covediver
Contributor
This book had been on my shelf waiting for summer beach reading (or what passes for it in Alaska) but the prolonged winter up here (three inches away from setting an all time record) forced me to do otherwise. The Pirate Hunter is an easy-to-read, entertaining book. The two stories unfold throughout the book in alternating chapters, a fairly conventional approach for historic novels that sets one story in the past and the other in the present.
The first story centers on the 18th century escapades of Captain Henry Thatch and his navigator, Ted Bascombe, a black teenager freed from the hull of a slave trader taken by Thatch, near the end of the era when the British West Indies and other Caribbean islands are a microcosm of the shifting alliances and perpetual conflicts in Europe and pirates sail under the pretext of slightly more respectable privateers under letters of marque issued by colonial governors. In many respects, this story a fairly typical "pirate tale" of danger and adventure. While not as good as the recent "Pirate Latitudes" it does have all the familiar elements of a yarn of brethern of the coast.
The second story centers on that of a young banjo strumming marine archaeologist, Greg Rhode, and his Australian girlfriend both of whom work for a treasure salvor, albeit an enlightened and empathetic one. That story centers on the excavation of an unknown wreck west of Key West.
For both stories, the towns and societies in which the protagonists function are portrayed in suffient detail that they become the stage without becoming the story. As I read the passages about Key West I found myself being reminded of the landscape that I have discovered on a trip to that place sometime ago, when a tropical storm kept us off the water and forced us to discover the town, all-in-all not a bad tradeoff.
A none-to-subtle aspect of each story is that of a moral struggle that each protagonist faces, essentially a story of redemption, forgiving the sins of the father. While the book is not excessively moralistic with its Christain approach to addressing this challenge, it is an essential element of the story, it at times ironic when the author explains that the church on Tortola was bulit so its door was aligned to allow the parishoners the first glimpse of commercial vessels passing the island. Readers turned off by Christain themes probably will not like the book; those readers that favor Christain fiction or are ambivalent to the themes will find the book worth reading.
The first story centers on the 18th century escapades of Captain Henry Thatch and his navigator, Ted Bascombe, a black teenager freed from the hull of a slave trader taken by Thatch, near the end of the era when the British West Indies and other Caribbean islands are a microcosm of the shifting alliances and perpetual conflicts in Europe and pirates sail under the pretext of slightly more respectable privateers under letters of marque issued by colonial governors. In many respects, this story a fairly typical "pirate tale" of danger and adventure. While not as good as the recent "Pirate Latitudes" it does have all the familiar elements of a yarn of brethern of the coast.
The second story centers on that of a young banjo strumming marine archaeologist, Greg Rhode, and his Australian girlfriend both of whom work for a treasure salvor, albeit an enlightened and empathetic one. That story centers on the excavation of an unknown wreck west of Key West.
For both stories, the towns and societies in which the protagonists function are portrayed in suffient detail that they become the stage without becoming the story. As I read the passages about Key West I found myself being reminded of the landscape that I have discovered on a trip to that place sometime ago, when a tropical storm kept us off the water and forced us to discover the town, all-in-all not a bad tradeoff.
A none-to-subtle aspect of each story is that of a moral struggle that each protagonist faces, essentially a story of redemption, forgiving the sins of the father. While the book is not excessively moralistic with its Christain approach to addressing this challenge, it is an essential element of the story, it at times ironic when the author explains that the church on Tortola was bulit so its door was aligned to allow the parishoners the first glimpse of commercial vessels passing the island. Readers turned off by Christain themes probably will not like the book; those readers that favor Christain fiction or are ambivalent to the themes will find the book worth reading.
