Penguins on Parade: Buccaneers of America!

Some Penguin Classics you’ll never the hell have heard of, period. Top of that list would be something like Alexander Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Rovers, published in a lovely little edition in Holland in 1678, and yet there it is, all dolled up in a 1969 Penguin Classic translation by Alexis Brown.

Exquemelin’s book translated into German the following year and eventually made its way – in much-altered form – into an English-language edition called Bucaniers of America in 1684, the same year that saw a freewheeling adaptation of the book called The History of the Bucaniers. These English editions were so outlandishly bad that the book’s principal subject, the notorious pirate captain Henry Morgan, sued the publishers for libel – and won (it was as beautifully-organized a cutting-out expedition as anything he ever did on the Spanish Main; he got court-awarded damages and also made his name immortal).

Alexis Brown claims, in his Introduction to this Penguin edition, that his is the first accurate translation into English of that Dutch original, but in any case a Penguin Classic of The Buccaneers of America raises more questions than it answers, foremost being – if you can stand it – “what IS a classic?” Exquemelin has plenty of dramatic stories to tell of his years as a barber-surgeon teamed up with one crew after another of pirates:

My own master often used to buy a butt of wine and set it in the middle of the street with the barrel-head knocked in, and stand barring the way. Every passer-by had to drink with him, or he’d have shot them dead with a gun he kept handy. Once he bought a cask of butter and threw the stuff at everyone who came by, daubing their clothes or their head, wherever he could best reach.

And he relates with drab but effective dispatch such well-worn stories as the time Morgan was hosting a large drinking-party on a ship that subsequently exploded, injuring him and killing almost everybody on board – and filling the water of the bay with bodies, a floating temptation no self-respecting band of pirates could resist:

A week after the ship had blown up, they fished out all the corpses floating in the water. This was not in order to give them a decent burial, but for the sake of their clothes and the gold rings on their fingers. As soon as they had fished out a body, they pulled off the garments and hacked off the fingers which were beringed, then threw back the corpse to be a floating prey for the sharks. Their bones are still to be found on the beaches, washed up by the sea.

But as interesting as all this is (and vogue-setting; Exquemelin’s book was much-imitated), it brings us back to that same question: what IS a classic, and how on Earth does this little book qualify? The prose is thoroughly unexceptional in Dutch, German, or English; the insights of the author are banal at best (old salts tell great yarns, but we must usually look elsewhere for wisdom); and while there’s some valuable first-hand information to be gleaned from these pages, the same is true of plenty of parish registers and loading manifests that have never (yet!) been indoctrinated into the Penguin Classics line. Surely even if we discount such things as quality of prose or quality of insight, the basic qualification for ‘classic’ status is a general approbation? Fifteen people (and, after this post, eighteen) have ever even heard of Esquemelin, and rightly so.

On the one hand, Alexis’ translation is an excellent ground-clearing point for future scholars, and Exquemelin’s book is a bit more entertaining than a collection of ship’s logs and manifests would be; on the other hand, if you call it a ‘classic’ in the same context as you call Anna Karenina a classic, what are you doing to the term ‘classic’ – or to your trusting readers? The editors of a ‘classics’ series are supposed to do much the same thing those ruthless pirates did: hack off the precious gems amidst the flotsam and jetsam, and leave the rest for shark-bait. If there’s ever been a Penguin Classic of Exquemelin, surely something slipped past the chum-line?