Never would I have thought that my to-read book stack would be loaded with nonfiction accounts of both The Golden Age of Piracy and the Age of Exploration.

My fascination with these eras began a few years back, when a friend gifted me a thrilling read called The Republic of Pirates. It’s a captivating tale that weaves in the histories of famous pirates like Blackbeard, Black Sam Bellamy, and so many others, telling their stories to the backdrop of this surge of piracy and the formation of a literal pirate island in the early 1700s. I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole, but it was easily one of the most gripping nonfiction books I have ever read, and it created a complex, rich, and complicated understanding of the many different types of pirates who existed in that era.

Fast-forward a couple of years and another of couple pirate books later, and my wife and I are at a maritime museum in San Diego. The big draw of this museum is the collection of ships from WWII and later, but I’m hung up on maps and accounts from the Age of Exploration. The peril. The danger. The toll that life at sea took every single day and the fabled promises of riches that kept explorers going.