Adrian Tinniswood

Sheer Me Timbers!

Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire, 1607–1697

By

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 368pp £25 order from our bookshop

The pirates of my childhood were a benign bunch. Captain Pugwash and the barely animated crew of the Black Pig outwitted the black-bearded, black-hearted Cut Throat Jake. A swashbuckling Errol Flynn beat the wicked French and won the heart of Olivia de Havilland in Sunday afternoon re-runs of Michael Curtiz’s 1935 masterpiece, Captain Blood. Even Robert Newton’s Long John Silver, whom I watched not in Disney’s Treasure Island but in a spin-off TV series, regularly ar-harred his way through poetry about buccaneers and buried gold and old romance. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us