Excerpt from Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Have you heard of Joseph Bannister?" he asked.

The men shook their heads.

Bannister, Bowden explained, was a well-respected seventeenth-century English sea captain in charge of transporting cargos between London and Jamaica. One day, for no reason anyone could explain, he stole the great ship he commanded, the Golden Fleece, and embarked on a pirating rampage, a genuine good guy gone bad in the 1680s, the Golden Age of Piracy. In just a few years, he became one of the most wanted men in the Caribbean. The harder the English tried to stop him, the more ingeniously he defied them. Soon, he'd become an international terror. The Brits swore they'd stop at nothing to hunt him down and hang him.

The Royal Navy pursued him on the open seas and used the full force of its might to try to find him. In those days, no one eluded a manhunt like that. But Bannister did. And his crimes got bolder and bolder. Finally, two navy warships pinned the pirate captain down, trapping him and his ship on an inescapable island. At the sight of a single frigate like these, most pirate captains threw up their hands and surrendered. Confronted by two? Even the toughest would drop to his knees and pray.

Not Bannister.

He and his crew manned cannons and rifles, and they waged an all-out battle against the two Royal Navy warships. The fighting lasted for two days. Bannister's ship, the Golden Fleece, was sunk in the combat. But Bannister won the war. Battered, and with many men dead and wounded, the navy ships limped back to Jamaica, and Bannister made his escape. It was a stunning defeat for the English and made Bannister a legend. Through the ages, however, his name had been lost to time.

"This is the greatest pirate story ever," Bowden said. "And no one knows about it. I want the Golden Fleece. And I think you guys can help find her."

Bowden did not have to explain the rarity of finding a pirate ship. Both Chatterton and Mattera knew that only one had ever been discovered and positively identified—the Whydah—lost in 1717 off Cape Cod and recovered by explorer Barry Clifford in 1984. The discovery had inspired books, documentaries, and an exhibit that continued to tour major museums more than twenty years after the find. It was clear, after the Whydah came up, that the world couldn't get enough of real pirates. Now Bowden was talking about going after a pirate ship captained by a man who sounded even more daring than the swashbucklers in Hollywood movies.

But that wasn't the only big news. Bowden also believed he knew the wreck's location. History was clear that the Golden Fleece had sunk off Cayo Levantado, a small island on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Chatterton and Mattera knew the place; it was shimmering with white sandy beaches, and home to a five-star resort. For years, it had been known as Bacardi Island, used by the rum maker in ads to depict a paradise on earth. It was a manageable area to work.

Bannister's story had been legend in its day, but few people seem to have searched for the wreck. The late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was rumored to have sent divers to Cayo Levantado as recently as the 1960s, but his men came up empty. Bowden picked up the search in 1984 but had found little more than modern debris at the island. In recent months, he'd come to believe that without the use of state-of-the-art equipment such as side-scan sonar and magnetometers, the Golden Fleece might never be found. Bowden had never gone in for technology like that; he'd stayed loyal to the time-tested ways that had made him. But he couldn't deny that guys like Chatterton and Mattera were the future. He knew they'd spent two years of their lives and a fortune to master the modern equipment, and he'd seen them make it work as they trained to hunt for their own galleon.

Excerpted from Pirate Hunters by Robert Kurson. Copyright © 2015 by Robert Kurson. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.