Though literature, films, and folklore have romanticized pirates as gallant seaman who hunted for treasure in exotic locales, David Cordingly, a former curator at the National Maritime Museum in England, reveals the facts behind the legends of such outlaws as Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Calico Jack.

Originally published in an extremely rare 1837 volume, these delightfully melodramatic yet true stories of the diabolical desperadoes who plundered the ships of the high seas detail the lives, atrocities, and exploits of such infamous pirates as Black Beard, Jean Lafitte, Robert Kidd, Edward Low, and Anne Bonney.

Published in 1724, Defoe's chronicle of the scourges of the sea was a smashing success, finding a wide audience eager for tales of those cutthroat sailors who flew the skull and crossbones.

Originally published in 1724, this instantaneous bestseller delivered a dramatic and detailed chronicle of robbery and murder on the high seas. This collection of brief biographies reads like a Who's Who? of piracy, with entries on Captains Kidd, Rackam, and Roberts, women-in-disguise pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and the infamous Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, "that couragious Brute, who might have pass'd in the World for a Heroe, had he been employ'd in a good Cause."

This unsparing account of the eighteenth-century maritime world reconstructs the often brutal social and cultural milieu of Anglo-American seafaring and piracy, following sailors and their ships from their trade routes into rowdy waterfront ports.

The History of Pirates traces piracy from the seas of antiquity to the New World and beyond. It is a thorough, authoritative, and memorable portrait of the fascinating world of pirates.

In Pirates Of The Carolinas, author/photographer Terrance Zepke evaluates thirteen buccaneers, male and female, all of whom share a connection to the Carolinas. From the universally feared Blackbeard to infamous Anne Bonny, who ran to avoid marrying a rich man her father chose for her husband, the adventurous and deadly histories of these watery thieves is vividly recreated as best known from the evidence.

Blackbeard roamed the coastal inlets and sounds of North America interfering with shipping. He married his thirteenth or fourteenth wife at Bath, NC, then was killed and beheaded in a battle with Lt. Maynard of the British Navy at Ocracoke Inlet, just off of Ocracoke, NC. 

'Prizes' were vessels of a rival nation captured by naval warships and privateers (private vessels operating under letters of marque and reprisal from their government). The taking and disposition of prizes were strictly 'regulated' by international law.