It's scant land dominated by a great bay, Rhode Island nurtured a colony of sailors, then a state of seafarers. Boasting "the finest harbour in all America" before our Revolution, the colony already had been a haven for pirates, then for their legal kin, the privateers, some of whom became the new nation's first naval officers. Still others would prosper (or perish) as slavers, while their neighbors championed abolition and cousins plied rich trade routes to the fabled Orient. So it was that Rhode Island's history, perhaps more than any other state's, intimately involves its maritime past.

This book is for anyone interested in the sea and the maritime history of Rhode Island, New England or the United States for that matter. It is a must-have for serious scholars of the age of sail and for armchair sailors alike as it examines the exciting and sometimes scandalous past. As Donald D. Breed wrote in the Providence Journal 2/13), "Do not look for this book on the coffee tables of many of Rhode Island's first families. On the one hand it is a scholarly almost dry history of a great many extended voyages by Rhode Island mariners. But it is also an expose of the nefarious activities of those seagoing men: piracy, the slave trade, running opium. To read it is to gain a new appreciation of why the colony was known as 'Rogue's Island.'... This is a hard book to put down, the subject matter is so gripping."