pIn the imaginations of young and old alike, the word pirate resonates with spine-tingling fear and swashbuckling adventure. Over centuries, our cultural landscape has been populated by a host of famous real and fictional figures immortalized in literature and art Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, with his fearsome reputation for cruelty Henry 'Bloody' Morgan, whose treasure is still sought today and of course Long John Silver, the archetypal anti-hero of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island 1885.Pirate Tales gathers a treasure trove of excerpts from literary works inspired by the historical pirates of the 16th and 17th centuries. The edition begins with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe 1719, a book containing all the trappings of pirate lore - shipwrecks, mutineers, undiscovered islands, and talking parrots - and one which influenced hundreds of works of adventure fiction, not least Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island 1871. The third nerve-jangling novel is Treasure Island, wi