![]() ![]() It followed the core of them, normally under Sharp's leadership, through their many vicissitudes until they arrived rich (except for those who had made their shipmates richer by gambling away their gains) in the West Indies, from there to disperse and commit further crimes until their usually short-spun lives gave out. Ringrose wrote a literate and revealing account of the venture that brought the buccaneers across the isthmus of Panama. It was Basil Ringrose, however, who made Sharp's voyage known and popular with the adventure-loving reading public of the day. If Sharp bought himself off with the English King Charles II (who had even knighted and given the lieutenant governorship of Jamaica to Henry Morgan some years before), he did it by means that were not as despicable as most of the actions of Morgan and his like-Sharp supplied as penance a book of charts of the coast of western Spanish America that was regarded as a great prize, and with it he won his freedom. Moreover, he had shown remarkable skills in navigating the waters south of Cape Horn from west to east (the first English captain to do so) and bringing his stolen vessel, the Trinity, to the West Indies. Sharp had been an effective and enduring leader of his band of buccaneers in the enterprise of crossing to the Pacific shore and, in capturing Spanish shipping, had reaped a considerable harvest from the colonial power, though not without many setbacks. Certainly Bartholomew Sharp got most of the credit, and deserved at least some of it, after he appeared in England, along with Ringrose and some others, in the spring of 1682. As a criminal, Ringrose had something to be said for him: not the most cruel and savage of the breed, he had a gift for sketching harbors and for writing (when he was not seasick on a voyage) a very readable kind of narrative-one of historical importance. In the history of the buccaneers, those romanticized robbers of the Spanish Main, the Caribbean, and the Pacific coasts in the late seventeenth century, Henry Morgan has well overshadowed Bartholomew Sharp, and Sharp, in turn, has overshadowed Basil Ringrose. Thrower, editors A Buccaneer's Atlas: Basil Ringrose's South Sea Waggoner. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. ![]() Preferred Citation: Howse, Derek, and Norman J. ![]()
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