Spanish Main
Pirate. By A. B. C. Whipple. Drawings by R. M. Powers. (Gollancz, 18s.)
INTO no more than 138 pages Professor Lloyd has somehow managed to fit everything: the early forays in the West Indies, the voyage round the world, the operations against the Armada (the 'bowls' story on Plymouth Hoe is completely dis- credited), and the final disappointments and dis- grace. The book also contains new information on Drake that has come to light during the last ten years.
To compare Drake with Nelson, says Professor Lloyd, is futile, because their lives were so dif- ferent. And yet were they so? Both were in the line of aggressive, unorthodox sea-captains—the line of Hawke and Cochrane and Beatty rather than that of Anson, St. Vincent and Jellicoe : both were happier with tactics than strategy; both saw things in terms of bla6k and white; Spain was Drake's great Antichrist, France was Nelson's. Both were • moody and impulsive, and Drake's reactions to Doughty and Borough were not entirely dissimilar to those of Nelson to Carac- ciolo and Troubridge. Only in one respect were they totally different. There was in Drake none of the femininity that, was both Nelson's strength and weakness. The virgin queen was a more tax- ing mistress than Lady Hamilton.
The Caribbean was the scene of Drake's early successes, and it is also the background for most of Mr. Whipple's Pirate. Drake himself, of course, was one of the earliest pirates, though we generally accord him the more polite title of privateer. (The essential difference between them was that one acted under the orders of government, the other on his own account; Drake did both.) The Caribbean was the hunting ground for most of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates, and Mr. Whipple's book is a well-documented digest of the doings of the most notorious. And what 'doings they were! We read of the dreadful Blackbeard who stuck lighted matches in his hair to terrify his enemies, of Captain Flood's hair- raising adventures (which had me rigid in my chair) on Lotus Island, of cunning Charlie Vane, of the two girl pirates Ann and Mary, of the gentleman pirate Major. Bonnet, and of poor, infamous Captain Kidd, who was not really a pirate at all. Nearly all of them met violent death, either in battle or at the hands of the hangman, yet none, let it be noted (nor any other), ever made his victim walk the plank. Mr. Whipple knows his subject and terrain backwards, and both in time and in place the atmosphere (helped by the sinister, brilliant drawings of Mr. Powers) is most powerfully conveyed. At the end of the book is a sort of Raymond Postgate's 'Good Treasure Guide' which tells you the four-star places to dig, if you have a mind to, for pieces
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