The Whydah

Martin W. Sandler's The Whydah is real pirate history for 10 year olds, and it starts somewhere most pirate books never go.

What happens

The Whydah was built in London in 1715 for a member of parliament who traded in people. It was named after a slave trading port in West Africa and designed for one job, carrying captured Africans to the Caribbean.

On its first voyage it took almost four hundred people across the Atlantic. Around a fifth of them died on the way.

Then, off the Bahamas in 1717, a young English pirate called Sam Bellamy chased it for three days and took it. He stripped out the platform the captives had been chained to, cut down everything that slowed the ship, added ten more cannon, and made it his flagship.

That's the spine of the book. Sandler doesn't let you forget what the ship was before it was famous.

Bellamy is a gift of a subject. He was twenty-four and broke when he went looking for sunken Spanish gold, found nothing at all, and decided to take what he wanted off the surface instead.

He wore a long velvet coat and tied his black hair back with a satin bow. He usually let the ships he robbed sail away afterwards. People called him the Robin Hood of the Seas.

The book is properly interested in how a pirate ship actually worked, which is the bit children tend to love. Everything was voted on. The captain could be sacked at any moment except in battle. Plunder was shared equally, including with the black crewmen aboard, at a time when almost nowhere else at sea worked that way. There was a rule against gambling and another one about candles after eight o'clock.

It's written in short runs, with background sections breaking in and maps carrying captions that explain themselves, so a reader can dip about rather than read straight through.

Now the hard part. This book is honest about cruelty, on both sides of its story.

The slavery chapters describe the Middle Passage plainly, including netting rigged round the deck to stop people throwing themselves overboard. The pirate chapters describe torture in the same matter-of-fact way, including a captain whose lips were sewn shut and men dragged under a ship's hull.

None of it is lingered over and all of it is sourced. But it is a lot for a 10 year old, and it isn't signposted before it arrives.

If your reader has only met pirates as a costume, expect some of this to land with a thump. If they've started wanting the real version of things, this is exactly the book, and the way it refuses to make anybody a hero is the best thing about it.

What to read next

For the story version, Blackbeard's Treasure is in the library too. Calista's grandmother hands her a book about Edward Teach, who turns up in this history as well, and Calista goes looking for the wreck of his ship.