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Essays on modern piracy
Essays about piracy introduction and conclusion
Essays about piracy introduction and conclusion
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Tucked away in history lies the world of piracy, too far to be fully reached, comprehended or related to. They are distance stories containing horrific facts and impossible realities. It is no secret that piracy has found a home in Western pop culture; the romance of mystery and drama seems to follow any pirate image. Historically speaking some scholars have rejected this romantic view yet, for every academic voice there exists a Jack Sparrow or Long John Silver. Conflict surrounds the truth of piracy as Historians continue to see piracy in light of historical contexts while social culture relies on the dramatized romantic view. Because of this, only when these studies and stories are brought together a new insight develops. By analyzing texts, such as the primary source The Buccaneers of America by Exquemelin, historian Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations and the famous Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, romance and piracy are brought together and surprisingly developed by historians and fiction-writers alike.
Treasure Island is one of the first texts to exposure modern culture to the cinematic world of piracy. This text, bursting with heroic themes and tantalizing twists and turns, stands as a striking example of romance in the pirate world. As the reader flips through the pages they come across a short section entitled “To the Hesitating Purchaser”, it is under this heading the author describes Treasure Island as “all the old romance, retold exactly in ancient way” . This text is an epic story of treasure, mystery, death and good victorious. The plot itself centers on the narrator Jim Hawkins, a boy who leaves his mother behind to find a buried treasure, the existence of which is found through mysteriou...
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...ed when compared with Exquemelin’s firsthand account. Rediker a scholar uses pirates as a symbol for a revolutionary cause not yet born into history; his own romantic take. It is through these different views romance of piracy is defined, protected and used to push the study of history further. Perhaps pirates will always remain to academia and the social world as symbols to represent the possibility of life and the freedom desired by all. Because of this, pirates will remain romantic figures beloved by all for many decades to come.
Bibliography
Exquemelin, Alexander O. The Buccaneers of America. Translated by Alexis Brown. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, INC., 1969.
Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Stevenson, Robert L. Treasure Island. New York City: Signet Classics, 1965.
Cordingly’s book Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates tells the story of many different pirates of different time periods by the facts. The book uses evidence from first hand sources to combat the image of pirates produced by fictional books, plays, and films. Cordingly explains where the fictional ideas may have come from using the evidence from the past. The stories are retold while still keeping the interest of the audience without having to stray from the factual
Phillips, Richard, and Stephan Talty. A captain's duty: Somali pirates, Navy Seals, and dangerous days at sea. New York: Hyperion, 2010.
Blackbeard began his pirating career sometime after 1713, as an ordinary crewmember aboard a Jamaican sloop commanded by the pirate Benjamin Hornigold. In 1716, Hornigold supplied Teach with a small crew, and a small captured vessel to command. By 1717 Hornigold and Teach were sailing in alliance, and together were feared throughout the seas. In November 1717, Hornigold and Teach were able to capture a 26 gun French vessel called the Concorde (recent research has shown that the vessel had originally been built in Great Britain). Blackbeard’s pirate partner, Hornigold, decided to take advantage of a recent offer of general amnesty from the British Crown- and retire in comfort. Teach rejected t...
Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier. New York: Walker, 2004. Print.
pirate as he is portrayed in the beginning of the text nor is he the
In Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jim, the protagonist, tried to get Captain Flint’s legendary treasure while fighting the lying and deceitful pirates. Robert Louis Stevenson used suspense, imagery, and foreshadowing as part of his craft to tell the story of Treasure Island. Each literary technique had a significant impact on the plot and characters.
The Golden Age of Piracy began around 1650, and ended around 1730. Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea, but can include acts committed on land, in the air, or in other major bodies of water or on a shore. It does not normally include crimes committed against persons traveling on the same vessel as the criminal. The term has been used throughout history to refer to raids across land borders by non-state agents. A pirate is one who commits robberies at sea, usually without being allotted to do so by any particular nation. The usual crime for piracy can include being hung, or publically executed. Some of the most famous pirates who were killed either because of piracy, or because of natural causes, are Barbarossa, Stede Bonnet, Anne Bonney, Sir Francis Drake, Captain Greaves, William Kidd, Jean Laffite, Sir Henry Morgan, Mary Read, and Giovanni da Verrazano.
Chapter twenty eight is intense and riveting, it addresses Stevenson’s main themes of ‘Treasure Island’, the search for good role model and whether the pirates have truly honourable characteristics. It is a chapter that is exciting and riveting, one that demonstrates Stevenson’s expert mastery of writing, his ability to captivate, excite, enthral, and raise questions and to make his readers love his stories.
Pirates have been around for a very long time. However, pirate stories have been highly romanticized and have turned more into a fantasy and less into a reality. Three topics that are very significant about pirates is the reality and history of them, how they are romanticized in novels like Treasure Island, and how they are in reality now vs.how people think they are due to romanticized stories.
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” (Stevenson 230). A desperate attempt to a filthy amount of wealth is made by a crew of men upon the ship, Hispaniola. In the search for treasure Jim finds trust in the one man he should be avoiding. This struggling yet exciting adventure that Robert Louis Stevenson portrays will pull you into the journey for wealth along with the crew. Treasure Island explains archetypes such as life or death, Jim’s rite of passage, the irony of the knife, the island as a lonely place, and the character analysis of Long John Silver and Robert Louis Stevenson.
This story is so realistic in its context of the time and its superb character dialogues, that it is very easy for the reader to be transported right in the middle of that age, and right in the company of sea-faring pirates. The authorís vivid descriptions of Jim, the main character and narrator, the many Pirates and other characters he comes across during his adventures are painstakingly detailed. You can see young Jim's eager and excited face when he finds out he is going on a treasure hunt. You can also easily picture the rips and bloodstained rags of the pirates, and smell the foul alcohol on their breaths. The description of the island itself is extremely detailed also, and it seems like the author was looking straight off a geographical map when he wrote the in-depth account of it.
Pirates have been around for a very long time. However, pirate stories have been highly romanticized and have turned more into a fantasy and less into a reality. Three topics that are very significant about pirates is the reality and history of them, how they are romanticized in novels like Treasure Island, and how they are in reality now vs.how people think they are due to romanticized stories.
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a tale of adventure filled with exciting characters and set in exotic locales. This paper will present background information on both the novel and its author and analyze and discuss the major characters, themes and motifs. Stevenson was born the only child of a prosperous middle-class family in Edinburgh, Scotland, in November 1850. His father, Thomas, was a civil engineer who specialized in the design and construction of lighthouses. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of a well-known clergyman (Livesey). Probably the two most important influences during Stevenson’s childhood were his family’s strict Presbyterian religion and his own poor health. During his frequent bouts with tuberculosis, his loving nurse, Alison Cunningham, liked to entertain him with stories of bloody deeds, hellfire, and damnation. This rendered him a frightened, guilt-ridden child and also apparently something of a little prude, a characteristic he certainly outgrew by the time he reached his late teens (Harvey).
Roughly from 1815 to 1910, this period of time is called the romantic period. At this period, all arts are transforming from classic arts by having greater emphasis on the qualities of remoteness and strangeness in essence. The influence of romanticism in music particularly, has shown that romantic composers value the freedom of expression, movement, passion, and endless pursuit of the unattainable fantasy and imagination. The composers of the romantic period are in search of new subject matters, more emotional and are more expressive of their feelings as they are not bounded by structural rules in classical music where order, equilibrium, control and perfection are deemed important (Dorak, 2000).
Of the many authors writing naval history, there are some that take their talents to create worlds of there own that can, at times, parallel our own. The writers of historical fiction can create some incredibly entertaining works. For the purposes of this paper three authors will be focused on. These three are Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester and Dudley Pope. These authors are some of the most renown for their many publications. Each of them has created at least one series of novels on the premise of historical naval fiction. Patrick O’Brian created the series of novels of Captain Jack Aubrey and his companion Dr. Stephen Maturin (known as the Aubrey-Maturin series). C.S. Forester is the creator of the Captain Horatio Hornblower series. Finally, Dudley Pope is the creator of the Ramage series that follows the life of Lord Nicholas Ramage. What all these authors have in common is that all their characters are apart of the British Royal Navy during the late 19th century either during the French Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic War.