Faceless in the dim light of a half moon, a man hurtles out of the shadows, claps a hand over Anthony Grey’s mouth and lifts him off the ground. A second man gags him and binds his wrists.

These few seconds on a night in 1668 completely change the course of Anthony’s life. As a bondservant to a Boston tavernkeeper Anthony has been keeping the accounts and entertaining the customers by doing sums in his head. It is for this skill that he is kidnapped and carried off to Port Royal, Jamaica, where he is pressed in to service as clerk to the notorious buccaneer Henry Morgan.

Anthony survives the explosion of Morgan’s flagship, fights in battles on land and sea and witnesses the pirates’ fearsome depredations on Spanish shipping and colonial cities, culminating in the infamous sacking of Panama City in 1672. Against a variety of authentic seventeenth-century settings – including London and Bristol, England as well as Cuba and Venezuela – the Beattys tell an exciting and suspenseful tale of political machinations and piratical derring-do.