REVIEW: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

By Patrick O’Brian

If you have seen Master and Commander and expect more of the same from Patrick O’Brian’s novel, I must warn you the film really has nothing to do with the book, except so far as they have the same characters. Not that either one is any bit less than excellent, they just do different things and tell different stories.

Peter Weir’s film is about action. But the nature of war at sea in the Age of Sail, meant that inaction was the norm. One spent months at sea going somewhere, looking for someone, and at the end they might shoot a cannon at you, or not as the case may be. While most writers just skip that whole “sail across the world bit”, O’Brian made it his specialty. His novels are about the closed-in life of sailors and their brief glimpses of intensely varied cultures ashore. Some reviewers compare O’Brian to Jane Austen, I tend to think of Jack Kerouac.

If Far Side of the World is Jane Austen, it’s Austen with the occasional flogging and amputation. Captain Jack Aubrey has to work to get the HMS Surprise across the world. And the local cultures aren’t just window dressing, Aubrey and his good friend Dr. Maturin find themselves in the right church, but wrong pew, as uncomprehending observers of somebody else’s nautical adventure when they meet a band of sea-going Polynesian Amazons. The seas are full of adventure.

The talk isn’t bad either. O’Brian fills the book with dry wit and absurd humor. His characters speak a distinctive early 19th century dialect that is fresh, without being a strain. There are vast amounts of nautical jargon, but when something critical needs to be conveyed to the reader, a lubberly landsman is on hand to ask the captain what’s going on.

So if you want the taste of salt horse and weevil biscuit without having to stray too far from Jack in the Box, you could ship out with the HMS Surprise.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE GHOST PIRATES

By William Hope Hodgson

The third of Hodgson’s trilogy of weird tales (Boats of the Glen Carrig and House on the Borderland were the first two), The Ghost Pirates is also about survival when the very boundaries of reality are under attack.

If you are expecting a stoned, metrosexual freebooter, be warned. Hodgson’s Ghost Pirates is more like H.P. Lovecraft as re-written by Joseph Conrad than Keith Richards meets Blackbeard. The narrator tells of how he shipped aboard the Mortzestus, trying to get back home from ‘Frisco to England. The Mortzestus is a Jonah, an unlucky ship that few man sail in twice. The narrator soon learns why. Shadow-men climb from the sea aboard the ship at night. Sailors report unexplainable and deadly happenings in the rigging. Soon the vessel is under siege.

Hodgson gives way to far more technical sea-jargon (perhaps necessarily) than in previous stories. However that artlessness gives the story a bit more verisimilitude: it is told as a sailor would tell it. The Mortzestus is essentially a haunted house at sea. The “ghosts” are no more explicable than the creatures that beset Hodgson’s other narrators. They come from somewhere else, wreak havoc and vanish.

While the story is slow paced, it does have much of Hodgson’s strange and creepy imagery. Perhaps the best image I retain is the glimpse of shadowy masts and a hull, seen backlit by a sinking sun at sea, slowly turning to stalk the doomed ship. Read this one when the lights are dim and the wind is howling off the sea.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG

By William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson was a sailor who left the sea to run a physical fitness and health food store before he took up writing. His stories are filled with deeds of action, physical courage, and adventures at sea.

Boats of the Glen Carrig tells the adventures of a boat of castaway sailors shipwrecked near the Sargasso Sea in 1757. The narrator is a passenger of the Glen Carrig. He gives a dead-pan recitation of the strange events that befell the unfortunate seafarers. They find a rotting hulk in a creek on a nameless island where strange and unnatural things roam at night. It’s a place to make a ship-wrecked sailor long for the sea.

The castaways escape only to find themselves trapped in a continent of floating seaweed locked tight about another island. They battle monsters that creep about the forests of fungi at night. Around the island are more hulks of vessels entombed in the seaweed. Led by the clever and courageous boatswain, sailors fight tooth and nail to survive the horrors the encounter.

Boats of the Glen Carrig is a unique sort of book. It is crammed with Hodgson’s deep nautical lore and told in an Eighteenth-century style. The result is sometimes awkward and sometimes a bit overloaded with nautical terms. But for all that it may work a bit better, for it avoids the contrived style of a professional writer making up a crazy story and sounds like an old sailor telling a crazy story. At times I felt like I was hearing an echo of a Ray Harryhausen script channeled by an old salt. At other times I thought of the wildly improbably D&D scenarios of teenagers whose imaginations were fired with Coke and Doritos. The story has a naïve love of wonder and action that ranges from Lovecraftian horror to Howardian blood-lust.

Hodgson was a favorite of H.P. Lovecraft, I expect that Robert E. Howard would have liked his work too. Myself I truly enjoyed it. The story has a freshness that overcomes the occasional amateurishness. It is also part of a trilogy of sorts that includes The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates. Boats of the Glen Carrig is a delightful, creepy, action-packed monster-story of a kind that you just don’t see anymore.

-Dave Hardy

From his secret headquarters over at No Fear of the Future comes news that two of Chris Nakashima Brown's tales of futuristic madness. Chris, if you'll recall is the guy that crafted one of the finest homage/pastiches of Robert E. Howard I have ever read: "The Bunker of the Tikriti" in Cross Plains Universe.

Just now he has a story appearing in Fast Forward 2 edited by Lou Anders. I had the pleasure of hearing Chris read excerpts of "The Sun Also Explodes" at Armadillo con this August. High art and bioengineering make a nexus in the West Texas desert where the trees grow Prozac.

Also appearing is "Wild Tchoupitoulas" in Spicy Slipstream Stories edited by Nick Mamatas and Jay Lake. I got to hear excerpts of this at World Fantasy Con back in 2006. It mixes the risque adventures of the pulp-era "spicies" with the waking dream of modern slipstream in a post-deluge New Orleans. Very cool.

http://nofearofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/09/turning-reality-up-to-eleven.html

WHEN CHINA RULED THE SEAS
By Louise Levathes

When China Ruled the Seas is an account of a little-known chapter in history, the high era of Chinese sea-going voyages of trade and exploration. Many people are familiar with the drive to reach the ports of the Indies that drove European voyages of exploration in the late 1400s and 1500s. A similar impulse drove Chinese mariners onto the Indian Ocean decades early, leaving us with a fascinating might-have-been scenario: what if China had not left the field to the Europeans?

In the late 1300s the Mongol rulers of China were overthrown and a new dynasty came to rule the Middle Kingdom: the Ming. During the mop-up campaigns a lad from a Muslim Chinese family was captured and castrated. His name was Zheng He. The eunuch lad was a prisoner of the Ming prince Zhu Di, who found Zheng He to be an able servant. Lest anyone picture Zheng as a mincing ninny, the eunuch was a strapping six-footer with a booming voice who followed Zhu Di into battle. When Zhu Di came to power as emperor of China, he did not forget faithful Zheng He. Zhu Di wanted to expand Chinese influence overseas, his method was to send a massive Chinese fleet comprised of some of the biggest ocean-going vessels built to that date on a trans-Indian Ocean trading/diplomatic mission. Zheng He was to be in command.

Levathes gives the reader a swift background on Chinese ships and sailing techniques, just enough for a layman, but not so much that it overwhelms. She also describes the nature of building the fleet. Like any other government programs, it was plagued with cost overruns, contract padding, and some outright corruption. The treasure ships were something like the famous Spanish galleons: massive enough to carry plenty of goods and supplies on an extended voyage, but lean enough to go into battle in the distant waters where they were the only Chinese presence.

The mission was not one of war and it was not exactly trade. It was more like an armed diplomatic mission that carried out elaborate gift exchanges. Zheng He’s fleet had no problem smashing pirates when they found them or intervening militarily to back an ally. However, the Chinese weren’t interested in conquest. Zheng He focussed on establishing relations with local rulers who would pay “tribute” to the Chinese emperor. In exchange the Chinese plied the locals with valuable gifts. The relative value of the gifts may have depended more on diplomatic status than market value.

That seems to have been part of why the voyages were eventually discontinued. The Chinese bureaucracy were superb bean counters and they found the trips were not cost effective. After massive spending on the fleet, they never gathered enough tribute to make it pay. Infighting between the Confucian civil servants and the eunuchs of the emperor’s household doomed the project.

Here’s where I find a fault with When China Ruled the Seas. Where was the Chinese merchant class? How did they react to the expeditions and what did they do when they ended? Did private traders take up where Zheng He left off? Why were the Confucians so hostile to private trade? I felt that some of these areas needed to be better explored.

On the other hand, Levathes is a veteran National Geographic writer and she knows how to lay on the colorful detail. We learn a lot about court intrigues, the founding of Beijing, and Chinese beliefs about sex (Korean women were considered just right). When China Ruled the Seas is a colorful telling of a tale that has been overlooked in the West.

-Dave Hardy

RECEIVED

Here are some belated notes on recent appearances by myself. I got my copy of Black Sails, the anthology of pirate-fantasy stories from 1018 Press. Some favorites are “The Death of Captain Eugene Bloodcake and Fall of the Horrid Whore” by Joel A. Sutherland (it’s about as weird as it sounds, and that’s a good thing). “The Siren’s Lure” by Jordan Lapp is a sparkling swashbuckler. There’s a lot of good stuff in here with all kinds of pirates from sheer fantasy to sharply defined history to Zeppelin pirates, in stories that cover comedy, horror, and action. It’s more than I can list right now, when I have a little more time I hope to comment on some of my fellow contributors’ tales in more detail.

From a while back The Cimmerian V4, N3 with my article “Worms of the Frontier” is available. There’s a fine article on Howard’s Sword & Sorcery influence on Heavy Metal by Scott Hall. Gary Romeo looks at the origins of the phrase “Sword & Sorcery”. Paul Shovlin takes a long hard look at Solomon Kane. I consider “Worms of the Earth” as a classic of American writing that imports the American frontier into Iron Age Britain.

Finally, my good friend GW Thomas has gotten Talbot Mundy’s classic TROS OF SAMOTHRACE out in one volume. This is some of the best historical fiction I’ve read. If you like Harold Lamb’s Cossack stories or Robert E. Howard’s Crusader tales, check out Tros. He’s a one man navy with a band of Freedom Fighters out to stop Julius Caesar from turning Britain into a Roman colony. It is way cool. Gary deserves a big hand for keeping this out where the public can get it: www.lulu.com/ragemachinebooks.

-Dave Hardy

THE WHITE HEADHUNTER
By Nigel Rendell

They say truth is stranger than fiction. It is also more depressing. Nigel Rendell tells the tale of castaway James Renton and how white civilization more-or-less steamrollered the native cultures of the Pacific. His research unites written accounts of sailors and officials with oral traditions from remote islands as well as some startling forensic evidence of headhunting.

James Renton was a young sailor from Scotland. In 1868 he and a several companions deserted the vessel they were sailing on. Desertion from sailing vessels was not uncommon in those days. Doing it in the middle of the Pacific was. Renton and his companions endured a hellish open-boat voyage of over a month. Near death they eventually made landfall on Malaita, one of the Solomon Islands. It was the one that was regarded as the least friendly to white sailors.

Renton was “adopted” into a local tribe, though his father Kabou had actually bought him as an investment. It seems the last time white men had come ashore the locals had massacred them all, but spared one who turned out to be a highly skilled carpenter. They were hoping for big things from the new one. The islanders got them. Through a series of misunderstandings Renton was hailed as a fire-eating killer. Having little choice, he played to the role. Renton formed an alliance with a warrior called Kwaisulia. He was a sort of local Achilles, a hired gun who took the lead in battle. Together the castaway and the Stone Age samurai so improved tactics that soon Kabou’s clan achieved a dominating role on Malaita.

This dominance was challenged by Renton’s “rescue” by a recruiting ship. Australia needed cheap labor and it was looking to the islands. The “blackbirders” often filled this need by kidnapping the natives, though efforts were made to regulate recruiting. In exchange for three years labor, the recruiters paid in axes, calicos, beads, tobacco, and above all in guns. The labor market was literally an arms race. Kwaisulia used his time in Australia to develop a program that turned him from a tribal warrior to a leading politician who dominated Malaita and neighboring islands by force of his strategic alliances and well-stocked arsenal.

Rendell paints a vivid picture of the Pacific in the era of contact and acculturation to colonialism. The story is tremendously complex, encompassing the creation of artificial islets on the coast of Malaita, the role of cannibalism, and the role of slavery. Rendell had been shanghaied, literally kidnapped and enslaved aboard the vessel he sailed on. In escaping, he nearly became a cannibal. He owed his survival to finding people who were regarded as cannibals (though the Malaitans were not, plenty of islanders were cannibals). The Malaitans didn’t eat him, but they did enslave him. The recruiters who Renton and Kwasulia were so involved with encompassed a large number of slavers, who in turn were believed to be cannibals (they took people from the islands, what else for but to eat?).

Rendell and Kwaisulia went their separate ways, the one to a career attempting to regulate the recruiting business, the other to exploit it to maintain his people’s (and his own) traditions and power. In both cases the attempt was doomed. Diseases from the white population devastated the islands on an apocalyptic scale. Missionaries worked hard to polish off native culture (and incidentally facilitated the spread of epidemics).

If I have one quibble with The White Headhunter it is with Rendall’s grammar. I often found myself losing track of what his pronouns referred to. Well, I often get similar complaints, so let it pass.

Grammatical issues aside, I heartily recommend The White Headhunter. It is a vivid depiction of the passing of the Pacific Islanders independence. Filled with colorful detail and vivid characters, it gives the Pacific frontier dimensions of tragedy and nobility. The story of those days is as wild and wooly as the settling of the American West.

-Dave Hardy

MASTER AND COMMANDER
By Patrick O’Brian

I think few writers would have chosen to start a novel about war at sea in the Napoleonic era with a scene about two guys who get on each others’ nerves during the performance of a string quartet. That’s exactly where Patrick O’Brian planted Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, tow of the oddest action heroes to come down the pike.

Aubrey is a regulation English sea-captain, bluff, bold, and hearty. Even so, he has a hidden streak of self-doubt, but not too much. Though he is a most discerning seafarer, Aubrey is charmingly oblivious to anyone who is not a sailor under his command.

Maturin is even more self-centered than Aubrey, but also self-reflective enough to admit it. He is an ignoramus at sea, and plays the part of the landsman who asks the questions the reader needs answered. In other respects Maturin has a scientist’s eye for exacting detail. His introduction to the world of an armed sloop in the service of His Majesty the King is a daft variation on the participant-observer process of an anthropologist. O’Brian’s pairing of Aubrey and Maturin is the damnedest thing since Oscar and Felix got an apartment together.

Because you must understand that O’Brian turns the conventions of the action tale upside down. This is a novel about a friendship between two unlike men under very unusual circumstances. The circumstances are Aubrey’s promotion to commander of a sloop of war based in the Mediterranean and Maturin’s recruitment as ship’s doctor (not, let it be noted, a surgeon who is, in British usage, a very inferior creature). Aubrey has a simple imperative, keep his crew and ship happy and seaworthy so he can capture lots of enemy vessels that he’ll get paid for (in those days being a naval officer was a little like piracy, you got a share of the loot). Maturin has to adapt himself to his role as lynchpin of morale. It’s not an easy task when Aubrey’s lieutenant is an old friend of Maturin who just happens to know him from their days as Irish nationalist revolutionaries.

The battles at sea are pretty thrilling here, but O’Brian knows that war is mostly sitting around (or sailing) getting ready and then waiting for a battle. O’Brian fills the space with odd vignettes, peculiar characters, and conversation. You’ll learn what a loblolly boy is and how a sin-eater may perform that role. We get exchanges between exiled Irishmen like this:

He is an ill-looking fellow, with a sly, Castle-informer look on his face. And the character of an informer is more despised in our country than in any other, is it not? Rightly so, in my opinion. Though, indeed, the creatures swarm there.

This is adventure for the thinking man. It’s a blazing war-story filled with quirky characters who exist in a fully-realized 19th century world. Read Master and Commander and you’ll see why it is one of the most popular series of sea-stories ever written.

-Dave Hardy

SHIP OF THE LINE
By C.S. Forester

Before there was an Aubrey and Maturin swanning about the seven seas, we had to rely on Horatio Hornblower to keep old Boney at bay across the Channel. It was a tough job, but someone had to do. Lucky for us, we had C.S. Forester to tell us all about it.

Ship of the Line is the sixth of the Hornblower books. Hornblower is a mature man, a post captain of some seniority and considerable experience of war. Hornblower has just received command of the Sutherland, a 74-gun ship of the line. It is the cutting edge of naval warfare technology. With over 30 guns on a side firing shot at 18 pounds and up, it can blast nearly a ton of metal through an enemy vessel. Hornblower is at the helm of a snarling tiger of the sea, ready to rip the frog-eaters a new one.

All he has to do is get a crew, supplies, permission from his superiors to cruise independently, and to find some Frenchies. In many respects Forester was less interested in Hornblower’s battles than his reaction to him. There are plenty of battles in Ship of the Line, but this is foremost a character study. While Hornblower works out his responses to a variety of naval warfare situations: training a crew of landsmen mostly recruited from jails or pressed off the street, protecting a convoy from fast sailing privateers, capturing prizes, collaborating with Spanish guerillas, or using naval gunfire to attack ground troops. All of these eventually build to a climactic ending and an unusual resolution that leads to the seventh Hornblower novel: Flying Colors. While that action is moving briskly along, the reader is inside Hornblower’s head.

In some ways this is the weakness of the story. The reader has such an intimate view of Hornblower (the only point of view character) that we lose sight of how others see him. The lack of any other point of view tends to vitiate the dichotomy of the outside and inside Hornblowers. While Hornblower is to the outside world a taciturn, unflappable sea-god, inside he’s pretty neurotic. Admittedly, it’s a 19th century, British sort of neurotic, but still a little weird. What is one to make of Hornblower’s resolve to never speak a single word more than is absolutely necessary? Or his almost obsessive fear of appearing foolish? It’s as if Forester were playing with the idea that inside the skin of a stone-killer war-hero (and Hornblower is a devil in battle) is a man filled with fears and unresolved contradictions.

While the Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian may have eclipsed the Hornblower series to some degree, this is the real stuff. For seventy years, Hornblower has been the gold standard of naval warfare series. May his heart of oak keep beating.

-Dave Hardy

FAIR BLOWS THE WIND
By Louis L’Amour

Though better known for his Westerns, Louis L’Amour was a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. A true product of the pulps, he was ready to write any kind of story, so long as it involved heroic men in a tight situation. In Fair Blows the Wind he takes on the era of Drake, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth. Unfortunately, the result is a bit uneven.

The novel begins with a strong premise. Tatton Chantry is cast away on the unexplored shores of North America. Much to his shock, he is not alone. A small group of Spanish travelers are also shipwrecked on the coast of what will someday be the Carolinas. It’s a bit of a stretch, but ok. Just as Chantry is working his way into the intrigues surrounding the Spanish castaways (involving a beautiful Inca princess and a special treasure) with yet another castaway (why am I reminded of Solomon Shaft from The Pyrates?) Chantry takes the reader on an extended flashback through pretty much all of Chantry’s teenage years and adulthood.

Alas, I was only slightly more enlightened about Chantry antecedents when I was done than when I started. L’Amour has a marked impulse to allude to things that are critical to the plot, but are too secret to be spoken aloud. Alas, this does little for reader comprehension. Chantry belongs to an un-named Irish family that has been outlawed. As L’Amour reminds us again and again, Chantry is not his real name, his own is so famous that all of Britain would know it. So why bother mentioning it, just be sure it’s REAL important.

The story is a bit of a picaresque as Chantry is by turns a member of a Travelling clan, an apprentice to a Highland sword-master, an associate of a secret society, a Grub Street hack, and a soldier-of-fortune. One gets the feeling that Chantry’s career parallels a bit of L’Amour’s life as well. Ultimately, Chantry pits himself against an Elizabethan Godfather who has made himself the crime-boss of 16th century London.

While normally I decry the tendency of novels to be overlong and full of padding, Fair Blows the Wind has enough material for a much longer novel. L’Amour seems almost to have been striving for an epic that encapsulates the time. But rather than following Drake’s epic voyages of piracy and exploration or the cataclysmic confrontation between radical-Catholic Spain and the revolutionary-Protestant Netherlands, L’Amour has his hero wander about the English countryside a lot.

Fair Blows the Wind is frankly, a big disappointment. There are decent moments, but they are not up to the level I expected. I had high hopes for a swashbuckling tale of Elizabethan rogues and rapscallions. Alas, the goods arrived damaged.

-Dave Hardy

TO THE INDIES

By C.S. Forester

Though he is better known for his tales of Horatio Hornblower, C.S. Forester was capable of evoking eras other than the Napoleonic and attitudes other than upper-class England’s. In To the Indies Forester tells the tale of Columbus’ next-to-last voyage to the Indies.

The tale is not told from the point of view of the globe-crossing Admiral of the Ocean Sea, or by one of the nascent conquistadors who accompanied him. Rather Forester follows the fortunes of Narciso Rich, a senior lawyer from Barcelona, who is way too old to be out conquering unknown lands.

Forester lets his story unfold as the wind and tide carry the adventurous Spaniards through their new empire. Rich is the outsider, he’s a gentleman, but not the right sort for the sword swinging lunk-heads who are Spain’s iron fist in the Indies. Columbus explores new lands and Rich experiences the joy and the brutality of contact with unknown cultures.

Forester segues into events on Hispaniola, where revolt by both the Indians and disaffected Spaniards is brewing. As the king’s eyes and ears in the Indies Rich has to make sense of the flood of new experiences while trying to decide who is to blame for the colony’s mismanagement.

Forester evokes the era beautifully. He reminds the reader that 15th century belief was not our own, but does not cram it down the reader’s throat. Forester also shows just why Columbus was the greatest navigator of his age by depicting the discomfort, danger, and uncertainty of 15th century sea-travel. He plays with the scientific notions of the time and neatly depicts the social divisions of Medieval Europe just as it was becoming Modern Europe. While never soft-pedaling the ferocity of the conquistadors, Forester also shows what made those heavily-armed, over-privileged frat boys the men who had the power to re-shape the world: an indomitable belief in their own ability to dare absolutely anything.

To the Indies is a rare work of fiction that tells a story and brings to life vivid characters while being fully engaged in a world radically different than our own. A world in fact, that gave birth to our own.

-Dave Hardy

THE PYRATES
By George MacDonald Fraser

George Macdonald Fraser has made a career of deconstructing classic genre fiction. The Flashman series is part homage, part parody, part mutation. The Pyrates carries the parody even further, this time instead of exploring every nook of the Victorian Empire, Fraser takes a run at the swashbuckling tales of Jeffery Farnol, Rafael Sabatini, Captain Johnson, Michael Curtiz, and dozens of others. The Flashman novels have footnotes, this one has a bibliography!

The tale follows Colonel Thomas Blood, who’d be a rakehell rapscallion, if only his luck would turn for just a minute. Alas, he is doomed to be overshadowed by handsome Ben Avery, the handsomest man in the Royal Navy. Avery is charged with delivering the Crown of Madagascar tot he ruler of that strategic nation (that is, an insect plagued bit of swamp the French happen to covet). Ben can’t help it if every damsel he passes falls violently, madly, obsessively in love with him. The only hitch is that the International Brotherhood of Pirates under their ferocious shop-steward Calico Jack Rackham are out to seize the crown, rescue their comrade Black Sheba (who is panting with lust for Avery) and save up for retirement. Complicating affairs is the disgusting Don Lardo, a villain of Sydney Greenstreet proportions and the Marquis de Sade’s predilections. Will the pirates and the Royal Navy put aside their animosity to unite against the real foe; Spaniards in possession of portable wealth? Pretty much, yeah.

For the record, Fraser’s hero Colonel Blood is NOT a knock-off of Sabatini’s Captain Blood. Rather he is a fictionalization of the real Col. Blood, an noted Irish schemer who was something of a one-man crime-wave. When he wasn’t plotting to overthrow the monarchy (or restore it, Blood’s politics were a bit murky), he was apt to do a bit of looting. Blood actually directed the heist of the century: he stole the Crown Jewels. Though he was immediately caught, Blood also managed a reversal that would have made O.J. envious. Blood was sentenced to a slow painful death (a seventeenth century specialty). But after being granted and interview His Majesty the King, Blood got a pardon and a Royal handshake. I guess the whole “sentenced to death thing” was just one of those wacky misunderstandings…

The Pyrates is a jolly romp through the cliches of the pirate tales of yore. Sometimes the humor gets a bit repetitious, but then there are gems like a description of a determined pirate chief as a man who, in modern times, would make a good Paratroop sergeant or a moderate Labour MP. Mr. Blair, take note.

-Dave Hardy

THE PIRATES LAFFITE
By William C. Davis

There have been many biographies of Jean Laffite, mostly they are romanticized evocations of an era when New Orleans dripped with Spanish Moss and scoundrels. Hot-blooded Creole gentlemen met with swords under the Dueling Oaks to determine who would win the favors of languid octaroon mistresses.

While octaroon mistresses do figure prominently in William Davis’ tale of the Big Easy’s best-known outlaws, Davis takes a flinty eye to the antics of the last great corsair.

First off, while Jean has had the spotlight pretty much to himself for 200 years, this is the story of the Laffite brothers. While Jean was the public face, older brother Pierre was a dedicated and skilled back-room schemer who complemented Jean’s drive and energy with meticulous planning and political chicanery.

Davis traces the pair to the south of France and finds some evidence that they relocated to the Caribbean in the early years of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. As opportunities for wealth and plunder closed down with the fall of France’s West Indian empire, the Laffites moved on to New Orleans.

At the time huge profits could be made by smuggling. Smugglers brought in everything from slaves, to ordinary goods, to loot captured by corsairs operating in the name of Spain’s rebellious colonies.

Evading customs duties was a major occupation for many New Orleans residents. The city was the major port for legitimate trade, and pretty much the major one for smuggling as well. The Laffites were able to act as honest brokers for the smugglers. They made sure debts were paid and the right palms were greased. They had a number of bases, their best known was Barataria. It was an island in the Mississippi delta, accessible only by shallow draft vessels, and only by one who knew the maze-like waterways. It was also reasonably near the customers in New Orleans. The Laffites had many scams for bringing in goods, including a magnificent use of legal loopholes that allowed them to inform on their own contraband, collect a reward for turning it in, and then sell the goods legally. Davis documents the Laffites’ rise to power with liberal use of court documents, newspaper stories, and government reports. Federal authorities had quite a bit to say about the Laffites.

In a remarkable turn of fortune, just when the Laffites’ fortunes were at their lowest, they turned them around by heroic service at the Battle of New Orleans. Davis tells the story with a twist, he shows just how the Laffites were masters at promising little while asking for a lot. Both the Federal authorities and the British courted the Laffites. Davis suggests their choice to join General Jackson was based less on patriotism than the fact that the Brits saw through the Laffites!

As Spain’s empire crumbled, many in the United States looked on greedily. Davis shows how the Laffites installed themselves at the nexus of patriots, schemers, spies, and expansionists who hoped to profit from the destruction of the Spanish empire. Davis also accessed the correspondence of Spain’s spies in the region and details the Laffites’ most audacious coup of all. When it became clear that the half-baked plans for using secret armies of American mercs to overthrow the Spanish would never work, the Laffites quietly turned informer. In a double stroke they obtained a pass for their own activities in commerce raiding while ensuring a steady income from the Spanish secret service!

Davis follows the downward arc of the Laffites’ career too. Jean’s operations at Barataria came under heavy pressure so he moved to Galveston. There he often found himself in the position of rendering substantial material aid to the very plotters he was supposed to be squelching for Spain. Laffite’s motives seem to be a mixture of humanitarianism and a need to keep the stumblebums in the field so the Spanish would pay him.

Davis documents the grim end of the brothers. Pierre died in a small affray in the Yucatan, Jean in a sea-fight off Cuba. It was a dismal end for men who had once been the criminal masterminds of the Gulf Coast and subject of concern to kings and presidents.

There is a coda. Pierre’s descendents by his mixed race mistress sought to better themselves in segregated New Orleans by passing as white. Davis found the court documents that showed they were not “white” and, in a revealing twist, notes the disappearance of church records that would have proved them to be mixed race.

While The Pirates Laffite is not a fast paced book, it is one of great depth. Davis is meticulous in his study of the details of the Laffites and the milieu of corsairs, smugglers, and secret agents they moved in. Sometimes the barrage of facts is a bit overwhelming, but the clarity of the picture Davis builds is worth slogging through the details. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Gulf Coast. It is also a monument in the literature of piracy and covert warfare.

New Orleans still drips with Spanish moss, criminals, and post-Katrina damp. The local outlaws are far more likely to ambush one another with bullets than to meet with swords. The era of Jean and Pierre Laffite seems quaint by contrast. Still, one wonders if they were here today, would they not quickly rise to the top?

-Dave Hardy

Local History & More Piracy!

I live near Hornsby Bend in Travis county (that’s Texas y’all). It’s an area of farmland that is swiftly turning into tract housing and a bypass highway. It’s perhaps not surprising that people might assume that there is no history behind an area like this. It was a cow pasture, now it’s brick-faced, ranch style homes starting in the $80s.

But every place has its story. It turns out the Hornsby area has quite a few old stories, if you know where to look. Here’s an interesting website that I came across today. It has all kinds of history tidbits about Rueben Hornsby, the first settler to move into this part of Travis County back in the 1830s.
http://www.hornsbybend.com/

Back to reviews of pirate books!



THE BLACKBIRDER
By James L. Nelson

It seems that you can’t toss a brick these days without hitting some kind of pirate reference (especially in children’s books and tv), except in the world of fiction. James L. Nelson set out to change that with his “Brethren of the Coast” series.

The Blackbirder is actually the second novel in the set (The Guardship was first and The Pirate Round is the third). The protagonist is Thomas Marlowe, a reformed pirate turned merchant captain and Virginia planter. Marlowe has freed his slaves, an act that has aroused the hostility of his slave-owning neighbors. When one of Marlowe’s freedmen kills the captain of a slave ship and then heads out to sea, Marlowe must hunt the man down or see his own future blighted. Action at sea and intrigue on land ensues.

This is a decent action novel, but not top drawer. Nelson isn’t Rafael Sabatini. He makes some desultory efforts to use 18th century speech, though mostly he uses neutral 20th century American English. Nelson's descriptions of slave ships are gruesomely true to life. His observations on pirates and their ways sometimes seems heavy-handed, but reasonably accurate: they were admirably freedom-loving, but brutal in their disregard of the lives and property of others.

There are a lot of characters and subplots in this novel, and some of it works better than other parts. Marlowe is a good hard-boiled character, as is Madshaka, an escaped slave with some interesting plans of his own. I really wished the novel spent more time with Marlowe. Too much of the plot seems contrived, the admirable freed slave just happens to kill a scummy slaver captain. The bigoted neighbor just happens to have a dark secret. A pirate ally just happens to show up to help Marlowe’s wife save the day for the freed slaves, etc…

While I don’t want to sound too negative about The Blackbirder, it just didn’t grab me as strongly as other pirate yarns. The strong points for the novel are lots of action, some good characters, and an interesting look at race relations in the 18th century.
-Dave Hardy

This is the inagural post for my new Fire & Sword blog. Given the great speed with which I write my reviews (as some may note from my grammar, spelling, and punctuation) , a blog format is the easiest way to get my reviews online. A nifty feature is that blogs can be interactive (not so with locked down html on a private site).

Please feel free to visit my site at http://www.fireandsword.com for lots of other reviews, links, and some examples of my fiction.

Since this is the summer of piracy, without further ado here is my review of the splendid pirate tale, The Golden Hawk.



THE GOLDEN HAWK
By Frank Yerby

Although little remembered today, Frank Yerby was one of the last great writers of swashbuckling adventure novels. In The Golden Hawk he tackled the quintessential swashbuckler subject, piracy on the high seas.

Kit Gerardo is the dashing young man at the center of the novel. He serves under Captain Lazarus, a leper buccaneer, together they quell a mutiny, survive the Port Royal earthquake, battle a Spanish galleon, and rescue a beautiful girl who drives Lazarus to suicide and shoots Kit in the head. And that’s just the first chapter.

The rest of the novel pretty much keeps up the pace. Kit and his friend Bernardo lead the buccaneers of the Seaflower across the Caribbean in search of vengeance upon Don Luis del Toro, the Spanish grandee who had Kit’s mother tortured to death by the Inquisition. Kit is also in quest of Rouge, the fieriest she-pirate ever to sail the Main, she also has a score to settle with Don Luis. On the other hand Bianca, Don Luis’ bride, becomes acquainted with Kit and ensures the very complex relationship between Don Luis and Kit doesn’t get any simpler.

Yerby was too good a writer to make his tale just about good and evil, so he keeps his characters hopping to show that good and evil aren’t always so far apart. Yerby also adds in the details that give his tale a richness beyond the usual cutlasses and pieces-of-eight business. I’d never heard of Caviedes the Mad Poet of Lima before, but he’s one of the most interesting characters in the novel.

The Golden Hawk is a rousing tale of adventure with a distinctive cut to its jib. While tales like Captain Blood and Pirates of the Caribbean are well known, The Golden Hawk is realtively obscure. It’s a pity because the Hawk deserves to soar.
-Dave Hardy