Get ready… as the captain of a Spanish treasure ship sailing in the Spanish Main, you're about to get captured as a pirate's prisoner! Pirates have many ingenious tortures, and once they have got what they want from you, the best you can hope for is to be marooned on an island. This title in the best-selling children’s history series, You Wouldn't Want To…, features full-colour illustrations which combine humour and accurate technical detail and a narrative approach placing reaworld warders at the centre of the history, encouraging them to become emotionally-involved with the characters and aiding their understanding of what life would have been like as a pirate’s prisoner. Informative captions, a complete glossary and an index make this title an ideal introduction to the conventions of information books for young readers. It is an ideal text for Key Stage 2 shared and guided reading and helps achieve the goals of the Scottish Standard Curriculum 5-14.

Describes the life of a pirate's prisoner, including survival tips.

One hundred and fifty years ago the Royal Navy fought a daring campaign against ruthless pirates and won, killing The King of the Pirates, Bartholomew Roberts off the coast of Africa and capturing his fleet. Scores of his men were executed by the Admiralty Court. On the Barbary Coast of North Africa pirates preyed on shipping in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic as they had done for centuries and they terrorized the populations of the coastal towns. To them, piracy was a way of life, and the great sea-powers of the day couldnt stop them. Then, in one of the most remarkable and neglected anti-piracy operations in maritime history, the Royal Navy confronted them, defeated them and made the seas safe for trade. This is the subject of Graham A. Thomass compelling new study of one of the most pernicious episodes in the history of African piracy. As he tells this compelling story, he uncovers the long tradition of piracy and privateering along the African shore. Vividly he describes attacks not only in the Mediterranean but also on the other side of the continent, along the shores of West Africa and around Madagascar. But perhaps the most telling sections of his narrative concern critical engagements that stand out from the story the daring rescue of the British merchant ship The Three Sisters by HMS Polyphemus in 1848 and the actions of the battleship HMS Prometheus against the Rif pirates a few years later. His account is based on documents held at the National Archives and other original sources. It gives a fascinating inside view into the way in which the Royal Navy responded to the menace of piracy in the nineteenth century.

In a page-turning tale brimming with adventure, author Richard Sanders tells of the remarkable exploits of Bartholomew Roberts (better known as Black Bart), the greatest of the Caribbean pirates. He drank tea instead of rum. He banned women and gambling on his ships. He never made his prisoners walk the plank, instead inviting them into his cabin for a friendly chat. And during the course of his extraordinary two-and-a-half-year career as a pirate captain, he captured four hundred prizes and brought trade in the eastern Caribbean to a standstill. In If a Pirate I Must Be..., Richard Sanders tells the larger-than-life story of Bartholomew Roberts, aka Black Bart. Born in a rural town, Roberts rose from third mate on a slave ship to pirate captain in a matter of months. Before long, his combination of audaciousness and cunning won him fame and fortune from the fisheries of Newfoundland to the slave ports of West Africa. Sanders brings to life a fascinating world of theater and ritual, where men (a third of whom were black) lived a close-knit, egalitarian life, democratically electing their officers and sharing their spoils. They were highly (if surreptitiously) popular with many merchants, with whom they struck incredibly lucrative deals. Yet with a fierce team of Royal Navy pirate hunters tracking his every move, Roberts' heyday would prove a brief one, and with his capture, the Golden Age of pirates would pass into the lore and legend of books and movies. Based on historical records, journals and letters from pirates under Roberts' command, and on writings by Roberts himself, If a Pirate I Must Be... is the true story of the greatest pirate ever to sail the Caribbean. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groups—they all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarah Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative, within limits. What these “communities” did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should today’s criminal justice system build on people’s shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society.