I didn't bother finishing this one. It was way too tedious for me.

This "book" will be the death of me I swear to god

Originally published in 1724, probably by the same author more popularly known for writing Robinson Crusoe, A General History of the Pyrates was meant to introduce a then-contemporary audience to the notion of piracy, who pirates were, why mariners became pirates, and what pirates did. The author makes clear from the outset that this is not a compilation of fantastic tales; he goes out of his way to confine himself to known and corroborated facts about the lives of the pirates/crews detailed therein and makes clear that all of these facts come from legal records (such as sworn statements in court) or from personal interviews that he held with relevant individuals (such as the pirates themselves). Due of this, A General History of the Pyrates can be extremely dry at times - even while describing actions that could easily be made lurid, such as various accounts of torture and murder - because, I think, the author wanted to avoid the impression that the treatise was meant to shock and be provocative, which itself would give the impression that it was a work of what we would call yellow journalism.

While accounts of various codes or agreements can make piracy sound appealing (such as the fact that a good number - if not most - pirate crews were actually democratic, making noncombat decisions by vote), the author very specifically does not support the notion of piracy. Various accounts of betrayal, torture, and murder with victims that were both pirates and nonpirates (not to mention actual state execution for piracy), as well as detailing the financial state of many pirate crews (as you can probably surmise, not great) is fairly off-putting, especially as the author spares no detail for delicate readers.

Overall, A General History of the Pyrates was an influential book when it was first published and has gone on to continually influence history and literature today. This book serves as the source material for many if not most accounts of some of the most well known pirates today - such as Edward Teach and Anne Bonny - and influenced the writers of Treasure Island and Peter Pan as they created enduring classics. However, the book is written in a style that will be unfamiliar to modern readers - extremely detailed, with archaic word use and sentence structure - and is deliberately written to convey an impression of anti-sensationalism. As such, it is a difficult read, but I found it an interesting and worthwhile one.

Самый классический труд про пиратов. Именно с этой книги началось всеобщее увлечение "романтикой" пиратства и вообще этой темой, хотя конечно европейские жители тех времён были знакомы с самим явлением.
При этом данная книга - вовсе не роман или измышления, но попытка подробно и правдиво описать жизнь известных пиратов того времени. Книга сразу стала популярной и выдержала несколько изданий с расширениями до двух томов. Но не смотря на это авторство книги до сих пор не установлено. На самом издании автором был указан некий капитан Чарльз Джонсон, но таких капитанов по архивным данным обнаружить пока не удалось. Большую часть XX века считалось доказанным, что автор этой книги - Даниэль Дефо, но данное утверждение в итоге было довольно убедительно оспорено. Что интересно, со временем освоения разных архивов подтверждается всё больше фактов, изложенных в книге, что конечно убеждает в её высокой достоверности.
Лично мне показалось, что автор действительно лично хорошо был знаком и с морским делом, и с пиратами, и если сам пиратом не был, то как минимум провёл немало времени в Лондоне за разговорами с настоящими пиратами, избежавшими виселицы. При этом также в пользу автора говорит то, что иногда он сам сообщает, что например о дальнейшей судьбе такого-то пирата он ничего не знает. Этот и другие особенности текста лично меня убедили в том, что автор сам ничего не сочинял, и если и есть в книге что-то не соответствующее действительности, то скорее это пересказ чьих-то чужих сочинений. Сам автор явно хотел передать всё максимально правдиво.
Книга не зря получила популярность сразу после выхода (в 1724 г.). Не смотря на то, что книга вроде бы и не художественная, изложение всё-таки не сухое, и читается почти как роман. Есть несколько относительно больших и скучных врезок с описанием той или иной местности вне Европы, кое-где излишне подробно описано вынесение судебных решений в отношении отдельных пиратов. И это кстати тоже наталкивает на мысль, что автор не хотел просто написать увлекательную книжку, а просто излагал всё что знал.
И конечно этот труд является одним из основных источников для подавляющего большинства художественных книг про пиратов. Здесь можно встретить и отдельные эпизоды, встречающиеся в других книгах, и описание традиций, тоже перекочевавшее в художественную литературу, и даже отдельные имена настоящих пиратов, попавшие затем в романы (например, Израэль Хэндс и Бенджамин Ган). В общем, с одной стороны основа для целого жанра (т.е. имеет историческо-литературную значимость), а с другой - вполне интересная книга, которую читать и увлекательно, и познавательно.

Fascinating and making me question everything I thought I knew about the history of the US. What piracy started as versus what it developed into throws a sharp light on the realities of the time and how something that started with reasonably good intentions and comparatively little prejudice developed into a merciless and demanding cult. Absolutely fascinating.

Every review talking about this being a dry read are a) correct. It was written in the early 1700s and that's not for everyone, but b) missing the fact that A General History of the Pyrates is the primary source we have about this time period. It is a fascinating insight into both life at sea and also how the public saw these pirates (because one of the things about A History is that we have no real idea of how sensationalised or straight up fictionalised it is - the 1720s equivalent of a Netflix true crime documentary except there's no-one still alive to point out the inaccuracies on twitter)

dense... :/

Daniel Defoe (or whoever the author is...the book is pseudonymous) reports, embellishes, and occasionally invents the lives of 35 of the most notorious pirates from the "golden age of piracy" in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The entertainment value and coherence of the stories varies throughout the book. Some are described vividly with a lot of attention to detail, some read like a boring police blotter or ship's log, One (Captain Misson) is completely fictitious, and some are interwoven in such a haphazard manner that it is hard to follow.

The five accounts that I found the most colorful/detailed and therefore most interesting were: Edward Teach (aka Blackbeard), Jack Rackam (aka Calico Jack), two of Calico Jack's companions - Mary Read and Anne Bonny, and William Fly.

Despite the occasional boring section, this book is well worth a read if you have any interest at all in pirates. It provides a great glimpse into the brutality, drunkenness, violence, courage, and tragedy that surrounded these men. John Robert Moore rightly says of this book: "It is hardly too much to say that the author of the History has created for us the modern conception of pirates."

Largely a dry read, written as it was as nonfiction with 1720s-era pacing. Interesting little bits about Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet tho!

Leave it to Daniel Defoe to make a very interesting topic boring as hell. Read other histories of the pirates, including the politics of how they came to be in the first place rather than this.

È divertente come questo libro sia uscito nel 1724 sotto uno pseudonimo e solo nel 1932 se ne è accertata la paternità reale attribuendola allo stranoto Daniel Defoe.

Non ci sono avventure di corsari alla Salgari o alla Stevenson, quanto piuttosto documenti e osservazioni sui dominatori dei mari che hanno fatto la storia della pirateria, un excursus nato per illustrare agli inglesi quale pericolo derivasse dalla crescente potenza mercantile del paese, con conseguente sviluppo massivo delle attività di pirateria tra il 1717 e il 1724.

Awful