It has been over a year since I moved back to the United States, but it has taken this long to adjust to being back here. Now that I am settled in, however, my focus as an author going forward is continuing to write about the pirates (The Pirate Project) who operated out of the Bahamas almost 300 years ago.   Fascinating details emerged from my research over the past five years which puts several of the pirates in a new light.  For instance, some of them were organizing a Jacobite fleet to join with other supporters of the Stuart line to attack England in an attempt overthrow King George.   This was probably the real reason behind Blackbeard (Edward Thatch) being considered such a threat and so quickly targeted and eliminated by naval forces. Others were what we could nowadays consider to be entrepreneurs; educated, middle class men who sought to improve their social standing through the accumulation of wealth. Some of them, like Christopher Condent, actually managed to pull it off.

It is also clear that it wasn’t the tea tax that ticked off the American colonists. It was the attempted British tax on rum. So much so that the pirates of the Bahamas were hired to smuggle it in.  Then, when rum manufacturing began in the American colonies, these same pirates ran molasses, the raw ingredient in rum, from French Martinique.  This was a dangerous occupation because Britain and France were at war, meaning that the American colonists were trading with the enemy.  If either the British or the French navy intercepted these ships, all aboard would be immediately hanged.  And on top of that they also had the Spanish navy to deal with.  In spite of these hazards, however, the molasses continued to flow and rum ended up becoming a critical part of the colonial economy.