Hunting Pirate Heaven: In Search of the Lost Pirate Utopias of the Indian Ocean
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.31 (690 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0802714234 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-08-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An Modern Day Adventure in Search of the Adventurers of the Past. This is a modern day adventure account by Rushby of his search for the remnants of 18th century pirate settlements on Madagascar and nearby islands. Who were these people who "drank the Devil's health and damned the King?" What did they seek and where did they end up? That was his quest. The most. "A Death-Defying Search for the Pirate Edens in East Africa" according to Donald Mitchell. Unless you are a lot more adventurous than I am, the closest you will ever get to most of the places and people described in this book is reading the book. Mr. Kevin Rushby deserves great credit for taking on a very dangerous and unpleasant journey in search of what utopian life in the tropics re
Hitching rides on a motley assortment of freighters, dhows, yachts, and fishing smacks, Rushby sailed up the east coast of Africa, then turned east to the islands of Comoros and Madagascar, his ultimate objective being to locate the descendants of the infamous sixteenth-century piratessuch as Captain Misson, the legendary French pirate who may have been dreamed up by Daniel Defoe; English sailor-turnedbuccaneer Thomas White; and Rhode Islander Thomas Tewwho carved kingdoms for themselves in the remote jungles of northeast Madagascar. A chance meeting on the muddy foreshore of the Thames River launched Kevin Rushby on a voyage to rediscover the lost pirate settlements that once dotted the islands and atolls of the Indian Ocean. As he traveled, Rushby met up with the crackpot dreamers, the tough settlers, the fighters and the failures, who live on the coasts and islands now. His is a romantic story in the old-fashioned sense of the word, full of adventure and colorful incident: voyages to islands where forgotten Portuguese forts lie covered in jungle, where some have tried to shoot their way to paradise, and where the ocean can destroy lives and dreams as quickly as men and women create them.
A rough-and-tumble adventurer who's more than willing to poke fun at his na‹vet‚ and inexperience (despite the long list of adventure travel books to his credit), Rushby journeys to the islands around East Africa and Madagascar in search of the old pirate redoubts once hidden there. From Publishers Weekly As difficult as it is to make a good pirate movie, it's almost as hard to write a good nonfiction book about pirates. Rushby (Children of Kali; Eating the Flowers of Paradise; etc.) has overcome the obstacle most writers on the subject come up against (i.e., the impossible task of separating a few hard grains of truth from the clouds of fantasy and wish-fulfillment that have always surrounded the subject) by simply venturing to the places pirates used to call home and looking around. . The journey is more interesting than the destination, as Rushby doesn't find many pirate remains at all: rumors, some ruins and lots o