Product Description

Awash with skullduggery, malice, terror, and opportunism, here are 28 first-hand memoirs and contemporary reports of the most famous pirates to sail the seven seas, including Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, Anne Bonney, and Jean Lafitte. These range from the Golden Age of piracy, beginning in the mid 16th century with the birth of the ‘buccaneers’ in the Caribbean, to more recent times.

Some of the accounts covered are Francis ‘Scourge of Spain’ Drake’s audacious night treasure raid on Nombre de Dios, the capture of Panama by Henry Morgan, cruelest of the ‘Brethren of the Coast’, Alexander Exquemelin’s fly-on-the-wall telling of the ‘wicked order of pirates or robbers of the sea,’ and the journal of William Dampier which was found stashed in a hollow bamboo tube, after he fled life as a Somerset farmer.

In addition, this book offers the Pirate’s Code of Honour (article 4: lights out at eight o’clock, 'if after that hour any still remained inclined to drinking, to do it on open deck'), a listing of pirate songs, and a full pirate chronology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175570 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Insightful and sometimes funny
First of all I'd like to comment on the previous review. It is clear that the reviewer stopped reading the book within the first chapter as their review is based completely on a poor chapter to begin a book. After you fight your way through that one first chapter and give the book a second chance, you won't be let down -- that is if you find history interesting in the first place. Some chapters are written by actual pirates and some are written by historians. Either way, each chapter is fun and interesting. If you want to learn about pirates, I recommend this book.

thankfully I got it cheap
For some reason any book with "Pirates" in the title gets great reviews, and there are many books on pirates out there that deserve them. This is not one of them. Assembled from journals or memoirs, with little or no background or context (unless you already know everything about the subject in that particular chapter to start with) the only thing moderately interesting is the language used by the writers, rather than the stories themselves.
Too bad, I was really looking forward to this book based on the reviews.
With every turn of the page I got more and more angry that I purchased this book, and thankfully I got it for only a few bucks delivered.

Swash buckling fun and full of info
Amazing book, chock full of facts from the horses mouth. Many of the tales printed are from actual journals, documents, diaries, manifests etc so its very interesting to hear first hand stories of these tales. Some of them are a little hard to follow as most of the author wrote in 3rd person but other than that its awesome.