Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship

If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. – If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. – Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. – Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives

—Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

The feeling of a place was the best reason to go.

History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.

Treasure shows who you really are. It strips away every façade you’ve constructed, every story you believe about yourself, and reveals the real you. If you are a miserable, lying, greedy, worthless fuck, treasure will tell you that. If you are a good and decent person, treasure will tell you that, too. And you needn’t find a single coin to know. It’s enough to get close to treasure, to believe it within reach, and you’ll have your answer, but once it happens it can’t be lied about and it can’t be bullshitted away. For that reason, treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. —MARK TWAIN

Sometimes the imagination could be even crueler than the bone saw.

It was too late for he and his father to have an adventure, and NOTHING seemed to have any color anymore.

only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach.

For all its wickedness, however, Port Royal seemed to tolerate everyone. Quakers, Catholics, atheists, Jews—all were free to worship and believe as they pleased, and they lived peacefully alongside one another as Port Royal became the richest town in the New World. Pirates and buccaneers continued to arrive, welcomed by a public that understood the wellspring of its good fortune, and who ate, drank, and lived among these fast-living men.

with these decisions forever. – Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you. – It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong. – The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world. – The worst possible decision is to give up.

treasure is crisis, because what you get in the end is yourself.

This is the greatest pirate story ever,” Bowden said. “And no one knows about it.

the only way to see what really mattered in life was to go to the places that were hardest to reach.

—If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. —If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. —Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. —Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.

The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin,