Pirate Trials

The lives and adventures of some of history's most prominent Pirate Captains.For the past few years, while researching for this series of books, the dust bins of history have been co-mingling with the breaking news of pirates, terrorists and killers. The first two volumes of PIRATE TRIALS dealt with a selected few cases of pirates who were caught, tried and sentenced to death for their murderous deeds. Those two volumes were brought to life from handwritten accounts kept among the historical artifacts of the Library of Congress. While they were tedious for some readers, they were authentic and without embellishment. This book is very different and while there are a few selected details of the trials of each of these pirate captains, they are short, brief and quick to execute the swashbuckling killers. These accounts and their very brief trials bring to life the work of one Captain Charles Johnson, who, as the following foreword by C. Lovat Fraser will explain, might be a bit difficult to pin down as to whether he was an actual person or perhaps an assortment of authors. One can be certain that the work was published centuries ago as a trail of published accounts leads to this day. The stories are told of bold and strong-willed men who dared to plunder and kill and justly met their rewards, mostly at the end of a rope. In many cases, their entire crew joined them at the gallows. In some such instances, the Pirate Captains and their crews had their lifeless corpses set upon gibbets and decorated the banks of harbors as a warning to incoming seamen not to follow in their wake. The corpses were left to rot for years, so pervasive was the problem of piracy.