The Pacific's pirate history ranks among its stories ship-attacking treasure hunters, human traffickers called blackbirders, and other brutal maritime criminals of all sorts. This volume contains a representative series of stories that starts with the first Europeans to enter and cross the great ocean and continues right through the modern era. Some of the names are famous, like the pirate Bully Hayes, the Chinese pirate empress Cheng I Sao, the brutal murderer Dr. James Patrick Murray, and the buried treasure of the Esperanza. The Caribbean and the Barbary Coast are better known as pirate havens, but the Pacific was just as bloody, just as lawless, and certainly as colorful.
