Book Alert / Empire of Blue Water

Empire of Blue Water -- Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign by Stephan Talty, Crown '07, $24.95, 332 pages, ISBN #0307236609. Index, bibliography, source notes, glossary.

You can beat your breast and bellow all you want about your heroic exploits, but until you have a rum (the favored drink of pirates) named after you, you haven't arrived. Welshman Henry Morgan happens to be among that elite group, and his attacks on behalf of the British against the Spanish Empire in the late 1600s are the stuff of legend.

As journalist Stephan Talty tells it, the Spanish were pretty well entrenched in the Western Hemisphere when 20 year-old Morgan arrived in the Caribbean in 1655. By the time of his assault on Panama 30 years later, he and his men had largely broken the hold of the Spanish Empire on the Americas.

In the process, the author ushers his readers through the royal courts of Britain and Spain in their heyday, as they jockeyed for supremacy; recounts the "forgotten story" of Thomas Gage, an Anglican pastor and spy for Oliver Cromwell, and describes the powerful earthquake that eviscerated Port Royal, "the richest and wickedest city in the world."