{ "item_title" : "Rope Money", "item_author" : [" Tobin Scott "], "item_description" : "Here's a product description for Rope Money, ready to paste into KDP. It runs about 330 words, well under Amazon's 4,000-character limit. They told you the law hanged the pirates. They didn't tell you who was paid to tie the knot.In 1718, the British Empire declared war on the pirates of the Caribbean. The story you know is simple: the Navy came, the courts convened, the rope did its work, and the seas were made safe.That story was written by the men who profited from it.In Rope Money, historian Tobin Scott hauls colonial justice onto the beach and scrapes it down to bare wood. Using a method he calls The Careening Autopsy, named for the way sailors heeled a ship onto its side to expose the rot below the waterline, he investigates the system that hunted, judged, jailed, and hanged the pirates of the Golden Age.What he finds is a racket dressed up as the rule of law: Governors on the payroll: a Bahamas governor paid to shelter the most wanted pirate on earth, and a colonial secretary caught with Blackbeard's stolen sugar hidden in his barn.Courts with no jury: seven officials who could send a man to the gallows in an afternoon, and did so to nine turtle fishermen whose crime was accepting a drink.Gaols run for profit: prisoners forced to pay for water, bedding, and lighter chains, where Mary Read died of fever before the hangman ever reached her.A navy in no hurry: captains hauling private cargo while pirates raided freely, and the men who killed Blackbeard waiting years for their reward.Execution as entertainment: crowds eating and drinking at the low-water mark while men died, and tarred corpses hung in iron cages at the harbor mouth.From Nassau to Port Royal to the gallows at Execution Dock, Rope Money follows Woodes Rogers, Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny, Charles Vane, and Captain Kidd, whose evidence went missing for two hundred years.The pirates were thieves. So were the men who hanged them. They just had better paperwork.A gripping, myth-busting companion to Tortuga: Autopsy of a Pirate Myth, for readers of true crime, maritime history, and the real Golden Age of Piracy.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/254/9798162546771_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "9.99", "online_price" : "9.99", "our_price" : "9.99", "club_price" : "9.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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