The Lost Pirate Kingdom

An enjoyable documentary on the age of pirates. Re-enactments felt authentic and paired well with interviews and narration. The narrator had a fun tone that carried well throughout. Interesting information and the whole series had a good flow.

The Lost Pirate Kingdom does something commendable. It tries to catch an incredibly interesting period in history; when pirates where all mighty. Emotionally, it does this very well. The stars aligned in such a way that pirates roamed the Caribbean virtually untouched, and it brought forth legend after legend, who are the clear focus of the documentary. It nails the feeling of just how extraordinary this must have been. Unfortunately, that's all it does well.

Functionally this documentary is pretty much flawed. There is too much repetition, the music is on the nose and there is so much focus on the players, that all the interesting background information, the ships, the technology, the navigation, the balance of power, the differences between the sea fairing nations... it's all pretty much completely lost. We get to spend a lot of time with (good) actors, and the (also good) narrator telling us how their characters felt, but we are left wanting. It's so thin on information, it hardly deserves the name 'documentary'.

I watched this after watching the excellent Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan. This is also a flawed documentary, that makes a few historical jumps too many, but far less so than The Lost Pirate Kingdom. I'm giving our pirates a positive 6 stars because I still think it's interesting to get a better feel for this period overall, and I got some new inspiration from it.

An emotionally engaging series sure, just not much of a documentary.

I find the study of piracy to be fascinating. I've read several books, seen plenty of documentaries, and I'm a big fan of the Pirate History Podcast (which I highly recommend). So I was eager to see "The Lost Pirate Kingdom." I just finished it and have to give it a six out of ten.

I give the show high marks for special effects (though they are clearly special effects, but the costs associated with finding, manning, and sailing enough replica vessels would be astronomical), most of the reenactment scenes, and for the overall narrative presented here.

Now, if you are unfamiliar with the explosion of piracy following the War of Spanish Succession, or the pirate haven in Nassau, then this is going to be really fascinating for you. If you know all about that, then there's nothing really new here ... and that's fine. There's only so much information on this subject that is available.

What I didn't like were the following things:

*Too much repetition. This was true both in reusing the dramatized pieces and for the conveying of information. The narrator would say something happened, there'd be a dramatized scene showing it happen, and then a couple of historians would tell you how it happened. This all could have been handled better, but the greatest fault here is that with so much repetition it left too little time, which brings me too....

*Almost no focus on tactics, on vessels, on the geopolitical situation (or at least very little on this one in particular.

*The pacing. I already touched on the way they repeat themselves numerous times, but this really comes home in the final episode. After Blackbeard is killed, the show pretty much wraps up with a montage of "and here's what happened to Anne Bonny ... here's what happened to Charles Vane." The ending felt very rushed. And I, for the life of me can't understand why they didn't make this an 8-episode show. There is plenty of material, plenty of other pirates they could have followed, more details in the life, etc.

*Too much speculation and assumption passed off as fact. For instance, there's no evidence Anne Bonny ever held a knife to Woodes Rogers throat or that Charles Vane gave an inspiring speech moments before his execution. I realize this is a docu-drama, but I prefer more docu and less drama in my history. Speaking of which....

*The history here is hit and miss.

1. Woodes Rogers is a villain? I realize critical theorists are at work here, but come on. Woodes Rogers' life is quite impressive and he shouldn't be vilified. This series portrays him as some rigid puritan trying to ruin the pirates' good time. The historical record is quite different. Rogers established order on New Providence and was quite generous towards the pirates--he had to have been, otherwise he would have been a failure.

2. Again, critical theory at work, but the pirates were not some social justice warriors out to change society. Yeah, they would free slaves ... sometimes, when it suited their purpose. But they were also just as likely to sell those slaves they acquired wherever they could. Yes, there were black pirates ... but then again, there were black freemen in all parts of the British Empire.

3. This series tries to make it seem like the British only started to care about the pirates once a couple of slave ships were captured. No, the situation was much more complex than that. And here is why they should have devoted a little more time to the history ... because the War of Spanish Succession was a devastating conflict that left all of Europe bankrupt. The British, however, were able to pay off their debts due to their global economic empire. It was the disruption of this network--not to the slave trade, but to raw materials headed for European markets--that affected this. While slavery was indeed a key part of the colonial economy, it wasn't as robust as this show makes it out to be. For instance, there were more Europeans enslaved by the Ottomans, and Barbary states than there were Africans enslaved in the Americas. And at least two-thirds of all African slaves went to South America (Spanish and Portuguese colonies), not British colonies. I say all this because the show tries to minimalize a rather complex issue.

4. While they do address Blackbeard's syphilis, they completely forgot to mention that he blockaded Charleston, SC for several days until his demands were met. Pirates of this age seldom had the power to do such a thing. Only the privateers and buccaneers of the earlier eras had ever done something like this (or worse, sack the city).

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea.

Long story short -- this is on Netflix, so if you have Netflix and like this topic, give it a watch.

This documentary-series is slow, over acted, inconsistent and with a lot of filler time that personally bored me. I thought I was going to see something similar to what Netflix did with the Samurai documentary, which I thought was an interesting and different approach to watching a documentary where the story was told in a very clear way and with novelistic elements that worked well to give it the feel of a TV series.

The scope of this documentary are roughly two years during the year 1716 - 1718 and then mainly about the pirates that sailed from Nassau. It has a total of 6 episodes of 40 minutes, so I thought that it would had enough time to really flesh out the period. But the way this documentary has been structured means that something has to repeated no less than four times. First - it is told by the narrator, then it is acted out by the actors, then a historian has to comment on it and the next episode is has to be repeated in case you have forgotten. So this documentary is pressed for time. It will mention the war of succession, but will not explain it, it will tell you nothing of the technology, ships, warfare, politics or religion of the time period. It focusses so much on Great Britain that it seems like there are barely any other nations involved. So what you are left with are summaries of acts of famous English pirates. It is competently acted and the special effects have been done well. But as a source of information it feels lacking and shallow.