Customer Reviews

The Pirates' Pact: The Secret Alliances Between History's Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial America

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Given the author's background and present academic pursuits, as well as the people and institutions he saw fit to thank, I approached this book with high expectations, which were rapidly dashed. The particulars of the discussion are often jumbled, with major characters making suddden appearances in widely-separated chapters. References are made to what one is led to asssume was correspondence from or to individuals such as Phillipse in New York, but I looked in vain for the actual details of such correspondence. A bibliography is non-existent, and the footnotes in the latter chapters are hopelessly botched because of pagination errors; it is only with a great deal of effort that one finds citations, since the pagination listed in the footnotes for the later chapters does not match with the pages of the text, a disturbing sign of poor proofreading, and a lack of sufficient editorial rigor.
Any form of peer review also appears to be missing; the discussion of colonial governments, in assuming that royal governors were paid by the Crown, reflects a misunderstanding of how royally-appointed governors basically had to wheedle and cajole local assemblies for their salaries. The discussion of the prize courts, which describes them as adjuncts or arms of the customs service, reflects a woeful misunderstanding of the operation of the vice-admiralty courts, which were administered by judges appointed by royal governors (witness the fact that Connecticut was included within the jurisdiction of the vice-admiralty appointee of the Governor of New York and Rhode Island fell under the Mass. Governor for purposes of vice-admiralty court appointments). A modicum of reading any of the available texts would have shown these facts.
Furthermore, the Admiralty offices in England kept close tabs on the operations of these courts, for example,receiving complaints from Rhode Island locals when they did not care for the Deputy Judge assigned from Boston and directing judges to report on prize cases disposed of and to check into allegations of misconduct by Rhode Islanders . Given the time described as devoted to this publication and the access to Rhode Island resources in particular as described by the author, these misstatements are inexplicable.

I just picked this up and read it in three sittings, which is fast for me. The book takes two very different threads--stories of the famous pirates, and what was going on in the colonies--and weaves them together beautifully. There is an incredible amount of detail, and despite all the history it often reads as much like a novel as a history book.

The pirates are colorful and fun, but Burgess spends more time talking about the people behind them: the governors, the merchants, even English lords that financed them. The style was similar to Robert Massie's, in that there were many threads of different stories that all came together in the end. Burgess makes the case that the so-called "golden age" of piracy was not what most people suppose, but instead a close alliance between the pirates and their colonial sponsors. I have never read another book that makes this argument, though he cites several in his footnotes.

My only complaint is that there are lots of quotations, which can get rather long. I understand that the author wants to let the sources speak for themselves, but I think some editing could have been done here.

Otherwise, it was an incredible book, a fast and easy read, and I would very strongly recommend it to anyone, whether they have an interest in piracy or not.

As a pirate historian, I found this book very disappointing. After completing extensive historical reach in the area including history conference papers and a thesis, I found many fallacies in this work and questionable sources. The lack of footnotes makes the work even more suspect.

Burgess neglects to explain his method and why he picks and chooses sources. Further, Burgess's definition of piracy is not accurate for the time or the "pirates" that he uses as examples. Many of his examples were simply smugglers or even privateers. He tried to approach the topic from a strictly legal view without considering the needs, expectations, and reality for the time. For example, on page 251, he "investigates" Lord Hamilton of Jamaica. Making his readers believe that Hamilton hired many pirates! In reality, Hamilton needed protection for the people of Jamaica from the Spanish Coast Guard because the "new" British king George I would not send the navy-he was cutting costs- so Hamilton hired privateers to patrol the island. Further, Burgess neglects to explain that Hamilton tried and hanged many pirates including Calico Jack because of the privateers that patrolled Jamaica. Even Woods Roger was a privateer, which if we apply Burgesses strict definition, would have been a pirate!

I would not recommend this book. If you are interested in accurate books about piracy, read on of Marcus Rediker's many books or Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook.

There is so much mention of piracy, not just smuggling, associated with the literature of Colonial and Early America that I have long thought it a primary growth industry of the time. For the first time American piracy is detailed in all its wondrous collusion. Piracy and privateering were intertwined businesses, the former pursued in time of peace, the latter in time of war. But regardless of the label they were exactly the same endeavor, resulting in exactly the same outcomes, the seizing of merchant vessels on the high seas.

In this seminal work Douglass Burgess uncovers the explicit, condoning and quite necessary involvement Britain's Monarchies and Colonial Governors had in the trade. The granting of commissions, knowingly abused, was rampant with Rhoad Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Carolinas all freely pursuing what turns out to be a global trade. Initially pursued by Queen Elizabeth in the 16th Century, this book details the involvement of subsequent ruling elites as the business goes into and out of favor during the ensuing 200 years. Surprisingly, it is internal competition within the Empire, not the atrocities committed, that finally curtail this 300 year endeavor.

Quite good.

This book could have been much shorter and better organized. The basic history is revealing but then the errors pointed out by another reviewer are also revealing. There seems to be a trend thee day to find some obscure topic and then write a layman's book about it that is padded to three times the necessary length to make it a book instead of an article. This book is a case in point. It's neither a historians text nor a layman's tale.