I’ve never met Thomas Treadwell in person, but I follow his all-star posts in a metal-detecting group on Facebook and know that this guy doesn’t just write about treasure-hunting pirates, he is one through and through. When I saw that he published a book about pirates, I was immediately intrigued—and since this appears to be his first (great) publication, it’s an absolute steal on Amazon.

The story is that of Captain Blackthorne, a renowned pirate who’s been tasked by the King himself to escort a small ship, the Dove, with its passengers and crew across the oceans to safety—this in exchange for his freedom as a pirate. Blackthorne is not to loot any other vessels but those of Britain’s enemies, the French, and will be allowed free reign against such scoundrels once his task is complete.

This book feels like an episode in a much longer epic. I could easily see Captain Blackthorne and Sims both as recurrent characters in adventures across the King’s domain. Treadwell’s given them and the other characters enough unstated backstory that he could move with equal ease either forward or backwards in time in any of his follow-books. We’d be entertained either way.

I found myself constantly comparing this story to E.M Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower books and Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe. Although I’ve never read anything by Patrick O’Brian, I assume it’s likewise reminiscent of his Captain Jack Aubrey. Treadwell’s writing is strong, drawing the reader into a distant era of sea captains, gunships, and terror on the high seas—and I’d love to read more.

The book contains a fair amount of death and a tiny bit of sex, but the language (as I recall it) was clean. The old vocabulary of ships and clothes and foodstuffs flows so well that you know exactly what Treadwell’s talking about, even if you’d never read the words before. He does include a glossary in the back-matter, but I never had to check it. I especially liked the diagram of the 42-Gun Warship in the early pages of the book, as it proved helpful in acclimating me to the ship’s parts and vocabulary. There’s just something about a good cross-section!

Treadwell also includes something in this book that I’ve rarely seen in other novels, an essay about his grandmother to whom he dedicated the book. “Grandma Made Me a Pirate” is a cozy look into the author’s life and inspiration, and I felt that it was a fitting addition to a great story. I think more authors could take a cue from Treadwell in this, and give us a little look behind the curtain to what drives their passion not just to write but to write about a given topic.

I look forward to reading more from Thomas D. Treadwell, and even to picking up other books written by the metal-detecting community. Incidentally, this same Facebook group is where I also found Doug Ohman’s Is It Possible?, a fantastic mishmash of real-life metal-detecting finds with short stories about how they might have been lost. That’s a book worth checking out as well. I wonder what other detecorists out there have written…

©2024 E.T.