True Caribbean Pirates

Public interest in pirates has been pricked by romantic visions of buried treasure maps (sadly, there don't seem to be any surviving examples), shipwrecks, and sea floors littered with gold coins and jewelry—not to mention a pair of highly successful Johnny Depp movies. This History Channel production takes a look at the real pirates of the Caribbean, arguing that these men (and women) were indeed as wild, reckless, and colorful as their legends suggest. Piracy flourished during the great age of exploration in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the Caribbean served as a vast shipping and trading ground for moving booty from the New World to Europe. Fueled by rum and greed, these buccaneers (literally, "jerky makers," for their fondness for smoking meat on wooden frames) turned the Caribbean into a free-for-all zone. One scholar notes here that the pirates lived a crazy life in which treasure from a looted ship would be later squandered in drunken debauches, but in spite of their crudeness, they subscribed to a rough democracy aboard ship, where a captain could be voted out by his men. Ultimately, the swashbuckling era was simply too wild to last, and most pirates were killed by tropical diseases, combat, the hangman's noose, or simply disappeared into the mists of history. Combining dramatic reenactments and interviews, True Caribbean Pirates brings to life a handful of famous pirates who sported nicknames like Blackbeard and Black Bart (as well as pirate queens such as Ann Bonny and Mary Read, who proved just as able as men at wielding a cutlass). In spite of a few slow spots and the inevitable Hollywood-style touches (dramatized pirate raids and ship-to-ship combat), this is solid popular history. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (S. Rees)