Golden Age of Piracy in 9 True Stories

You grew up on parrots, peg legs and buried treasure, and somewhere along the way you started wondering what pirate life actually looked like. The real men behind the black flag were stranger, harder and far more interesting than the movies let on.

Each chapter of this pirate history drops you into a single true moment. You stand on the deck of a captured merchant ship, sit in on a crew council as men vote out their captain, watch plunder divided by written articles, and wait in the crowd at a Caribbean hanging. Along the way you meet escaped enslaved men who found a place in pirate crews, women who sailed and fought alongside them, and the victims who paid in blood and fear. Where the legend runs ahead of the surviving records, the narrator tells you so plainly.

You come away knowing the golden age of piracy as it was lived, with stories worth retelling. Press play and step aboard.