A True Account is actually two stories. One is set in Cambridge Massachusetts, circa 1930, with Radcliffe College professor Marian Beresford and her undergraduate student Kay Lonergan. Kay has found a manuscript by a female pirate named Hannah Masury. The second story is how in 1726 Hannah went from being a common serving girl in Boston to part of a pirate crew looking for a buried treasure. Author Katherine Howe provides an enormous amount of fascinating information about pirates and life in the colonies in the early 18th century while also providing a look into the restricted world of female scholars in the 1930s.
Professor Marian Beresford is something of an outsider despite her advantages. She is smart and well connected, but she is a lesbian and must hide this part of herself at risk of perhaps losing her job. Moreover, her father is a world renowned explorer and scholar who casts a long shadow over Marian’s work. Marian seems to live her life trying to win his attention and praise but is also irritated by the situation. She is plodding along with her teaching job, living on auto-pilot, when one of her undergraduate students surprises her with an 18th century manuscript seemingly written by a woman who lived as a pirate. Marian is initially skeptical about its validity, but Kay is a smart student who is earnest and sure that it is legitimate. In order to prove its veracity, Marian and Kay develop a plan to find the treasure alluded to in the text, but in order to do that, Marian will have to reach out to her father for help. The journey to reveal the truth about Hannah Masury reveals even more surprising truths about the three women — Hannah, Marian and Kay — at the heart of this story.
The most fascinating part of this novel are the chapters devoted to Hannah’s memoir. The life of an 18th century pirate was a brutal and terrifying affair. Hannah falls into piracy after getting tangled up with a young man who has run afoul of a ruthless pirate crew. She, along with the rest of Boston, just witnessed the public hanging of captured pirates, a grim affair described in detail. While trying to help the young man, who is starving and terrified, Hannah unwittingly becomes a target of men who would kill her for this mercy. To save her own life, she steals the young man’s clothing, masquerades as a boy and gets aboard a commercial ship as a cabin boy, only to find that she has boarded the ship of notorious pirate Ned Low. What follows is the story of Hannah becoming “Will” and learning the code of the pirate. This involves a good amount of violence, gore and death (described in detail) as well as battling the weather. There are harrowing accounts of surviving squalls and a hurricane.
I wish this novel had just been about Hannah, and I wish it had followed her entire journey in detail. Howe does a great job with incorporating historical fact into fiction, and she made me interested in the developing relationship between Hannah and a fellow pirate named Seneca. I want the whole story! The story of Marian and Kay was less interesting to me and had some real holes in it. As someone who went to graduate school for history, I found some of Marian’s actions to be ridiculous. She and her father make a huge blunder that I don’t think any sensible person would make. The resolutions to both story lines felt a bit rushed and incomplete. This is a good story, not a great one.