This book began in late 2019 when I first realised that piracy in the Atlantic Ocean during the last decades of the Age of Sail was a rich and unexplored era of history. By far the most evidence available surrounded the attack on the Morning Star by Benito de Soto and the pirates of the Defensor de Pedro. This compelling story forms the basis of this book. It also includes true stories, backed by historical evidence, of other Atlantic pirates of the nineteenth century and the circumstances that allowed them to thrive.

The brutal 1828 attack on the Morning Star brought real pirates back into the public consciousness for the first time in a century. Newspapers were now far cheaper and accessible to the masses. This meant even before the Morning Star limped into Gravesend with its dishevelled survivors on board, news of the attack had spread across southern England. The power of twenty-first-century news aggregators revealed that the full story of the Morning Star attack and the pirates who committed it played out across global media over the next two years. Fortunately, a handful of witness accounts survived, most notably by Andrew Beyerman, the Morning Star's steward, and James Johnston, one of the passengers. Absent, as was typical at the time, was any hint of the female passengers’ plight. Fortunately, Spanish records survived to gain some insight into their harrowing experience.

The Morning Star attack may have been the most notorious but it was not isolated. In fact, dozens of British ships reported raids and attacks that same year. Through their sheer scale, these could only have been perpetrated by multiple individuals operating independently. I examine how many of these people gained their raiding experience in and around Cuba during Spain's battles to retain its Latin American colonies after the end of the Revolutionary Wars in 1815. These include Roberto Cofresi, Diablocito, and Pepe el Mallorquin.

That we know so much about the Morning Star pirates is thanks to a Spanish naval officer called Joaquin Maria Lazaga. In 1892, he painstakingly collated and curated thousands of pages of Spanish court documentation and published it into a nearly 500-page volume he called Los Piratas del Defensor de Pedro.