The Irish are celebrated at home and abroad as explorers, freedom fighters and great writers and artists, but for every Tom Crean, Bernardo O'Higgins or James Joyce, there is a Hugh Gough, Antoine Walsh or Luke Ryan.
This book is about the Irish slavers, grave-robbers, duellists, conmen, drug-lords and killers who wreaked havoc around the world …
Includes
- Beauchamp Bagenal from Carlow, an eighteenth-century duellist, hell-raiser, heart-breaker
- Burke & Hare grave-robbers turned murderers who supplied cadavers to the medical schools of nineteenth-century Edinburgh
- Antoine Walsh from Kilkenny who amassed huge fortunes in the French slave trade
- Luke Ryan, a pirate & buccaneer born in Rush in 1750
- Sir Hugh Gough, a Limerick man who commanded the British troops in the first Opium war against China
- James 'Sligo' Jameson who was rumoured to have fallen into madness and cannibalism in the Congo in 1888 … and many more!
