Tag: Anne Bonny

Madeira Mondays: The Lost Pirate Kingdom (TV Show Review)

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This was really awful. 

You’re very welcome to stick around for the rest of this post (and I hope you do!!) but if you’re going to take one thing out of it, it’s the above sentence. Netflix’s new ‘docuseries’ The Lost Pirate Kingdom (2021) was really, really awful. 

It’s one in a new trend of ‘history’ documentary films which features interviews with historians interspersed with extended live action reenactments (aka imagined fantasies) of historical events. This format worked surprisingly well in The History Channel’s Washington last year (which I reviewed here). Washington worked because it had a really star-studded line up of leading historians. It also worked because it had, if I remember correctly, a higher percentage of historians talking and a lower percentage of reenactments than Pirate Kingdom has, although I could be wrong. In any case, I enjoyed Washington just fine and found the reenactments there quite restrained and engaging…rather than the sensational, graphic, needlessly violent and terribly CGI-ed reenactments we find here.

  • A promotional shot for Pirate Kingdom. Presumably this is Blackbeard, who used to set his beard on fire to scare the ships that he was boarding. I didn’t get to the Blackbeard episode. But I’ll bet the show makes a real meal out of this detail – wouldn’t be surprised if his beard shot off fireworks etc.!

I can’t speak at all to the calibre or credentials of the people interviewed in Pirate Kingdom because I’m not as familiar with this historical community. The period that this ‘docuseries’ looks at is the early 1700s, after the War of Spanish Succession, when piracy flourished in the Caribbean. It looks at the lives (and, more likely, the legends) of some of the most famous pirates who lived then: people like Blackbeard (who was a real guy), Samuel Bellamy, Anne Bonny etc.

And, like I said, I’m no pirate expert, but I smelled a rat even in the show’s introduction, when a voiceover that sounds exactly like David Attenborough (but thankfully wasn’t!) told me that this series was about pirates who were the ‘real forefathers of modern America.’ What? I only watched the first episode, so I didn’t stick around long enough to find out what exactly that means, but are they trying to suggest that America was founded not by like, the actual founders, but…pirates? I don’t know, and I really don’t care. By the time they said that, which was about five minutes into the episode, I was already experiencing sensory overload from all the random action on screen and still reeling from the fact that I’d just seen shots of a woman being raped. In the introduction!! (This is how we’re introduced to the famous female pirate Anne Bonny. The not-David Attenborough voiceover says that ‘not all pirates were men!’ and then we see shots of a lady being raped, before holding a knife to her attacker’s throat. Presumably, this is Bonny.)

In addition to the sexual assault moment, there’s also a pretty lengthy torture scene and lots more violence. And I’m not averse to any of these things in film. In fact sometimes they’re necessary to tell a story! And I’m sure that life aboard pirate ships really was awful. But these things just seemed like sensational set pieces there to hold your interest. I felt so patronized by it: like the filmmakers thought I would lose interest if another violent thing wasn’t thrown at me every five minutes.

I actually wanted to hear what the historians were saying, but they cut away from them so quickly I had trouble keeping up. 

  • An illustration of Anne Bonny (and her boobs, I guess) from a Dutch version of Charles Johnson’s book of pirates

Honestly, don’t watch this. I don’t blame the historians, and I don’t blame the actors (who all seemed fine). I actually don’t even blame the people who scripted the reenactment scenes because sometimes the dialogue in them was pretty good, when it slowed down long enough to let people speak to each other. I blame the entire concept and the overall execution. I don’t need some guy yelling ‘I’m Blackbeard! Arrg!!!’ directly to camera for me to be interested. And I’m not alone. People like pirates. The material is inherently interesting. If they just slowed down and let it breathe (and let us breathe) for one minute, maybe we could have engaged with that material in some sort of real way. 

I didn’t even touch on the ‘historical accuracy’ of this because I don’t feel like there’s any need. Hopefully people know that what they’re watching is as ‘historical fiction’ as any novel, despite the historians present. 

I wish I could say The Lost Pirate Kingdom was ‘good bad’, because I love films that are so ridiculous they are good (see my review of Beyond the Mask). But this is tasteless. Can we call it an exploitation film? Maybe. I’ll say it’s exploitation adjacent. But, then again, that’s too high praise because the ‘exploitation’ in those films is often done in a knowing way and as part of a genre. This is just blood and guts, murder and mayhem which is un-self-aware and no fun. And in the guise of ‘education’ no less!! No thanks. 

I can confidently say that this is my least favorite thing I’ve ever watched for Madeira Mondays. At least nobody talks in ‘pirate speak’? Although I wouldn’t put it past them in future episodes. 

Recommended Further Reading/Viewing: 

PS Today’s Featured Image is ‘A French Ship and Barbary Pirates’, a painting from 1615, accessed via Wikimedia

‘Madeira Mondays’ is a series of blog posts exploring 18th century history and historical fiction. Follow the blog for a new post every other Monday and thanks for reading!

Madeira Mondays: The Unbinding of Mary Reade (Book Review)

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Let’s talk about pirates!

I was super excited when I checked out The Unbinding of Mary Reade from my local library a couple of weeks ago. This historical fiction novel by Miriam McNamara came out in 2018 and it’s inspired by the life of a real 18th century (female!) pirate by the name of Mary Read. I knew nothing about Mary Read going into the book, but I’ve since learned a little bit about her and her status as one of the legendary English pirates of the early 18th century, the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy’.

We’ll come back to the real historical Mary’s life in a moment, but I went into this book without any of that knowledge and I’m reviewing it now as a novel. And, unfortunately, as a novel, I don’t think that it wholly succeeded, despite the super exciting premise of a queer lady pirate going on an adventure in the Caribbean (cue Pirates of the Caribbean theme music…).

I’ll start with some of what works about the book. At its core this book is really a romance, between Mary Reade and another female pirate called Anne Bonny (also a real person). And some of the sensual scenes are really well written without being explicit – it’s a Young Adult book, so it’s still appropriate for that audience. Bodies melt into each other like ‘candle wax’ and the characters are always covered in gritty sand (okay, so maybe that’s not sensual, but it is specific and probably realistic). In general, the setting was well described – colorful parrots fly overhead, the sea is shining under the hot sun etc.

I also liked the character of Anne Bonny, the female pirate who our protagonist Mary becomes enamored with. Anne was an excellent combination of manipulative and vulnerable, capable and helpless, totally over-confident at times and totally self-pitying the next. She’s gorgeous and bold and brash. As a poor woman in the 18th century, the odds were not in her favor and she has learned to manipulate the men around her and play the system, using her sexuality to gain safety and favors, but we see her coming up against the pervasive lack of fairness and unequal treatment of women at that time, which all works great.

Unfortunately though, the cons outweighed the pros for me with this book. My main issue is that there wasn’t a lot of pirate stuff in it. No buried treasure? Maps? Sword fighting? None of that? These are things we expect from the genre. I wanted a queer pirate treasure island, I guess – whether or not that’s historically accurate is another matter (it probably wasn’t) but you come to expect some of those trappings from pirate stories. A lot of pirate life probably was waiting around for opportunities to arise, as the characters do in this book, but that’s not as fun to read about.

Also I wasn’t a fan of the book’s structure. It flashes back from past to present, in alternating chapters, which was often confusing and didn’t add much. I think those flashbacks would have been better if they had simply been woven into the main body of text, not set off in separate chapters.

Additionally, the dialogue was often a little clunky and on-the-nose (there’s a bit when two characters scream at each other: ‘You don’t understand what it’s like to be me!’ ‘Well you don’t understand what it’s like to be me!’). And throughout the text there didn’t seem to be much of an attempt at taking on an 18th century manner of speaking. Often I prefer a lighter hand when it comes to adopting a historical voice, but I didn’t feel like McNamara was enjoying or reveling in any of the amazing language of this time period, which was full of very distinctive and colorful phrases.

Overall though I think my main criticism was quite simply the lack of adventure. I think buried treasure is mentioned but then it’s dropped. I would have preferred the primary driver of the plot to be something non-romantic (Mary wants to find treasure and get rich, for instance) and then have the romance with Anne Bonny growing slowly throughout their adventure together. But that’s also an entirely different book. 

When I went to read a bit about the real Mary Read after finishing this book, I was also a bit taken aback by all the changes McNamara made to her life. Not because the author doesn’t have license to change whatever she wants (of course she does!), but because I just don’t understand why some of these changes were made. Why change so much? The real Mary was married before she became a pirate, for instance, which I think could have made for quite an interesting backstory (although possibly not as appropriate for YA?).

Also, as a side note, I’m unclear why the character’s name is spelled with an ‘e’ in this book (Reade) but most sources I’ve found online refer to her as Mary Read (without the ‘e’). I’m guessing these are just variations of the spelling of her name (it was fairly common in the early modern period, especially when many people still couldn’t write, to have multiple spellings of your name). But I’m just curious!

To sum it all up, in the end I’d still recommend this book if you’re after an unconventional love story between two women, but not if you’re looking for a pirate story. It was a disappointing read because I just have this writerly feeling (I could be wrong!) that McNamara was one or two drafts away from this book being really great, but that what we’re reading just isn’t quite finished yet. Which is sad because it’s such a fascinating story about a really unique historical person. I’d certainly pick up another book by her in the future.

What have you been reading recently? Any suggestions?

PS Today’s Featured Image is ‘Capture of the Pirate, Blackbeard, 1718’, accessed via Wikipedia

‘Madeira Mondays’ is a series of blog posts exploring Early American history and historical fiction. Follow the blog for a new post every Monday and thanks for reading!