The Monarchs of the Main; Or, Adventures of the Buccaneers. Volume 1 (of 3)

Before the pirate flags flew over Nassau, before Blackbeard terrorized merchant vessels, there were the buccaneers: French hunters driven from Hispaniola by Spanish soldiers, who found savage refuge on the rock of Tortuga and turned their muskets against empire itself. Walter Thornbury's vivid 1855 account reconstructs the origins of these legendary raiders with the verve of historical fiction and the rigor of Victorian scholarship. He traces their metamorphosis from starving huntsmen curing meat on wooden frames (the word itself comes from their barbacoa) to the terror of the Spanish Main, men who founded a republic of outcasts and held the great galleons of Spain at bay. Volume One opens on Tortuga's craggy shores, introducing the rough democracy of the Brethren of the Coast, theircodes of honor, their brutal wars, and the unlikely genesis of a maritime brotherhood that would reshape the colonial world. For readers who loved Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood or the golden age of historical adventure, this is where the legend truly begins.