Hunting Pirate Heaven - Softcover

Kevin Rushby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841194883 ISBN 13: 9781841194882

Publisher: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2002

Synopsis

This acclaimed book is travel writing at its entertaining and hair-raising best. Kevin Rushby set out to find the lost pirate settlements that once existed on the islands and atolls of the Indian Ocean. Hitching rides on a motley assortment of vessels, he sails up the African coast, then east, to locate the descendants of the legendary sixteenth-century pirates who carved out kingdoms in the jungles of Madagascar. Along the way, Rushby meets up with the crackpot dreamers, tough settlers, the fighters and the failures who live on the islands now. This is a romantic story in the old-fashioned sense, full of adventure and colour.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin Rushby has lived and worked in Sudan, Malaysia, Thailand and Yemen. He is a full-time writer and author of four previous books: Chasing the Mountain of Light, Eating the Flowers of Paradise, Children of Kali and Hunting Pirate Heaven.

From Publishers Weekly

As difficult as it is to make a good pirate movie, it's almost as hard to write a good nonfiction book about pirates. Rushby (Children of Kali; Eating the Flowers of Paradise; etc.) has overcome the obstacle most writers on the subject come up against (i.e., the impossible task of separating a few hard grains of truth from the clouds of fantasy and wish-fulfillment that have always surrounded the subject) by simply venturing to the places pirates used to call home and looking around. A rough-and-tumble adventurer who's more than willing to poke fun at his na‹vet‚ and inexperience (despite the long list of adventure travel books to his credit), Rushby journeys to the islands around East Africa and Madagascar in search of the old pirate redoubts once hidden there. He follows pirate legends via a mix-and-match collection of hitched rides and lucky encounters, reveling in the loopy nature of the area's Arab, Indian, French and African cultural cross-pollination. Rushby is affable even in the worst circumstances, which serves him well when he's going clubbing in a dangerous part of Mozambique with a former gunrunner, almost getting marooned by a vengeful Scandinavian or losing his passport on the war-torn isle of Anjouan. The journey is more interesting than the destination, as Rushby doesn't find many pirate remains at all: rumors, some ruins and lots of stories. However, Rushby does present an enthralling guide to a little-visited corner of the world, haunted by the ghosts of its pirate past.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Constable & Robinson Ltd.
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1841194883
• ISBN 13: 9781841194882
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288