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Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Life and Legends of the Pirate Charles Gibbs (Studies in Maritime History) |
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Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Life and Legends of the Pirate Charles Gibbs (Studies in Maritime History)
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by Joseph Gibbs
Sales Rank: 670034
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Discount: 35 %
List Price: $29.95
$21.86
At Amazon
on 6-19-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 211 pages
Published by: University of South Carolina Press August 30, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1570036934
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1570036934
Book Dimensions:
9.2 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
Weighs: 1 pounds
ForeWord Magazine
Only a 'bloodthirsty prose' can elicit the exploits-whether fact or legend-of the pirate Charles Gibbs.
Book Description
Dead men tell no tales, or so the pirate maxim goes. But shortly before execution for mutiny and murder in 1831, the enigmatic pirate Charles Gibbs recounted the infamous crimes of his harrowing life at sea in a self-aggrandizing series of "confessions." Wildly popular reading among nineteenth-century audiences, such criminal confessions were peppered with the romanticized mythology that informs pirate lore to this day. Author Joseph Gibbs takes up the task of separating fact from fiction to explicate the true story of Charles Gibbs--an alias for James Jeffers (1798-1831) of Newport, Rhode Island--in an investigation that reveals a life as riveting as the legend it replaces.
Jeffers was the child of a Revolutionary War privateer captain with his own history of "rough work." Following his father into the privateer trade on behalf of Latin American insurgents, he soon turned to outright piracy, sailing from Cuban ports to wreak havoc in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico aboard a series of commandeered schooners. Along the way, he admittedly had a hand in the taking of dozens of ships and hundreds of lives.
Stripping away 170 years of embellishment, Joseph Gibbs maps the still shockingly violent saga of James Jeffers across the seas and in the process challenges and discredits much of the pirate's mythology. He dismisses, for example, Jeffers' claims of War of 1812 heroism, and shows how his confessions were augmented and distorted by generations of writers fascinated by the man's story.
The author also recounts Jeffers's well-documented role in the infamous mutiny and murders in 1830 aboard the brig Vineyard while the vessel was carrying a load of Mexican silver. Arrested within days of setting foot on the New York shore, the case against Jeffers and accomplice Thomas Wansley culminated in a sensational trial which ended in their subsequent executions by hanging on Ellis Island.
In addition to recounting the life of a ruthless pirate, Dead Men Tell No Tales reconstructs the greater story of American piracy and privateering in the early nineteenth century and illustrates the role of American and European adventurers in the Latin American wars of liberation. Carefully researched, engagingly written, this book is pirate history at its most credible and readable.
Reader Reviews
"The murderous pirate Charles Gibbs plundered his way across the Caribbean, boasting and bellowing all the way. Buy this book for every Walter Mitty daydreamer in your life."
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Dead Men Tell No Tales: The Life and Legends of the Pirate Charles Gibbs (Studies in Maritime History)
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Price: $21.86
Updated on 6-19-2008.
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