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The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down | 
 enlarge | Author: Colin Woodard
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $5.48
You Save: $9.52 (63%)
New (36) Used (13) from $4.46
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 121361
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 015603462X
Dewey Decimal Number: 972
EAN: 9780156034623
ASIN: 015603462X
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Welcome to the Pirate Republic—the early-eighteenth-century home to some of the great pirate captains, including Blackbeard, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates—former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves—this "Flying Gang" established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote.
For a brief, glorious period the Pirate Republic was enormously successful. It cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires. Imperial authorities and wealthy shipowners denounced its residents as the enemies of mankind, but common people saw them as heroes. Colin Woodard tells the dramatic untold story of the Pirate Republic that shook the very foundations of the British and Spanish Empires and fanned the democratic sentiments that would one day drive the American Revolution.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 The republic of Pirates July 30, 2008
Thaddeus A. Opiola (Macomb, MI)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Colin Woodard has done a great job in documenting all we know about the Caribbean Pirates. I like the level of detail. I enjoyed the investigative detail of all of his research on court trials and history. No doldrums in the reading this book at all; each page and chapter carefully well written and laid out. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to buy this as a gift, who would like to read about the Caribbean pirates and who loves to read about history. There was good introduction about the famous John Avery Madagascar pirate.
I really enjoyed how this information was woven together and I hope Collin writes another just on the Madagascar pirates.
Better than Expected June 2, 2008
Andrew (Davis, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was very descriptive and detailed. All the pirates, their crews, and ships were all named, and a few of the ships were pinned down to the port they were made at and the type of wood they were made from. Somehow the author was able to compile all of this data and turn it into a real story.
I couldn't put it down.
A Real History May 29, 2008
J. Crivelli (NY, NY, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Because of the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean, many books about pirates have been published in the past few years. Most are light-weight works.
The Republic of Pirates is a real history which puts the pirates of the early 18th Century in perspective, concentrating on the Bahamas.
This is one of several excellent books I've read recently about pirates.
My interest was originally sparked in 1995 with David Cordingly's "Under the Black Flag" because this book pictured the privateers/pirates as sea-going guerrillas.
Beside "The Republic of Pirates", the following are worth reading:
Peter Earle Pirate Wars
The Sack of Panama
Stephan Talty Empire of Blue Water
Benerson Little The Sea Rover's Practice
The Buccaneer's Realm
Richard Zacks The Pirate Coast
Frederick C. Leiner End of the Barbary Terror
Together these works cover piracy from the late 16th to the early 19th Century.
"...to swing in the air and feed the crow...." April 16, 2008
WILLIAM H FULLER (SPEARFISH, SD USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES is the first book on historical pirating that one has picked up, it should be put right down again without being opened even a crack lest one be tempted to read it through. No, shelve it at once and pick up EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER instead, for it portrays the true beginning of the "Golden Age" of pirating in 17th century Caribbean waters. EMPIRE ends in the waning years of the century with the death of Henry Morgan and the destruction of Port Royal in a massive Jamaican earthquake, which is almost exactly where THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES begins. The two books complement each other perfectly and, between them, give us a comprehensive view of pirating from the 1600s into the early 1800s.
The writing styles of both authors are entertainingly readable. The historical events that they relate are as fascinating as any fictional novel could be, making their books both instructive and captivating.
REPUBLIC does develop occasional textual problems about halfway through. For instance, on page 168, we are told that the ships for one expedition were stocked with "enough salt, bread, flower, and preserved food" to feed its sailors and soldiers. I'd like to know how they preserved that "flower." Page 202 has sentences erroneously using "them" for "they" and "affect" for "effect." Page 209 has Blackbeard's men "ascribed to a number of attacks," whereas the intent is obviously to ascribe the attacks to the men. The syntax is utterly reversed! Pages 214 and 222 both misspell the Antilles islands as the "Antillies," a particularly ironic error in a book dealing with seafaring. Finally, I sm still searching for the definition of "paridor" that appears on page 236; granted, it is in a quotation dating from about 1718 and may now be an obsolete term, in which case, an explanatory footnote would have been valuable. Not counting the obscure quoted term, almost all the grammatical and syntactical errors occur in a span of 54 pages and do not afflict the remainder of the 332-page book (not counting the endnotes). Perhaps the proofreader somehow missed those pages.
I do not find the occurrence of grammatical errors so numerous or so frequent as to weaken the book significantly, but I would hope that the few that do exist will be corrected should the book be reprinted for future editions, for they are distracting when they do occur. The book also lacks a bibliography, and, while the reader can ascertain the author's sources by reading though 37 pages of endnotes, a concise listing of published sources and additional books on the subject would be potentially useful.
Despite its occasional flaws, REPUBLIC easily receives my rating of five Amazon stars. In addition to continuing the historical saga of pirates where EMPIRE leaves off, the book gives us glimpses into early bribery of colonial officialdom, affords us glances of life in the eastern seaboard of 18th century America (North, Central and South) and the islands off that seaboard, and even shows us the real-life source of Daniel Defoe's fictional Robinson Crusoe. Benjamin Franklin also makes an appearance as a youthful poet writing about the death of Blackbeard (a snatch of which comprises the title of this review). We are reminded of (or perhaps learn about) the English monarchical lines of the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, the Jacobite uprisings, the War of Spanish Succession and even the well-forgotten War of the Quadruple Alliance, and especially the impact that all of these had on the New World. Descriptions of the wildernesses that became today's Florida and the other seaboard states to the north remind us that an extensive history of settlement, trade, banditry, and the fluctuating fortunes of war played out on this continent long before the establishment of today's nations. Best of all, this intriguing history plays out before our eyes in an engaging manner that will captivate almost any reader.
I recommend both EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER and THE REPUBLIC OF PIRATES (to be read in that order) to every reader who enjoys unusual history, tales of adventure, and generally well written narratives about the men-and a couple of women-who helped form the New World.
 Glorious, vainglorious, rotters February 23, 2008
Charles S. Fisher (Woodacre, CA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
From the author's introduction I was prepared to find pirates of the golden age like the heroes of my childhood. Although some never abused or killed their victims, they were not nice in their theft of goods, impressments holders of needed skills, and wanton destruction of ships. Granted, as the author points out, they were rootless, onetime privateers, escapees of an exploitative merchant marine and cruel navies, but they were still thieves in the night bankrupting small merchants, and impoverishing townspeoples and farmers who were not their oppressors. Some may have been polite to their captors but others were vengeful sadists. Although I was tempted to romanticize the earliest of the golden age pirates, I ended up disgusted with them and feeling (though I have reservations about capital punishment) they deserved the gallows and gibbet.
Piracy is such a romantic topic, I would love to find a book that puts it in a world historical perspective. Woodard gives us a good tale of the golden age. I would love to know more about its rise with the coming of long distance maritime trade three thousand years ago, its role as an economic, political, and military weapon of leaders and political entities, like cities, or empire and piracy as a form of thievery. Woodard's book is an exciting read, but piracy has always been with us. What has it been all about?
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
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