Ramage & the Freebooters

I was originally interested in this novel series as it is titled after my own last name. After starting to read the series I found I really enjoyed it. If you like swashbuckle type sea novels, with sea battles, life on a tall ship, and life in those times then you will enjoy this series. This book is a good read on its own, but I would recommend getting the entire series, or at least starting from book 1. The Freebooters is book 3 out of 18 in this series. These are paperbacks. I had obtained some older versions from publisher Harper Collins printed several years ago in this series and was ordering this book to fill in the ones I did not have. The books from this publisher, McBooks Press, are larger and have the number of the series on them.

Lt. Lord Ramage single-handedly overcomes the fleet mutiny at Spithead, sees through a slaver's ruse to take a rich prize, exposes a spy, and winkles out a secretive privateer terrorizing the Caribbean. A busy, and entertaining, fellow. I like the sense of adventure, the clever plots, Ramage's audacity and modesty, the nautical lore and clearly described maneuvering, and the sense of place. I don't like Pope's insertion of interesting lore as a device to delay the action once it's underway, his predictably good or evilly incompetent characters (irrespective if friend or foe), and his telegraphed plot solutions (despite coy circumspection). However, in Freebooters there IS one key character about whom Pope did maintain my suspicions through many chapters and another person turns out to have had conflicting loyalties. Two minor plot elements jumped out as inconsistent. These McBook pb edition books have a nice look, heft, and feel. (Why DID they pick that silly name?) Again there's wrap-around cover art by Peter Wright, evocative in its ghostly silence and spidery tracery. Wright repeatedly over-emphasizes an integrated design for the catheads, one that reminds me of horned beetles or owls.Is it odd how many maritime authors write series rather than one-off novels? Pope, Woodman, Kent, Forester, O'Brian; D.C. Poyer doing it for the modern navy. Maybe it is the ready handle of a rigidly structured career ladder to follow and explore, each rung offering a different view of command behavior and individual psychology. Do others find the early books in a series offer the greatest compass for ingenuity, excitement, and water-level story telling? For example, some of the later O'Brian titles in the Pacific drag interminably to small effect, and Lambdin's Lewrie loses some of his bold, ah, flirtation.

Ninty percent of this book is a well-written and exciting novel, filled with action at sea and a little espionage. The other ten percent concerns a romance that is corny, sappy, insipid, etc. The rest of this book is so good that the romance seems glaringly out of place. Our hero, Lt. Ramage, first has to overcome a mutinous crew, and then find a defeat a group of privateers in the Caribbean. As usual, he uses some creative tactics to overcome his problems, particularly to gain the loyalty of his mutinous crew. One of the things I like most about Pope is that he does not shy away from describing the harsh realities of the times. For example, he describes in such detail the poor treatment the common sailors recieved it is easy to understand why they mutinied and why they deserted whenever they got the chance. He also gets into some very dangerous territory in this book when he describes the slave trade. That is obviously a very sensitive issue but I think he did a good job describing it in some detail without diminishing its horrors but also without getting too melodramatic. I don't want to give away too much about the end of this book, so I will simply say that it is very exciting and at least the equal of the first two books in this series. So, in conclusion, just try to ignore the ridiculous romantic scenes and you will really enjoy this book.

Calling this book a first edition is a bit of a stretch. It is a reprinting of a book first published many years ago, and precedes the books published by more recent authors like O'Brien. Lt. Ramage is a young Royal Navy officer who uses intelligence and strategy rather than simply charging in using brute force. Identifying the pirates who have been seizing small inter-island merchant ships is a challenge which Ramage proves capable of dealing with. Like most fiction writers, Pope ignores the main hazard of service in the West Indies, i.e., disease. It was not uncommon at that time for a ship to lose half its crew to yellow fever (for an account of real naval service in the West Indies during that time period see Frederick Hoffman, "A Sailor of King George"). It should be noted that the mutiny of 1797 had two parts, one at Spithead (resolved peacefully), and one at the Nore (which resulted in conflicts with the mutineers, and eventually a number of hangings). The mutiny is covered by C. Northcote Parkinson in his novel, "The Fireship." Overall, this novel by Dudley Pope is a well written Royal Navy adventure. In this book, Pope tends to concentrate on a particular action (after preliminaries) in contrast to some of the more recent novels by other writers like O'Brien ("Master and Commander") or Woodman ("A King's Cutter") whose early books cover an extended period of time with many actions.

In this, the 3rd of the Ramage series, Lt. Ramage is given command of the brig Triton whose crew is involved in the great fleet-wide mutiny at Spithead in the spring of 1797. His orders are to carry dispaches to the admirals off Brest , Cadiz and then to the West Indies. How does he set out to sea with such a crew? Then in the Caribbean, he is instructed to stop the mysterious loss of ships sailing from Grenada to Barbados after frigate captains had failed. There is an interesting discussion of the economics of the slave trade in the 18th century. I find I re-read Pope's books more often that the smiilar books by Forrester, Kent or O'Brien. Pope always gives a good tale.