Piracy has captivated audiences for hundreds of years, predominantly from the activities surrounding what has been dubbed the Golden Age of Piracy. While difficult to define, the Golden Age of Piracy typically refers to the decade between 1714 and 1724. However, the piracy that birthed this era spanned several decades. This period has been the subject of many authors, including Angus Konstam, a long-time maritime historian. Konstam’s latest book, The Pirate Menace: Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy, explores the intricate web of piracy, politics, and trade of the early eighteenth-century colonial Americas and Africa.
Konstam weaves an elaborate tale of the lives and deaths of the pirates of the Caribbean. Using various primary sources, Konstam brings readers into the early eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Konstam uses several chapters to set the stage. These chapters take place before the defined Golden Age but is necessary to understand how piracy became rampant several decades later. These chapters also discuss the establishment of several pirate havens, including Nassau and its relationship to Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold, men who would mentor many of the Golden Age pirates and then hunt them down. This beginning allows Konstam to draw connections between these men and their mentees, the major pirates of the Golden Age, including Edward Teach and Charles Vane, and more opportunistic pirates, such as Sam Bellamy. Konstam effortlessly uses primary sources to show the complex web that formed between the pirates, the pirate hunters, the pirate sympathizers, and the colonial world. In doing so, Konstam uncovers the world of the Golden Age of Piracy and the intricate political and economic situations that precipitated the rise and fall of piracy within the Atlantic world.
Much of the work reads like a perfectly crafted story rather than a well-cited historical non-fiction. This writing style makes the work accessible to a general audience and researchers alike. However, Konstam moves from this illustrative narrative style to a more traditional historical discussion in some sections. For example, when discussing Stede Bonnet, Konstam relies heavily on the work of Captain Johnson, a contemporary writer of the Golden Age, and breaks his storytelling style to reference the uncertainty in Bonnet’s story. In contrast, when discussing Edward Teach, Henry Jennings, and Bartholemew Roberts, the storytelling is more definitive toward their actions and the efforts to bring them down. While this does not detract from Konstam's work or extensive research, it does show the difficulties in tracing piracy within the colonial world, where sources of the people living at the edges of society are limited.
The Pirate Menace's masterful storytelling continues the tradition of presenting piracy to the public, which began with The General History of the Pyrates from the Golden Age itself. Compared to other works, it effortlessly weaves the stories of the most famous pirates of the Golden Age with the men who fought them, including their own, and the complex political world in which they operated. This book should be required reading for all pirate scholars and interested parties.
