Empire of Blue Water

Description

He challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades-and brought it to its knees. "Empire of Blue Water" is the real story of the pirates of theCaribbean. Henry Morgan, a twenty-year-old Welshman, crossed the Atlantic in 1655, hell-bent on making his fortune. Over the next three decades, his exploits in the Caribbean in the service of theEnglish became legendary. His daring attacks on the mighty Spanish Empire on land and at sea determined the fates of kings and queens, and his victories helped shape the destiny of the New World. Morgangathered disaffected European sailors and soldiers, hard-bitten adventurers, runaway slaves, and vicious cutthroats, and turned them into the most feared army in the Western Hemisphere. Sailing out from the Englishstronghold of Port Royal, Jamaica, "the wickedest city in the New World," Morgan and his men terrorized Spanish merchant ships and devastated the cities where great riches in silver, gold, and gems laywaiting. His last raid, a daring assault on the fabled city of Panama, helped break Spain's hold on the Americas forever. Awash with bloody battles, political intrigues, natural disaster, anda cast of characters more compelling, bizarre, and memorable than any found in a Hollywood swashbuckler-including the notorious pirate L'Ollonais, the soul-tortured King Philip IV of Spain, and ThomasModyford, the crafty English governor of Jamaica-"Empire of Blue Water" brilliantly re-creates the passions and the violence of the age of exploration andempire. "From the Hardcover edition."