In 1897, philosopher and historian John Fiske observed that [a]t no other time in the world's history has the business of piracy thriven so greatly as in the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth. Its golden age may be said to have extended from about 1650 to about 1720 . It is this brief, 7-decade period to which most folks refer when they talk about pirates and piracy, even though there were in fact three quite distinct outbreaks of piracy during this timeframe. And it is this period that gave rise to two books that would have a long-lasting influence on public perceptions of piracy.
The first piratical outburst, a roughly three-decade period (ca. 1650-1680), involved Anglo-French seaman on Hispaniola and Tortuga undertaking piracy in response to Spanish attempts to wipe out their native food supply. (The term most commonly applied to these pirates, buccaneers, is derived from the Arawak term bukan, a type of grill used to smoke meat.) Because this piracy was attractive to the British Crown as a low-budget way to wage war against Spain, many of these pirates wound up becoming privateers. It was this period of piracy that gave rise to Montbars the Exterminator (Daniel Montbars).
It was towards the end of this period (1678) that a French writer and former buccaneer, Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, published in Amsterdam one of the most influential books about piracy ever written, De Americaensche Zee-Roovers. Translated into Spanish in 1681, the title was translated into English in 1684. (The English translation was based on the Spanish, not the Dutch, edition. Shortly thereafter [also 1684], there appeared a revision of the English edition which sought to clean up the image of the British privateer Henry Morgan, corrected from the errors of the original, by the relations of some English gentlemen, that then resided in those parts.) A French edition followed in 1686.
No book of the 17th century in any language (so one observer noted, and as we shall see for ourselves shortly) was ever the parent of so many imitations and the source of so much fiction. The title pages depicted below (the original Dutch edition, left, and its English translation, right) are courtesy of Stephen Gertz:
Although this influential title has been reprinted far too many times to recount (witness the recent reprint above), many collectors prefer one of the earliest editions due to the many excellent engravings contained therein (several of which are foldouts). Despite the fact that Exquemelin often confuses his dates, he is considered to be, on the whole, a perfectly honest witness, and his accounts of such transactions as fell within his own experience are corroborated by the official narratives....
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