Barry Clifford

On January 2, 1678, a fleet of French ships sank off the Venezuelan coast. This proved disastrous for French naval power in the region, and sparked the rise of a golden age of piracy. Tracing the lives of fabled pirates like the Chevalier de Grammont, Nikolaas Van Hoorn, Thomas Paine, and Jean Comte d'Estrées, The Lost Fleet portrays a dark age, when the outcasts of European society formed a democracy of buccaneers, settling on a string of islands...

Explores the role of the Whydah in the slave trade and discusses how it came to be a pirate ship, providing evidence of what life was like for pirates in the Caribbean Area in the 18th century through artifiacts found on the wrecks of pirate ships.