Pirate Latitudes

Pirate Latitudes is an adventure novel by the American writer Michael Crichton. It was published in 2009, the year after his death, and the manuscript was found on one of his computers along with an unfinished second novel. It is the first of his books to be published posthumously.

The setting is the Caribbean in 1665, and the novel stays inside the world of the privateers who worked out of the English colony of Jamaica: its capital, Port Royal, is a harbour town of taverns, grog shops and bawdy houses. Its hero is Captain Charles Hunter, a privateer who is hired by the governor of Jamaica to raid a Spanish galleon for the treasure she is carrying.

Crichton had wanted to write about Caribbean piracy for a long time: he described a research trip to Jamaica in a travel book of 1988, said in 1981 that he was working on a pirate story, and wrote this one alongside the novel Next. For its central action the book borrows from the record of what privateers out of Port Royal actually did, which included attacking a Spanish island's fortress to plunder a ship carrying treasure.