well written book Empire of Blue Water and all my sordid notions about the man who became the legend went right out the window. Morgan, dead more than 300 years, has conquered me as surely as he did Portobelo or Panama. Damn.

Talty, who is a journalist and writer, is an impeccable historian as well. His research on every issue that touched the great Morgan - from society to fashion to ships at sea - is irreproachable. The book is not, however, weighted down by these facts. Quite the contrary. It sings vibrantly of both Morgan's colorful life and the city and island he made famous, Port Royal and Jamaica.

We meet Morgan as he boards a ship for Hispanola, one of thousands of men sent by Cromwell to conquer the Spanish island. The mission almost naturally fails and the British take Jamaica as a consolation prize. We follow him as he learns the ropes at sea with Christopher Myngs, his star rising rapidly under the tutelage of the Puritan privateer. Talty does not tip-toe - as Morgan himself did - around the buccaneer's landed gentry lineage. He is also very forthcoming about the Welshman's foibles but there is a place where the author turns apologist.

An entire chapter in the book - The Art of Cruelty - is devoted to my favorite boucanier Francois L'Olonnais. Of course, I'm always happy to read about the man who was probably the most successful leader out of Tortuga but that's not the issue. Talty supposes that Morgan never really did all those horrible things Exquemelin said he did. All that torture and such, racking and woolding, it's just hype according to Talty. And if Morgan really did put those Spaniards to the sword well, he learned everything he knew from the dark heart of L'Olonnais the sociopath. To quote Talty directly: "...the craziest often rose to the top of the trade." Morgan would be on top no matter what.

Obviously I'm skeptical of this interpretation but I'm hardly going to split hairs. Becoming an apologist is almost par for the course when you get as close to a subject as Talty had to in order to produce such a fine book. It's no different than the piratical types who worship Edward Teach while overlooking his blacker exploits. Or the Laffite fans who refuse to note that Jean in particular was a template for every mob boss to come. Time softens the edges, but maybe it shouldn't.

Talty also includes a worthwhile conceit in the form of a fictional every-buccaneer named Roderick. Roderick is with Morgan at all the big scores, Portobelo, Maracaibo and Panama and we see through his eyes just how grueling the life was for an average member of the Brethren. The chapter on the march across the isthmus of Panama will make you itchy, hungry and prostrate with exhaustion. Very well done.

Later in the book, really in the last two chapters, Talty quits pulling his punches. It is here that he starts to show us Morgan in every light - not just golden. As an example he notes quite accurately that "Morgan treated ships like disposable objects, to be wrecked, sunk, rammed or turned into blazing weapons whenever necessary..." The truth of that statement still sets my teeth on edge. He gets closer to Morgan than he has in previous chapters, making him more human.

The point that made me laugh out loud is in this chapter. Morgan, now deputy Governor of the island of Jamaica, has turned pirate hunter. He invites a group of suspected brigands to leave their ship and come ashore for a lavish dinner hosted by the great buccaneer himself. The pirates are in awe, of course and once the rum really starts flowing they fess up and call themselves what they are. Morgan laughs and sends them off to bed only to wake them in the morning and put them on trial, personally sentencing them to hang. As Talty puts it:

It is moments like this that make one wish Morgan had written his memoirs; the sheer enjoyment he got out of being a ruthless bastard could have made him one of the great seventeenth-century characters.

But all is not lost as Stephan Talty has virtually done it for him. Huzzah for Henry Morgan then, the man the myth and the legend.

Empire of Blue Water will set you back around $12.00 and is worth every penny. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up. You'll be more than glad you did.