Could an Irish monk in the sixth century really have sailed all the way across the Atlantic in a small open boat, thus beating Columbus to the New World by almost a thousand years? Relying on the medieval text of St. Brendan, award-winning adventure writer Tim Severin painstakingly researched and built a boat identical to the leather curragh that carried Brendan on his epic voyage. He found a centuries-old, family-run tannery to prepare the ox hides in the medieval way; he undertook an exhaustive search for skilled harness makers (the only people who would know how to stitch the...

Rome, 799 AD. Pope Leo is viciously attacked by unknown assailants. Sigwulf, a Saxon prince who has been banished to the court of King Carolus in Frankia, is sent to Rome as a spy to find who was responsible. There, he discovers a web of lies the only clue to the attackers' identity an intricate gold buckle, which Sigwulf links with a flagon in the home of the Pope's chamberlain. Could the attack have its source in the highest levels of the church? Pope Leo had made enemies on his rapid ascension to St. Peter's Throne. Returning to Frankia to report his discovery, Sigwulf learns that the...

Sailing the Caribbean, Hector Lynch falls into the hands of the notorious buccaneer, Captain John Coxon, who mistakes him for the nephew of the Governor of Jamaica an error Hector encourages. Coxon delivers Hector to a bitter enemy of Governor Lynch, expecting to curry favor, but is publicly humiliated when the deception is revealed. From then on, Hector has a dangerous enemy.

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A voyage back to the seventeenth century and life on dangerous seas. In Tim Severin's fourth Pirate adventure, Privateer, Hector Lynch must escape a desert island and evade treacherous mercenaries to find his wife.