In the imaginations of young and old alike, the word -pirate- resonates with spine-tingling fear and swashbuckling adventure. Over centuries, our cultural landscape has been populated by a host of famous real and fictional figures immortalized in literature and art: Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, with his fearsome reputation for cruelty; Henry -Bloody- Morgan, whose treasure is still sought today; and of course Long John Silver, the archetypal anti-hero of Robert Louis Stevenson-s Treasure Island (1885).Pirate Tales gathers a treasure trove of excerpts from literary works inspired by the historical pirates of the 16th and 17th centuries. The edition begins with Daniel Defoe-s Robinson Crusoe (1719), a book containing all the trappings of pirate lore - shipwrecks, mutineers, undiscovered islands, and talking parrots - and one which influenced hundreds of works of adventure fiction, not least Jules Verne-s The Mysterious Island (1871). The third nerve-jangling novel is Treasu
