All readers who have enjoyed this book should be aware that it is a picture sequel to William Gilkerson’s previous book on the same subject, the Governor General’s Award-winning, novel Pirate’s Passage (Shambhala Publications, 2006).

For further reading on the general subject, the author recommends David Cordingly’s factual history Life Among the Pirates and its companion picture book, Pirates: Fact and Fiction, by David Cordingly and John Falconer. Cordingly has also written the commentary for a new edition of the most authentic of all contemporary pirate histories, Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Robberies & Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. Many insights into the same period of history are found in Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

For readers who want to know more about piracy’s earlier eras, Peter Earle’s The Sack of Panama offers a vivid look at Morgan’s time, and Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates does the same for Kidd’s period. The single best contemporary account of the buccaneers is Alexandre Olivier Esquemeling’s Boucaniers of America, first published in 1678. A first-hand of privateering can be found in Woodes Rogers’s journal of 1712, titled A Cruising Voyage Round the World. Various reprints of both have been published over the years, as with The Journal of Bernal Diaz, a conquistador’s eyewitness account of Mexico’s invasion by Cortez in 1519. Readers might find this more easily in the modern edition The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo.

Those who want to know more about Granuaile are directed to Anne Chamber’s biography Granuaille: Ireland’s Pirate Queen, and those wanting more on John Paul Jones from William Gilkerson are directed to his written and illustrated history The Ships of John Paul Jones; the author cites Samuel Eliot Morison’s John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography as the best scholarly Jones biography, and the most readable.

Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, quoted in the final chapter here, gives a profoundly compelling account of a common sailor’s shipboard life in the nineteenth century.

And for all readers who want to look at more pictures of pirates, the author recommends the work of the great American illustrator N. C. Wyeth in the 1911 Scribners edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (recently reissued), and the work of Howard Pyle in the Harper & Brothers 1921 classic Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (also recently reissued).