A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself
In the early 1930s, Professor Marian Beresford discovers an unforgettable character in a manuscript of mysterious origin. Hannah Masury, writing from 200 years earlier, offers up an improbable memoir of her sojourn aboard the pirate ship Reporter, captained by the infamous Edward Low. Disguised as a cabin boy in a desperate attempt to escape assassination, the profane, scrappy, and unsentimental Hannah manages to make herself useful to a band of desperate men and to escape her tedious life in pre-Revolutionary Boston.
Howe adds intrigue to a familiar narrative – storms, rum, shanties, mutinies, buried treasure, etc. – by alternating Hannah’s story with Marian’s attempts, first to authenticate the manuscript, then to follow its clues to the lost pirate gold. Like Hannah, Marian hides her real identity from the wider world, and Howe draws some interesting parallels between the violent, yet free world of the pirates and the safer but stifling world Marian inhabits at Radcliffe during the Depression.
The two time periods move the plot along, but at the price of a loss of complexity in the characters and settings. Most of the characters play all-too-predictable roles in the two protagonists’ lives, and neither the world of the 1720s nor the 1930s really comes to life. The overall concept is clever, however, the plot satisfyingly twisty, and Howe’s style is fresh and readable, leaving the reader with a desire to spend more time with Hannah.
