Finished reading Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes. My first experience of reading a sea adventure novel. Thoroughly shocked! Even though has learnt American history in school I had no idea about the rough life of the early settlers from all the nations of Europe and what a 'savage' life they led on land and sea in those early centuries of the New World. The raw, brutal, gory details startled me! Still the story was gripping and so I read it to the end in spite of revulsion at the barbarian fashion of life of those days.