Ebook: A Ladybird Book About Pirates

From the time of Queen Elizabeth I to that of George IV, conditions in England—poverty, bad housing, harsh laws, lack of sanitation, plague and primitive medical facilities—made life short and uncertain for most of the population. There were no police, and a masked highwayman waiting on a lonely road might rob a coach and escape capture. Many rogues found highway robbery more rewarding than trying to earn an honest living.

In those days a man might legally be seized in the street by a ‘press-gang’ and compelled to serve for years as a sailor in a ship of the King's Navy, often without his wife and family knowing what had happened to him. Sailors were badly fed and brutally punished, and sometimes they mutinied, murdered their hated officers and became pirates in well-armed ships.

Pirates—and highwaymen—were mainly scoundrels and a menace to all honest folk. They were not the romantic heroes suggested by many stories, and many of them came to the sort of end they so richly deserved.