Katherine Howe Delivers an Unusual Pirate Tale in 'A True Account

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian, Katherine Howe, chats with us to discuss her latest pirate adventure tale, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself. A True Account is a dual narrative, historical fiction that begins in 1726 in Boston, Massachusetts. Hannah Masury, a young woman in her late teens, is the protagonist, and she has been bound out to service at a waterfront tavern since childhood and witnesses the hanging of a pirate named William Fly in the town square. As the story goes, “Hannah watches William Fly be hanged for piracy with a couple of his confederates, and then she gets caught up in some intrigue that is connected to William Fly and she winds up having to flee for her life. So, Hannah disguises herself as a cabin boy and ships out on a fruit packet… and instead she finds that she’s delivered herself into the hands of the notorious pirate, Ned Low, who was active out of Boston for a time in the 1720’s, and for the first part of the book it feels like we’re just following along on Hannah’s adventure. It’s first person and we’re just in the action with her and then about 40 pages in, we discover that instead, we’ve actually been reading over someone’s shoulder and we’re reading over the shoulder of a Radcliffe professor named Mariane Beresford in 1929, and Mariane Beresford has an undergraduate… who has found a manuscript called True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, and has brought it to her professor because she thinks that it’s real and that there’s a secret buried in Hannah’s true account that will lead them to buried treasure.”

During the conversation, Howe debunks a few myths that many believe to be true of piracy. In popular culture, pirate life is portrayed as romantic and alluring. True accounts of piracy, however, prove otherwise. Howe explains, “In one way, for instance, most pirate crews were actually multi-ethnic. If you watch Pirates of the Caribbean, that is not the picture that you would get of a pirate crew, but you would have people who were… French, or who were from West Africa or who were from Spanish holdings in the Caribbean or things like that. There were few examples of self-liberating people who ended up joining pirate crews… and of course there were few historical examples of women disguising themselves as men and going pirating. The most famous examples are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were two working class women… they both were in disguise in the same pirate crew that was raiding off of Port Royal, Jamaica… I feel like our picture of Golden Age Piracy tends to be monolithic and the truth of the matter in Golden Age Piracy is much more complex and I think much more interesting, and I explore some of those things in A True Account.”