Nancy's Reviews > Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune

The sensationalized subtitle makes it sound almost silly, but this is a well researched, well written account of a group of pirates, mostly Englishmen, who band together to prey upon Spanish ships and Spanish settlements along the coasts of Central and South America. They cross the jungles of the Panama isthmus with the help of indigenous guides, storming a Spanish garrison along the way, before commandeering ships in the Bay of Panama. Their objective is to take Panama City. The author draws upon the journals kept by a number of men in the party who chronicled the events, including William Dampier, a botanist, Lionel Wafer, ship's surgeon, and Basil Ringrose, a mathematician fluent in several languages including Latin. They seem unlikely pirates (or privateers, as they'd have preferred it, although at this time a peace had been concluded between England and Spain and so pirates they were), but they clearly all had a taste for risk, violence, and brutality.