The Age of Unreason XIV of France, Emperor Peter the Great of Russia, King Charles XII of Sweden, and Edward Teach, better known as the pirate Blackbeard. The Age of Unreason The Age of Unreason is a series of four novels written by Gregory Keyes: Its title is a reference to Thomas Paine's treatise "The Age of Reason". The story spans the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, with the action moving between England and France, later involving Russia, Austria, the Republic of Venice, and North America. The author makes use of pseudosciences (scientific alchemy instead of our physics) that were popular at the
Pirate Round and attacked ships loaded with the exotic products of India. . . . which came to be known as the Pirate Round.". Jenifer G. Marx writes that "Ambitious sea outlaws began to leave for the East on what became known as the Pirate Round: a route that, for some thirty years beginning in 1690, linked ports in the Caribbean and the North American colonies with Madagascar." English piracy in the Indian Ocean goes back at least to King James I, but for most of the 17th century the Spanish Empire was the principal target of English pirates. The Pirate Round