The Pirate Menace: Uncovering the Golden Age of Piracy

This new account explores the most notorious pirates in history and how their rise and fall can be traced back to a single pirate haven, Nassau.

Angus Konstam, one of the world's leading pirate experts, has brought his 30 years of research to create the definitive book on the short-lived Golden Age of Piracy. Following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), many of the privateers the British had used to prey on French and Spanish shipping turned to piracy leading to a major surge in attacks in the Caribbean and along North America's Atlantic seaboard. The fragile maritime economy of the Americas was threatened with collapse and, when major ports were threatened and trade brought to a standstill, the British government finally declared war on the pirates.

Most of the ships captured by pirates carried cargoes which were worthless unless they could be 'fenced'. As all legal ports were closed to them, the pirates took over Nassau on the Bahamian island of New Providence and turned it into their own pirate haven, where shady merchants were happy to buy their plunder. Some of the pirates based there ranged as far afield as Newfoundland, West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and Nassau became the hub of a pirate network that included some of the most notorious pirates in history: Blackbeard, "Calico Jack" Rackam, Charles Vane and Bartholomew Roberts.

The Pirate Menace draws on extensive research, as well as a wide range of first-hand accounts, to produce a new history of the heyday of historical piracy.