Pirate Hunters

Great armchair travel read as well as an insight to the amount of research that goes along with the diving and recovery.

Normally, when the story line veers from the action I'm thinking ‘get on with it!' but the author has the biographies and research sprinkled thru out and for short durations, so you're not too long away from the action which I enjoy.

Audio book version Narrator rating 5/5

I want to preference this review by saying that I don't think I was the intended audience for this book but I was drawn in by the synopsis and great reviews. That being said, this was a tough book to get through. The combination of constant story side-stepping, numerous false starts and the overly toxic, ultra macho egotism that is riddled throughout this book made it a difficult listen. At the start, the story was interesting and engaging I was eager to go along for the ride the author promises in the synopsis with the two main characters but the book turned more into a 4 person biography but only one of those, that of the Pirate captain, is justified. The more I learned of these explorers the less I liked them especially John Chatterton, whom aside from his abilities as a diver has no favorable qualities. The constant rotating topic made this book hard to follow and by disc 4, I was dreading listening to the last 3 discs. Overall, they FINALLY find their ship with little to no respect to the Country and the people of which they are plundering their lost treasure, I think a better suited title to this book would have been “I'm a man who does manly things because I'm a man and that's what men do, I have a false sense of pride and I do dangerous things because I am not afraid to die because I am manly.”

P.S. I know that his is a non-fiction book and the author has no control of the facts including the personalities of the two main characters but I wanted to include that criticism in my review for readers who are put-off by those personalities and the supporting theme in the book of “macho pride” If none of that bothers you think you'd enjoy it, it is well written from a technical standpoint but I think an abridged version would have suited my taste better.

It shouldn't be surprising, considering the name, that this book was more about the treasure hunters than it was about the pirates itself, but it's still disappointing to me because the latter was just infinitely more interesting whenever it came up.

The story (based on real life events) is about two men who are looking for the ship (The Golden Fleece) of the merchant-turned-pireate Joseph Bannister. The book recounts the events of what led to them eventually finding the ship back in 2009, which was not an easy feat, as they weren't the only ones after it.

Most of the book is about the hunters and their search, but it's also intersected with various history on pirates in general, outside of Joseph Bannister. On their stance on democracy or crew relations or even how they handled amputations. I loved those parts, while I was losing more interest in the hunters' part the more it went on.