Many excursions to the New England coastline over the years have left me with a substantial library of books that I picked up hither and yon and which now reside in my treasured library. Many of them I have read, while some have languished, gathering dust, for years until some sudden whim inspires me to pick one up and give it some long-overdue attention. That's how I found myself recently browsing through New England's Pirates & Lost Treasures, a slim volume by acclaimed regional historian Robert Ellis Cahill.

Let's face it, it's always fun to read about pirates. But the late Cahill, while an authority on any number of fascinating nautical-, historical- and New England-focused topics, was not always the most organized when it came to writing them down. His books, between two and three dozen in number, were mass-produced for the New England tourism market, and they often went to press without ... let's just say without adequate careful editing.

As has been my experience with the two previous Cahill books in my collection -- Haunted Ships of the North Atlantic and New England's Naughty Navy -- the text is dense and littered with spelling and punctuation errors, although I'm not sure how much of the fault lies with Cahill and how much with Old Saltbox, his publisher. (Old Saltbox, an independent regional publisher based in Massachusetts, is known for producing inexpensive books on New England history, folklore and ghosts that are primarily sold in gift shops ... which is, admittedly, Cahill's target audience. Details are vague online, but it's possible Cahill owned or partly owned Old Saltbox, making the question moot.)

That said, New England's Pirates & Lost Treasures has a lot of interesting information tucked into its 60 pages, and it's sufficient to give readers a taste of pirate history and lore. Without question, Cahill knows a lot on the subject.

But Cahill also operates from the assumption that a lot of pirates buried their treasures and sailed away ... a belief that, Captain Kidd and Treasure Island notwithstanding, is rooted more in fiction than fact. The truth is, most pirates spent their ill-gotten gains as soon as they found themselves in a port town with a few taverns and whorehouses ... and then they set sail again seeking more.

Credulous readers of this book might even be inspired to seek a few lonely shores and coastal islands in New England and, based on Cahill's descriptions here, start digging in hopes of finding their fortune. But read carefully and you'll notice a lot of the hidden treasures exist only in rumors and hearsay, local legends and testimony from pirates pleading for their lives. Many of the lucky finds described here, often on the beach or in the shallows, are more likely to be detritus from old shipwrecks off the coast rather than buried hoards ashore.

But to be honest, most people don't buy these books for their thorough historical research and scholarship. Cahill scratches an itch, fulfilling a need for guests to the region who are interested enough in a topic to spend a few dollars and spend an hour or two reading but aren't looking for excessive amounts of detail. Anyone who wants a more thorough text can find any number of excellent books on the general history of piracy, or on specific regions or particular pirates of interest (many of which have been reviewed here). On the other hand, anyone who has found themselves in, for instance, Salem, Massachusetts, or Mystic, Connecticut, might want to take something home to remind them of their brush with nautical history, and New England's Pirates & Lost Treasures -- or any number of Cahill's other publications -- will fill that bill quite nicely.