The Privateer’s-Man, One Hundred Years Ago

Frederick Marryat’s last sea novel unfolds as a long, confessional letter written by Alexander Musgrave, a young Englishman from Cumberland who recalls his rough years afloat roughly a century before Marryat set them down. Musgrave signs aboard the privateer Revenge, cruises the waters off Hispaniola, and trades broadsides with heavily armed French ships in the running wars of the early eighteenth century. His fortunes carry him across the Atlantic and onto land, through captures, escapes, and dealings with both European rivals and the native peoples of the Americas. What lifts the book above simple action is its unease: Musgrave keeps weighing the plunder and bloodshed of privateering against the suffering it leaves in its wake. Readers who enjoy period seafaring fiction will find a darker, more reflective voyage than Marryat’s earlier naval yarns.