Book log 2018 #3 - Empire Of Blue Water
Feb. 9th, 2018 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lonemagpieby Stephen Talty
I'd been looking forward to this nonfiction book about Henry Morgan and the pirates and his governorship of Jamaica. It has its moments, and lots of asides to folks and events before and after and tangentially related, and it's fairly conversational, but... There are a lot of big buts, and, contrary to how that sounds, I do not like big buts, and I cannot lie.
The first hit came on page 36, when I stumbled into “Privateering [as opposed to piracy] was invented by Henry VIII” - Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The earliest surviving letter of Marque and Reprisal/Commission to a privateer issued in England was issued by John in 1205. Henry IV issued four surviving ones, in 1400, 1404, 1405, and 1411. Henry V issued a surviving one against Genoa in 1413, and *then* Henry VIII finally put one out against France and Scotland in 1543. It doesn’t survive, but we know Edward III issued at least one set somewhere around 1344-5-ish as well.
This means I can't trust the rest of the book to be any more accurate, since I'm not familiar with this writer and thus don't know if it's just a rare slip. Then he decides to introduce a fictional exemplar of an everyday pirate of the sort who'd be in Morgan's crew – I can see why, but he doesn't integrate this character (called Roderick) into the style well at all, so instead of saying “an everyday pirate would...” he goes “Roderick now does...” at random, which just makes you wonder who the fuck is this Roderick guy again?
For extra shits and giggles, where a primary source (if we're willing to trust any of them) writes something that disagrees with his view of how the lives of the people in the area were – for example Mary Carleton's memoirs that the pirates were all gents to her – he contradicts it with a lecture. Which is fine where there's another contradictory record from the time, but not when it's just how a person felt and there's no evidence otherwise. Then rather than foreshadowing or laying groundwork for stuff that will happen later, he just squeezes bits in at random, without integrating them in a coherent or at least apparently planned manner. (E.g. suddenly diverting to the geology at the end of a chapter on how and why they blew their money the way did, and that financial correlation to social status. It just doesn't work as flow or setup.)
And then there are the footnotes. There is a section of footnotes at the back, for each chapter, all nicely numbered. There are, however, no indications of the footnotes, or numbers to link them, in the actual fucking text. (OK, I've edited history books, this one's probably the fault of the copyeditors not getting the correct documents when the manuscript was delivered, or a fuckup with the formatting, but it's still a major pain in what's
supposed to be educational, and I've been particularly looking forward to.)
And that's a damn shame, cos most of the individual bits are chatty and interesting enough, but really I'm now just so desperate to read something with fewer problems.
I'd been looking forward to this nonfiction book about Henry Morgan and the pirates and his governorship of Jamaica. It has its moments, and lots of asides to folks and events before and after and tangentially related, and it's fairly conversational, but... There are a lot of big buts, and, contrary to how that sounds, I do not like big buts, and I cannot lie.
The first hit came on page 36, when I stumbled into “Privateering [as opposed to piracy] was invented by Henry VIII” - Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The earliest surviving letter of Marque and Reprisal/Commission to a privateer issued in England was issued by John in 1205. Henry IV issued four surviving ones, in 1400, 1404, 1405, and 1411. Henry V issued a surviving one against Genoa in 1413, and *then* Henry VIII finally put one out against France and Scotland in 1543. It doesn’t survive, but we know Edward III issued at least one set somewhere around 1344-5-ish as well.
This means I can't trust the rest of the book to be any more accurate, since I'm not familiar with this writer and thus don't know if it's just a rare slip. Then he decides to introduce a fictional exemplar of an everyday pirate of the sort who'd be in Morgan's crew – I can see why, but he doesn't integrate this character (called Roderick) into the style well at all, so instead of saying “an everyday pirate would...” he goes “Roderick now does...” at random, which just makes you wonder who the fuck is this Roderick guy again?
For extra shits and giggles, where a primary source (if we're willing to trust any of them) writes something that disagrees with his view of how the lives of the people in the area were – for example Mary Carleton's memoirs that the pirates were all gents to her – he contradicts it with a lecture. Which is fine where there's another contradictory record from the time, but not when it's just how a person felt and there's no evidence otherwise. Then rather than foreshadowing or laying groundwork for stuff that will happen later, he just squeezes bits in at random, without integrating them in a coherent or at least apparently planned manner. (E.g. suddenly diverting to the geology at the end of a chapter on how and why they blew their money the way did, and that financial correlation to social status. It just doesn't work as flow or setup.)
And then there are the footnotes. There is a section of footnotes at the back, for each chapter, all nicely numbered. There are, however, no indications of the footnotes, or numbers to link them, in the actual fucking text. (OK, I've edited history books, this one's probably the fault of the copyeditors not getting the correct documents when the manuscript was delivered, or a fuckup with the formatting, but it's still a major pain in what's
supposed to be educational, and I've been particularly looking forward to.)
And that's a damn shame, cos most of the individual bits are chatty and interesting enough, but really I'm now just so desperate to read something with fewer problems.