About this chronicle
— and the unremarkable person who keeps it
I am not a historian, in the sense that no university has ever paid me to be one, and I would be quite badly out of my depth in a senior common room. What I am, or have become, is a former systems librarian with an inexplicable specialist interest in Caribbean maritime history, particularly between roughly 1655 and 1720. The Chronicle is what that interest does when it is not pointed at anything in particular.
This site exists for three reasons. First, because I had been writing these things into the margins of books I was borrowing from the city library, and the librarians — my former colleagues — eventually asked me, with great kindness, to stop. Second, because the popular history of piracy is in a worse state than it deserves to be: too much of it is a long line of unbroken telephone-game retellings of Esquemeling, with the wilder bits sanded down or pumped up depending on the audience, and the duller bits — which are usually the interesting ones — left out entirely. Third, because writing in public turns out to be a much better cure for being wrong than writing in private.
What this site is
The Chronicle is an essay-length blog updated roughly every two to three weeks, with longer pieces during the winter when the daylight is poor and there is nothing else to do. Subjects fall, broadly, into three areas: the buccaneers of the seventeenth-century Spanish Main; the East India Company and its Dutch and French analogues during the same period; and the legal and commercial machinery — letters of marque, prize courts, factor-system trading — that connected them. Occasionally I write about cartography, because old maps are an inexhaustibly good time.
I try, where possible, to work from primary sources or from serious recent scholarship. Where I am repeating something I read in a popular book and cannot verify, I will say so. Where I am speculating, I will say so. Where I am wrong, please write and tell me, and I will be grateful and probably also faintly embarrassed.
What this site is not
It is not a teaching resource. It is not peer-reviewed. It is not commercially supported, and never will be: there are no ads, no analytics, no tracking, no newsletter capture, and no affiliate links. I pay for the hosting out of pocket and the hosting is, mercifully, cheap. The site is built by hand in a text editor and contains, as far as I know, no JavaScript at all.
It is also not impartial. I am sympathetic to the buccaneers in the same way that one might be sympathetic to a particular dog — with a clear understanding that, given the chance, the dog would do something appalling. I am sceptical of the chartered companies, which I think have been ill-served by the popular tendency to imagine them as proto-corporations rather than as the genuinely strange creatures they were. I try not to let either bias do too much work, but you should know that it is there.
About the byline
I write under the name A. Penrose. The Penrose is borrowed; the A. is a real initial. There is no particular mystery to this, only a strong personal preference for not having my employer find my hobby on a search engine. If you happen to know who I am — and a handful of people do — you are warmly invited to keep it to yourself.
Corrections, letters, disagreements
I read everything. I reply, eventually, to most things. Politeness is reciprocated; pedantry is welcomed; outright rudeness is filed and forgotten. If you have a primary source I should know about, please send it. If you spot an error in a post, please be specific and, if you can, cite something.
The Editor —
from the darkest bilge.