Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer, fabulously rich, burying dozens of treasure chests up and down the eastern seaboard. But it turns out that most everyone, even many respected scholars, have the story all wrong. Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. His three-year odyssey aboard the aptly named Adventure galley pitted him against arrogant Royal Navy commanders, jealous East India Company captains, storms, starvation, angry natives, and, above all, flesh-and-blood pirates. Superbly written and impeccably researched, The Pirate Hunter is one ripping good yarn.
Download DescriptionThree hundred years after his adventures at sea, Captain Kidd is still the best known pirate in the English-speaking world. But what historians, novelists and the general public do not know is that Kidd was not a cardboard-cutout villain, a Blackbeard with firecrackers in his hair. In fact, he wasn't even a pirate. He was a successful NY sea-captain hired by the Lords of London to chase pirates, and the man he wanted to capture more than any other was a long-forgotten rogue by the name of Robert Culliford, who dogged Kidd throughout his career, and who was, in many ways responsible for Captain Kidd's reputation as a rogue, as a pirate. Zacks takes readers from an execution by hanging in London to the home of William Kidd, master mariner, at 56 Wall Street in Manhattan, and then to the high seas with Captain Kidd, on a covert mission to go after the bounty of five pirate ships, a mission cooked up and later disavowed by England's King William. Zacks brings to life the real story of Captain Kidd, a man who met a tragic end for crimes he did not commit, and who led another life on land, with a beautiful, wealthy wife and daughter in New York. Set in England, Madagascar, the Caribbean and many other exotic locations including the quite uncivilized Wall Street of 300 years ago, this is a tale of adventure, betrayal and courage, a book that will stand both as biography as well as with such classic tales of adventure as IN THE HEART OF THE SEA. The writing is quite extraordinary - you are with these men on their adventures. The reason for this is that Zacks followed Kidd's trail around the world, from libraries in England to remote villages in Madagascar, and the result is a tale that is more fantastic than fiction.


Click here to find out more about this treasure...