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Month -- April 2024
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A Discourse on Pirates, by Captain Henry Mainwaring Henry Mainwaring,(1587–1653) was an English lawyer, soldier, writer, seaman and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1621 to 1622. He was for a time a pirate based in Newfoundland and then a naval officer with the Royal Navy. He supported the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. In 1616, shortly after he had given up piracy, he wrote this, addressed to King James I. It is an detailed account of piracy as it existed in the early 17th Century, and consists of sober and accurate fact, far removed from the romantic picture and exaggerated stories current at the time, and even more so today.. |
The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need. When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ." If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this. This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.
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