Buccaneers Books in Order

Buccaneers begins with Jemmy Dawes in Charles I’s Southampton. After his mother dies, he loses the little house he had kept with her and is left on the streets. The authorities do not want vagabonds, so he is sent to sea.

It is meant to remove him from sight. It gives him a life.

In No Peace Beyond The Line, Jemmy fights Dunkirk pirates, sails to the Caribbean, and discovers that peace in Europe does not mean peace in the West Indies. Barbados, small craft, privateers, national ships, outright pirates, and rival European powers all make the Caribbean a place where law is flexible and survival is active work.

By Rovers of the Western Sea, Jemmy is Captain Dawes of the Brethren of the Coast. He does not think of himself as a pirate, but the distinction is not always convincing to others. A buccaneer captain must keep succeeding, and respectability on land requires money he has not yet secured.

This short series is about the border between privateering and piracy, and about a man who is tempted by both profit and respectability. Wareham treats the Caribbean as tangled political water, where English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish interests overlap and where a poor man can rise if he is quick enough and hard enough.

Read the two books in order. No Peace Beyond The Line gives Jemmy’s forced beginning at sea, while Rovers of the Western Sea asks whether a man who has learned to thrive by roving can really settle down.