Forget what you think you know about pirates.
Walking the plank is almost certainly a myth. Blackbeard has no documented kills until his final battle. Buried treasure maps don’t exist in any authentic historical record. And the famous “pirate accent”? Invented in 1950 by a British actor from Dorset.
The real history is far more surprising.
Pirates ran the most democratic societies of their age — ships with written constitutions, elected captains, and disability compensation that specified exactly how much you’d receive for losing a right arm (600 pieces of eight) versus a left (500). They built fleets that humbled national navies. They kidnapped an entire Irish village and sold it into slavery in North Africa. One of them — a woman who began life on a floating brothel — commanded a fleet so large that the combined navies of China, Portugal, and Britain couldn’t stop her.
Salt & Blood covers 3,000 years of piracy across every ocean: Bronze Age raiders who may have destroyed more civilizations than any army in history, Vikings who reached Baghdad through Russian rivers, North African corsairs who enslaved over a million Europeans, the outlaw democracies of the Caribbean, the enormous fleets of East Asia, and the modern pirates whose attacks shipping companies deliberately hid to avoid insurance costs.
This isn’t a book about parrots and peg legs. It’s about what actually happened — in trial transcripts, contemporary accounts, and the wreckage of ships still on the ocean floor.
On every page, something will surprise you.
