EMPIRE of BLUE WATER: CAPTAIN MORGAN'S GREAT PIRATE ARMY, the EPIC BATTLE for the AMERICAS, and the CATASTROPHE that ENDED the OUTLAWS' BLOODY REIGN (audiobook) by Stephan Talty
Published in 2007 by Random House Audio Read by John H. Mayer Duration: 13 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Stephan Talty writes a lot about pirates in Empire of Blue Water. Not modern pirates, but the swashbuckling pirates that most Americans imagine when they hear the word "pirate". The modern personification of that word is Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow. In the late 1600s, the personification of that word was a Welshman named Henry Morgan. Morgan was technically not a pirate. He was a privateer. If you were in the Spanish government, there was not much of a difference between a privateer and a pirate, except that privateers came with an extra level of annoyance. 17th century England did not have the money to expand the Royal Navy enough to confront Spain. Spain was more than 200 years into looting the Americas and had a very, very large navy to protect that loot as it came across the Atlantic to the home country. England did have something that Spain did not ha