Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
A book review
Pirate Latitudes is Michael Crichton's tribute to the classic pirate adventure story, and a grand tribute it is. In the fall of 1665, twenty years before the hero of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood is sold into slavery in Barbadoes - or Jamaica, in the 1935 movie starring Errol Flynn - Pirate Latitudes opens the curtain on a grumpy, gouty fictional governor of the English colony of Jamaica. "Governor Almont, known locally as 'James the Tenth,' because of his insistence on diverting a tenth share of privateering expeditions to his personal coffers ... hobbled on his painful left leg across the room to make his toilet."
Almont is preparing to attend the hanging of a pirate. A significant distinction separates pirates, who attack English ships, from privateers, who do not. Encouraging privateer attacks on Spanish ships achieves two important objectives: cultivating skilled fighting men to defend the colony, "a small and weak outpost of England in the midst of Spanish territories," and fostering commerce by increasing the colony's wealth. Of course, even privateers must not attack without provocation – or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Enter Captain Hunter, awakened from his afternoon slumbers with the news that the governor expects him for dinner and, "That Frenchman with the scar is downstairs looking for you." A drunken French pirate in a fury is daunting, and what the governor proposes is far more so, although enticing enough to outweigh the hazards. In a cove protected by an impregnable Spanish fortress, a treasure ship showing signs of an unusually large cargo lies at anchor. Before long, decks are awash in blood, gunpowder is employed in a fiendishly clever manner, and the seas present dangers more terrifying than a sadistic Spanish naval commander.
The research underpinning Pirate Latitudes is impressive. Vivid details of seventeenth-century life in the Caribbean heighten suspense by plunging the reader almost tangibly into this death-defying, magnificently improbable seafaring adventure. (2009, 312 pages)