"White Gold" by Giles Milton

 This story of the (estimated) million slaves seized from European ships and coastal towns by Barbary corsairs and enslaved in Moslem North Africa between about 1550 and 1820 focuses on one man: Thomas Pellow from Cornwall, who was captured as a ten year old boy, forcibly converted to Islam, became a house servant of the bloodthirsty ruler of Morocco and later one one of the leading soldiers of one of his armies, was forcibly married and became a father, made several escape attempts, was saved while on the scaffold on one occasion, and finally escaped at the age of thirty-three. It's a brilliant story and it is told with the flair of the author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Samurai William, and The Riddle and the Knight, amongst others. 

The Moroccan trade properly got going after 1610, when King Philip III "expelled all one million Spanish Moors from his land" (Ch 1) providing a pool of dispossessed people longing for revenge.

Strangely, the man who ended this trade by leading a British fleet to bombard Algiers, was Sir Edward Pellew who was related to Thomas Pellow.

Selected quotes:

• "The flags on their mainmasts depicted a human skull on a dark green background" (Ch 1)
• "His extraordinary story had just been published in one of the capital's newspapers. Pellow was surprised and asked to be shown the article. ... Almost every detail in the report was wrong." (Ch 12) The standards of accurate journalism are - probably - better nowadays.

October 2022; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Pirate of Exquisite Mind" by Diana and Michael Preston

This is a biography of William Dampier, the first person to circumnavigate the world three times, who landed on the coast of Australia 80 years before Captain James Cook and who became the best selling author who inspired the new genre of travel writing as well as Robinson Crusoe (being on both the expeditions which marooned Alexander Selkirk and which rescued him) by Daniel Defoe (whose biography is reviewed here) and Gulliver's Travels. He is also responsible for a host of words including avocado, barbeque, chopsticks and sub-species.

But he started off as a buccaneer. Sailing to the West Indies he began working on a sugar plantation but his wanderlust soon got the better of him. He spent time as a logger before signing on as a pirate. His career in piracy was pretty lacklustre; in his first voyage he sacked a couple of towns but kept missing the rich prizes and he returned to England (having rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Pacific) after twelve years at sea with little to show for his trouble. His second voyage, as a captain of a scientific vessel for the Royal Navy was equally unsuccessful. Only on his third voyage, demoted to navigator under the command of Woodes Rogers, did he help in capturing a Spanish Galleon which earned him some thousands of pounds, enough to pay his debts after he had died. In all, he did better as an author.

The Prestons tell his tale in great detail which sometimes slows the narrative. A great deal of time is spent on the first voyage (to be fair, it was the longest, it took twelve years). But Dampier did so much and discovered so much that it is difficult to see how any less detail would be possible. Certainly the book is action packed to the extent that I got a little lost a times. I would have liked to see some (modern) maps to show exactly where he was at which time.

This is is an interesting biography of a fascinating man and well worth reading.

August 2015; 461 pages

Silver: Return to treasure Island" by Andrew Motion

This is the sequel to one of the best adventure yarns ever: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. As such it was always bound to disappoint.

Jim is the son of Jim Hawkins who keeps a pub on the north bank of the Thames estuary. One day, Natty, the daughter of Long John Silver, turns up, takes him to her father and persuades him to steal the map of Treasure Island from his father and to get on a boat organised by her father to find the treasure that was left behind, an enormous cache of bar silver. Which he agrees to do. He feels very guilty about betraying his father and stealing from him but he seems to feel no fear whatsoever in obeying the summons and getting on board a boat with no-one he knows crewed by Captain Beamish.

I found this stretched my credulity too far. It is difficult for a book to redeem itself when one cannot believe in the first act.

When they get to Treasure Island (Natty now disguised as ship's boy Nat which continued to distort credibility) they discover that it is now inhabited. Adventures follow.

When I fist read Treasure Island it gave me nightmares. The secret was the brilliant characters: the smooth talking pirate Long John Silver with his single leg and the ex-buccaneer Billy Bones with his drunken rendering of the Captain Flint pirate song: "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest; Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum." The foolish too-trusting Squire Trelawney and the shrewd Doctor Livesey. The mad maroon Ben Gunn and the superbly sinister Blind Pew. And the adventures! Cross and double cross. Never being sure who was your friend and who your enemy; your life being saved by the arch villain. The reality of a pirate leader's life: deliver the gold or be torn apart by your crew. The threats and the brutality.

There was menace in this book. There were characters. But there was no betrayal. Goodies were goodies and stayed goodies, baddies were likewise constant. In some places there was a whiff of political correctness. The descriptions were beautiful and young Jim is very taken up by the floras and fauna of the island, even when heading into peril on an island of menace. But it really didn't gel.

It ended with as clear a presumption of a sequel as I have ever met, outside those books where they give you the first chapter of the next book as a taster.

Disappointing. May 2015; 404 pages