Zaide

About the Book

Adventure and romance by sea and land. Jan Janszoon van Haarlem was a notorious seventeenth century pirate who preyed on merchant ships and plied the vast slave trade to the Barbary coast. He was Dutch by birth but became naturalised to the Barbaries. Not confining his depredations to the Mediterranean, he visited and slaved from England, Iceland and notoriously, Ireland. His most daring raid was to Baltimore on Ireland’s south coast on June 20th 1631, where he took most of the village’s inhabitants to slavery. This raid is remembered in song and story to the present day.

About the Author

Rich Merne is a recently retired engineer, but whose life passion is writing. He is also an avid sailor but one who likes to have his writing keyboard to hand at all times. He has written two other works; a novel, ‘Prisoners’, which is a dark and mysterious tale of anxiety, disconnection, love and finally hope – it’s set in Romania around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He’s had this work printed for private circulation and Trinity College Dublin holds a copy. His second work is a large collection of short stories, essays, parables, ephemera and poetry running to some one hundred and sixty thousand words which again is privately circulated. ‘Zaide’ is his third work and is a tale of piracy, slavery, adventure and romance. It is set in the early seventeenth century and touches Ireland, Europe, the Barbary Coast and Turkey. The author has a fourth work in progress, set in European Napoleonic times.