Born to Be Hanged

Keith Thomson

The year is 1680 in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy and more than three hundred daring hardened pirates-a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers-gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline raiding cities mines and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become legends. So begins one of the greatest piratical adventures of the era-a story not given its full due until now.

Inspired by the intrepid forays of pirate turned Jamaican governor Captain Henry Morgan-yes that Captain Morgan-the company crosses Panama on foot slashing its way through the Darien Isthmus one of the thickest jungles on the planet and liberating a native princess along the way. After reaching the South Sea the buccaneers primarily Englishmen plunder the Spanish Main in a series of historic assaults often prevailing against staggering odds and superior firepower. A collective shudder racks the western coastline of South America as the English pirates waging a kind of proxy war against the Spaniards gleefully undertake a brief reign over Pacific waters marauding up and down the continent.

With novelistic prose and a rip-roaring sense of adventure Keith Thomson guides us through the pirates' legendary two-year odyssey. We witness the buccaneers evading Indigenous tribes Spanish conquistadors and sometimes even their own English countrymen all with the ever-present threat of the gallows for anyone captured. By fusing contemporaneous accounts with intensive research and previously unknown primary sources Born to Be Hanged offers a rollicking account of one of the most astonishing pirate expeditions of all time.

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