The Life and Tryals of the Gentleman Pirate, Major Stede Bonnet by Jeremy R. Moss
An heir to an established land-owning aristocratic family in Barbados, Major Stede Bonnet enjoyed luxuries equal to those of the finest houses in London. “A Gentleman of good Reputation” and a “Master of a plentiful Fortune,” he was given “the Advantage of a liberal Education,” but the call of the sea-and perhaps more significantly, the push of his obligations as a father and husband-cast Major Bonnet onto an unlikely and deliberate course toward piracy. Easily likable, by friend and foe, many would be drawn to Bonnet. In his two short years of piracy, Stede Bonnet stood alongside some of the New World’s most notorious pirates, including Charles Vane, Charles Condent (also known as “Billy One-Hand”), Robert Deal, “Calico” John Rackham, Israel Hands, Benjamin Hornigold, William Kidd, Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and the pirate to whom Bonnet would forever be connected, Edward Thatch (infamously known around the world as “Blackbeard”).…
The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy – but it was also, argues anthropologist David Graeber, a brief window of radical democracy, as the pirate settlers attempted to apply the egalitarian principles of their ships to a new society on land.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’, or de Glorieuze Overtocht in Dutch, is often called the Bloodless Revolution as there was very little bloodshed in England itself, although in Ireland it was a particularly bloody affair. Most ordinary people weren’t directly affected by the invasion as they had been during the Civil Wars (1642-52). In his book 