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Dead Men Tell No Tales - James Jeffers, Privateering, and Piracy in the Americas, 1816-1830 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,017
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Dead Men Tell No Tales - James Jeffers, Privateering, and Piracy in the Americas, 1816-1830 (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in Maritime History
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Dead men tell no tales, or so the pirate maxim goes. But when
facing execution in 1831 for mutiny and murder, the previously
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. 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 in the ""rough work."" After a heroic career in the U.S.
Navy during the War of 1812, Jeffers eschewed military life and
took to the privateer trade himself. As Charles Gibbs, pirate, he
sailed from the ports of Charleston and New Orleans to wreak havoc
in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Stripping away 170 years of
embellishment, Joseph Gibbs maps the still-shockingly violent
career of Charles Gibbs across the seas and, in the process,
challenges and discredits much of his self-made mythology. Gibbs
recounts Jeffers' 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. The pirate was captured the
following year and brought to New York. The case against Jeffers
and accomplice Thomas Wansley culminated in a sensational trial,
which led to their subsequent executions by hanging on Ellis
Island. In addition to recounting the exploits of a ruthless
cutthroat, ""The Confessions of ""Charles Gibbs"""" tells the
larger 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, and enhanced by twenty
illustrations, this is pirate history at its most credible and
readable.
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