"The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary War. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told before, yet missing from most maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels, from 20-foot whaleboats to 40-cannon men-of-war, that truly revealed the new nation's character-above...

Explores the colorful history of piracy and smuggling, including the Golden Age of buccaneers, Prohibition-era rumrunners, and endangered wildlife kidnapping. Pirates and Smugglers is a swashbuckling introduction to the highwaymen and women of the seas-from the cruel Cilician pirates who terrorized the Mediterranean more than 2,000 years ago to the well-organized and ruthless modern-day buccaneers who target supertankers on the South China Sea-and...

"Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness, a powerful mercenary whose reign of terror stretches across the Mirabel Galaxy. To those aboard her glass starship, Marauder, however, she's just Andi, their friend and fearless leader. But when a routine mission goes awry, the Marauder's all-girl crew is tested as they find themselves in a treacherous situation-and at the mercy of a sadistic bounty hunter from Andi's past. Meanwhile, across the galaxy,...

A revelation of America's War of Independence, a sweeping tale of maritime rebel-entrepreneurs bent on personal profit as well as national freedom. Privateers were legalized pirates empowered by the Continental Congress to raid and plunder, at their own considerable risk, as much enemy trade as they could successfully haul back to America's shores. Patton writes how privateering engaged all levels of Revolutionary life, from the dockyards to the assembly...