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The John Batchelor Show

S8 Ep275: DEFOE THE MASTER SPY AND AVERY THE STRATEGIST Colleagues Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan, The Pirate King. The group discusses the irony of Defoe and Avery attending a play about Avery's life, which Defoe secretly wrote under a pseudonym. Kingsley emphasizes

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2026

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

 DEFOE THE MASTER SPY AND AVERY THE STRATEGIST Colleagues Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan, The Pirate King. The group discusses the irony of Defoe and Avery attending a play about Avery's life, which Defoe secretly wrote under a pseudonym. Kingsley emphasizes Defoe's role as a master spy using multiple aliases. They conclude that Avery was a strategist who defied the simple "swashbuckling" pirate stereotype. NUMBER 4

Transcript

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0:00.0

It was Sean Kingsley and Rex Cowan.

0:02.0

John Kingsley, the marine historian, Rex Cowan, the archaeologist and shipwreck hunter,

0:08.0

and both of them have come across the pirate king, the strange adventures of Henry Avery,

0:13.0

and the birth of the golden age of piracy.

0:15.0

There's a scene that they wonderfully present of Tennyson, the man, the churchman, who's at the end of the dead

0:23.2

drop for the letter that we saw Avery writing in Falma.

0:28.4

Tennyson and Defoe and Avery, all Avery in disguise, coming out of a play in London in 1719, I believe, or maybe it was 1712, yes.

0:42.7

And a play about Avery the Pirate, although it's vaguely described as by Charles Johnson,

0:49.7

and the man has a pseudonym that's meant to be Avery.

0:52.5

Everybody gets a joke because everybody's looking for Avery.

0:55.3

He's got a bounty on his head, but most importantly, he has a treasure that he's hidden somewhere.

1:00.3

They all want to know where he is.

1:02.2

They come laughing out of the play, and Rex had come to you.

1:07.4

Defoe wrote that play, didn't he?

1:09.0

Did you discover, did you know that DeFoe was making all this up and they were laughing all the time?

1:14.4

Not at all.

1:15.6

In fact, I knew very little by the time that I'd looked at that.

1:21.2

I hadn't been really interested either.

1:24.2

I mean, what has interested me is just how much I didn't know and how much I didn't

1:31.0

imagine would come out of this, this find and discovery. Otherwise, I might have wasted a lot more

1:39.1

of my life pursuing things which I wasn't capable of pursuing, and which Sean has done in a remarkable fashion to entertain me as well as

1:49.8

other people are going to read the book.

...

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