The Whydah: A Pirate Ship Feared, Wrecked, and Found

Reviewed by: Jill O'Connor - Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School, Brunswick, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: May 5, 2018

Review

Sandler's account of the pirate ship Whydah reads like a tale of old with mutiny and plunder a-plenty. The Whydah was built as a slave ship so tied up in the story of this ship is the story of heartache and horror of people ripped from their homes and brought to foreign lands to work for others. We can never have enough stories or examples of how wrong this was, so it's valuable when talking to young readers about the romanticized pirate to speak of the types of "cargo" and "booty" many ships sailing in the 1700s contained. The benefit of being overtaken by pirates was that race didn't matter much when signing on to a life of piracy and often pirate crews were made up of men of many colored skin and there was more equity on a pirate ship. It was a dangerous life though, if caught. There was little sympathy for men captured and brought to trial by established governments. Black Sam Bellamy was a feared and capable pirate. As the captain of the Whydah, he successfully plundered many private ships and the royal navy would have loved to stop him. Fortunately for them, unfortunately for Bellamy, nature took a hand. The Whydah was caught in the treacherous rocky shoals off Cape Cod, Massachusetts and sunk. Most survivors who crawled up on shore were tried and sentenced to death (hanging with their bodies locked in a cage and then tarred and feathered for all to see as an example of how NOT to live!). Sandler weaves the story of the Whydah into the history of the shipping exploits of the 18th-century. He uses reproductions of documents and some black & white illustrations of wood cuts of famous figures in the story of piracy from the day. Some of the reproductions are grainy, but that might be due to the condition of the originals. The biggest critique of this well-researched book is that there are many inserted story boxes and instead of simply placing them at the end of a chapter, which would not have interrupted the flow of the reader, they are smack down in the middle of a chapter, sometimes the middle of a sentence. The delineation of these story boxes are a black outline and a slight graying of the page, which is not really all that clear and the struggling reader might find them very jarring. Too bad the design of them or the placement wasn't clearer/better. Otherwise, this is a very good narrative nonfiction book to place in the hands of upper elementary to high school readers.

Overall Book Score: very good