Book Review: Way of a Buccaneer by Davenport Steward
It is 1663, and young Wayne Thorp, late of Cambridge University, is assisting his father Captain Thomas Thorpe in a smuggling voyage to Spanish-controlled Panama. Unfortunately, their trading partner, Irish-Spanish minor government official Don Timóteo O’Bannion y Salazar, has decided he can make even more money and a promotion by betraying them to the authorities. The elder Thorpe is treacherously murdered by O’Bannion, and Wayne barely makes it overboard. But now he is lost in a Panamanian swamp thousands of miles from England. How long can he survive?
By a stroke of luck, Wayne is captured by a tribe of Cimarrons, or Maroons, escaped slaves who have created their own culture in the hills. This tribe is “ruled” by Gideon Hamby, an English sailor who’d been stranded there fifteen years before. Wayne is taken in by the tribe, who teach him the basics of jungle survival, weapons use, and pidgin Spanish.
The tribe irregularly stages raids on Spanish caravans traversing the Gold Road between Panama City and Portobelo, and the first of these that Wayne participates nets him Ana, a merchant’s daughter who the tribe says will be “his woman.” Wayne has an unusually strong understanding of sexual consent for the time period, and does not force himself on Ana. (Though of course he’s willing to let her do all the “women’s work” for him.) This endears him to her, and she teaches him better Spanish, and even starts to fall in love with him a bit. But circumstances make it clear this is an ill-starred match, so Wayne frees her where she can be found (this comes back to help him a couple of times.)
The next raid secures him Dorotea, a mestizo woman who had been forced into prostitution at a young age. She is much more comfortable with being Wayne’s woman, and is enthusiastic about consenting. She even reveals that they’re going to have a child. So naturally, that’s when the Spanish attack, killing most of the tribe and enslaving the rest. Dorotea’s fate is unknown, but she’s probably dead. The enslavement thing includes Wayne, as Ana’s father put in a good word for him to save him from execution.
After a few years on a chain gang, building muscle, Wayne is purchased by a more reasonable government official, Don Federico, on the advice of Ana’s father. Discovering that Wayne is college-educated, Don Federico makes his slave a clerk, and the two men learn to appreciate each other, Wayne even saving his master’s life. When Don Federico is recalled to Spain, he takes Wayne with him on the ship so that he can free the young man. Unfortunately, Don Federico is old, and dies on the voyage, whereupon the ship’s captain destroys the manumission documents and sells Wayne in Cuba.
Wayne’s new master is something of an absentee landlord, so most of the time young Thorpe doesn’t see him. He does, however see and get seen by Consuelo de Soto, the master’s beautiful and spoiled daughter. She enjoys teasing him with her beauty, but both of them know their social status, and that she needs to stay a virgin until marriage.
This ends when Wayne’s escape plans are discovered, and he’s shipped off to an even harsher plantation in Florida. A year or so later, he’s “rescued” by some off-course pirates, whose damaged ship barely makes it back to Jamaica. Wayne’s unusual skillset brings him to the attention of Henry Morgan, who introduces the young man to a friend with a sugar plantation so he can rest up, in preparation to joining an upcoming raid that the pirate captain is planning.
The plantation owner’s daughter is Patricia Martin, a lovely lass, and she and Wayne get on well. But now is the time at last for Wayne Thorpe to become a buccaneer!
This 1956 historical novel was written by a Georgia newspaper man who turned out a half-dozen or so “historicals” during his lifetime. It looks like none of them have been reprinted after that time, so they may be hard to track down.
Good: You can tell Mr. Steward has done his research with the limitations of the 1950s. The offhand details feel realistic, especially when he keeps bringing up all the crawling insects everywhere in the tropics. There’s some exciting action.
I also like that Wayne isn’t an action hero straight from the beginning. One of the first things we learn about him is that he’s not a good swimmer, and although he learns to fight, Wayne is very much not a brilliant swordsman while O’Bannion is. It takes until the middle of the novel before Wayne finally gets some control over his own destiny, and he’s only a pirate for a few chapters at the end.
While Wayne isn’t exactly a moral paragon, he does have some standards, being unwilling to rape women, murder the helpless, or mistreat slaves when he gets the chance. O’Bannion notes towards the end that he certainly would not have given Thorpe a fair fight if he had any choice, but Wayne insists on it.
There’s some effort made to show that not all Spaniards are uniformly evil, but the sympathetic or more moral ones have a bad habit of dying on Wayne.
Less good: Wayne’s life runs on a lot of coincidence, O’Bannion crosses his path far more often than is plausible, and Wayne otherwise keeps running into people he wouldn’t have expected in those places. The first half of the story has Wayne being a “pinball protagonist”, bouncing from one situation to the next based on happenstance more than his choices.
Most of the novel is tight third person on Wayne, but it does go to other characters for a few pages to explain events he’s not present for.
Content note: Loads of lethal violence, including the deaths of women, children and animals. Torture. Rape (off-page.) Also consensual extramarital sex on page, but not graphic. Prostitution. Period racism, sexism, ethnic prejudice and religious prejudice. Lots of use of slurs, including the N-word by almost everybody. One amusing slur is that the Spanish keep calling Wayne Luterano (“Lutheran”), which bounces off him because he’s agnostic (but is willing to respect a theoretical God enough not to lie and say he’s Catholic.) Slavery is endemic; while Wayne resents being a slave himself, he isn’t against the practice and makes no effort to free other slaves.
Overall, it’s an interesting book, and I enjoyed it, but dated and I can see why it doesn’t have modern reprints. Check out used bookstores and garage sales! Recommended to pirate fans.
