The American Privateers
by
Donald Barr Chidsey

The Book and the Author

The American Privateers is one of the more informally written books on my site; in spots, the style is positively breezy. Nonetheless it covers its subject well, giving us a good feel for what privateering was all about, including the all-important legal framework; as well as what the experience was like, especially from the Revolution to the War of 1812. It also has a good Bibliography and a very useful Glossary, although I would have liked to see just a few more terms added.

Or, as the jacket blurb puts it, somewhat misleadingly (among other things, Jonathan Haraden should have been cited instead of Seth Harding who is mentioned only once, pretty much in passing) — and the writing not at all as success­ful as the author's:

As reported in his obituary in The New York Times, he eventually wrote 50 books on a variety of topics: the American Revolution, miscellaneous biographies, the sea and maritime history, and those novels; plus the occasional journal article. He died on March 17, 1981, at New London, CT.

 p. v  ☆Contents

 p. vii  ☆Illustrations

Following page 86
[in the printed book; in this Web transcription, moved to the pages linked here:]

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition followed in this transcription was that of my own hard copy, a Dodd, Mead & Company hardback issued in 1962; the copyright of that same year was not renewed in 1989 or 1990 as required by the then law in order to be maintained; surprisingly, since according to the United States Copyright Office's catalogue the copyrights on 16 other books published by our (prolific) author between 1953 and 1964, all on military or naval topics, were renewed — but this one was not. This one is thus in the public domain: details here on the copyright law involved.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was fairly well proofread, mistakes being pretty much confined to proper names. I marked those few typographical errors, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my colorization of the book's 8th illustration, the original of which I've placed here.

After I colorized it, it occurred to me that the painting might be online, and so it is, in several photographs, the colors of which range very widely. This is the one that seemed the most likely to me, although even here I've edited it to strip away most of an unpleasant ochre cast due either to poor scanning or several lifetimes of cigarette smoke:

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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