Hunting Pirate Heaven

September 1, 2003
As difficult as it is to make a good pirate movie, it's almost as hard to write a good nonfiction book about pirates. Rushby (Children of Kali; Eating the Flowers of Paradise; etc.) has overcome the obstacle most writers on the subject come up against (i.e., the impossible task of separating a few hard grains of truth from the clouds of fantasy and wish-fulfillment that have always surrounded the subject) by simply venturing to the places pirates used to call home and looking around. A rough-and-tumble adventurer who's more than willing to poke fun at his naïveté and inexperience (despite the long list of adventure travel books to his credit), Rushby journeys to the islands around East Africa and Madagascar in search of the old pirate redoubts once hidden there. He follows pirate legends via a mix-and-match collection of hitched rides and lucky encounters, reveling in the loopy nature of the area's Arab, Indian, French and African cultural cross-pollination. Rushby is affable even in the worst circumstances, which serves him well when he's going clubbing in a dangerous part of Mozambique with a former gunrunner, almost getting marooned by a vengeful Scandinavian or losing his passport on the war-torn isle of Anjouan. The journey is more interesting than the destination, as Rushby doesn't find many pirate remains at all: rumors, some ruins and lots of stories. However, Rushby does present an enthralling guide to a little-visited corner of the world, haunted by the ghosts of its pirate past.