Buccaneers and Privateers

The Story of the English Sea Rover, 1675–1725

Richard Frohock

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781611493887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In the late seventeenth century, Spain dominated the Caribbean and Central and South America, establishing colonies, mining gold and silver, and gathering riches from Asia for transportation back to Europe. Seeking to disrupt Spain's nearly unchecked empire-building and siphon off some of their wealth, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British adventurers—both legitimate and illegitimate—led numerous expeditions into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Many voyagers wrote accounts of their exploits, captivating readers with their tales of exotic places, shocking hardships and cruelties, and daring engagements with national enemies. Widely distributed and read, buccaneering and privateering narratives contributed significantly to England's imaginative, literary rendering of the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and they provided a venue for public dialogue about sea rovers and their position within empire. This book takes as its subject the literary and rhetorical construction of voyagers and their histories, and by extension, the representation of English imperialism in popular sea-voyage narratives of the period.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Bible Overboard
• Chapter 2: “The Usual Atrocities”
• Chapter 3: Exquemelin in England
• Chapter 4: Captain Bartholomew Sharp and the “Sacred Hunger of Gold”
• Chapter 5: Reconsidering William Dampier’s Colonial Vision
• Chapter 6: Consummate Privateers
• Chapter 7: The Return of the Buccaneer in the Voyage Narratives of Shelvocke and Betagh
• Bibliography
• About the Author