Benerson Little

Born in Key West, Florida, Benerson Little grew up variously on all three US coasts. Following his graduation from Tulane University, he entered the US Navy and served as an officer for eight years, most of them as a Navy SEAL. Upon completion of Basic Underwater Demolition/​SEAL training in 1983 (BUDS Class 121), he was assigned first to SEAL Team THREE, then to SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team ONE. After resigning his commission in 1989, he worked variously as a special operations and intelligence analyst, including for the Naval Special Warfare Strategy and Tactics Group and for a private intelligence collection and analysis firm, among other similar organizations. He now works as a writer and consultant in several areas, with an emphasis on maritime and naval issues, particularly maritime threat and security. He has appeared in two television documentaries on piracy and has advised on several. He lives in Huntsville, Alabama with his two daughters, and in his spare time he teaches modern fencing at the Huntsville Fencing Club, researches historical fencing, and works on contemporary and historical novels.

Pirate Hunting (forthcoming, early September 2010) was inspired by the need to look at piracy and other forms of sea roving from their earliest record to the present, and in particular at the measures taken to counter them. Besides being an opportunity to look at six millennia of maritime history, the subject has practical appeal today, given the increase in international piracy.

How History's Greatest Pirates Pillaged, Plundered, and Got Away With It (forthcoming, mid-December 2010) will bring pirate stories and tactics to life for a broad audience. Thoroughly researched, these narrative pirate histories put readers in the middle of the action.

The Buccaneer's Realm was born of an interest in the role of the buccaneer, filibuster, and Spanish pirate in the development of the New World, as well as how these sea rovers influenced and were influenced by the variety of cultures and physical environments of a frontier comprising one third of the entire world.

The Sea Rover’s Practice was born of a lifelong interest in pirates and privateers, an interest originally inspired by the sea, by the fiction of Stevenson, Sabatini, and Steinbeck, by the illustrations of Pyle and Wyeth, and by the journals of Exquemelin, Dampier, and Rogers. Originally researched both for personal interest and to support the writing of historical fiction, the author soon turned the material into a book to fill a void in the literature of the sea.