Lives of the Most Notorious Pirates

First published in 1724, this book, issued under the name Captain Charles Johnson, offers biographical sketches of early eighteenth-century pirates and some of their predecessors. Typical lives include Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, Henry Avery, William Kidd, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and others who sailed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Johnson describes ships, articles of agreement, trials, and hangings, and he records how crews elected captains and shared plunder. The tone is documentary and sensational at once. The work is a collective rogue's gallery, the chief contemporary source-book of the so-called golden age of piracy, not a single voyage narrative.

Quarter-bound in black cloth with red marbled covers. Green slipcase.