Pirate stories.................

 .................are worth reading.  Read, and thoroughly enjoyed, the last two of these.  The first one is on-order.  Might suggest adding this one to the list:

Opening paragraphs.................

      When Elizabeth Tudor inherited the kingdom from her half sister Mary I, in November 1558, England was on the brink of ruin.  The feeling of despair among the nobles can only be imagined:  not only had the country been torn between the ultra-Protestant reign of Elizabeth's half brother, Edward V, followed by the fanatically Catholic Mary, but the crown was now proffered to the daughter of the reviled Queen Anne Boleyn.  Elizabeth, who had lived her life as an unwelcomed reminder of the union of Henry VIII and her mother, would most assuredly have been burned at the stake by Mary without the intervention of the queen's absentee husband, Philip II of Spain.  If there was one thing Elizabeth Tudor understood intuitively, it was life on the edge.

-Susan Ronald,  The Pirate Queen:  Queen ElizabethI, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire 

One of the most interesting...................

 ...........paragraphs I've read this month:

     Impressment arose in part because the age of exploration created a demand for labor at sea that could not be met through normal financial incentives.  But it also arose because of changes on land.  The shift from late feudalism to early agrarian capitalism, the great disruption that would fuel the growth of the metropolitan centers in the coming centuries, had disgorged a whole class of society—small, commons-based cottage laborers—and turned them into itinerant free agents.  By the late 1500s, the explosion of vagabonds made them public enemy number one, triggering one of the first true moral panics of the post-Gutenberg era.  Everywhere there were wanderers, whole families lost in the changing economic landscape.  Serfs once grounded in a coherent, if oppressive, feudal system found themselves flotsam on the twisting stream of early capitalism.  To everyone sitting on the banks above that stream, the change must have seemed something like the modern fantasies of zombie invasions:  you wake up one day and realize that the streets are filled with people who not only lack homes, but also suffer from some other, more existential form of homelessness—not even knowing what kind of home they should be seeking.

-Steven Johnson, Enemy of All Mankind:  A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

distant shock waves...................

      To do justice to that story—particularly on the pre-history side of the hourglass—the chains of cause and effect have to run at different scales.  Some events have short-term causes, like that exploding cannon or the direct hit on the mainmast.  But other causes roll in more slowly, like those that ultimately brought so much treasure aboard the Mughal ship, or the ones that ultimately incentivized a small band of human beings to deliberately become pirates.  A full account of the events demands that you break out of the boundaries of period histories and traditional biographies.  You have to jump around in time to get the facts right.  Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn't always capture the deep causes that drive history.  Some causes are proximate, in the moment.  Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred—or a thousand—years later.

-Steven Johnson,  Enemy Of All Mankind:  A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt

Leveraging your inner pirate............

Argh ... Mathew Ferrara offers a different path to success:

It’s not about disrupting other people’s lives or careers. It’s about disrupting yours. Start with things you’d like to do, but haven’t yet begun. Maybe you want to try a new business practice or new career entirely. Perhaps you want to throw some customers overboard, to make room for new ones. Are there rules or customs have find frustrating, yet haven’t broken because it would be too chaotic?

Opening paragraphs.....................................

     Charybdis herself must have spat them into the sea.  They committed "a Crime so odious and horrid in all it Circumstances, that those who have treated on the Subject have been at a loss for Words and Terms to stamp a sufficient Ignominy upon it."  Their contemporaries called them "Sea-monsters,"  "Hell-Hounds," and "Robbers, Opposers and Violators of all Laws, Humane and Divine."  some believed they were "Devils incarnate."  Others suspected they were "Children of the Wicked One" himself.  "Danger lurked in their very Smiles."
-Peter T. Leeson,  The Invisible Hook:  The Hidden Economics of Pirates

Aarrrgh..............................................

some cartoons from here