The Forests of the Night the war as it really was, as James Kirkup observed, an "acid portrait of those who played at being members of the [French] Resistance". The novel's theme and title come from the opening lines to William Blake's poem "The Tyger": "Tiger, tiger, burning bright - in the forests of the night." "The Forests of the Night" was translated in 1951 into English by Nora Wydenbruck; it has not been re-printed since. Francis is the son of the Comte de Balansun, whose family resides in the French town of Saint-Clar, near the Pyrenees. Francis, in the beginning of the novel, skips
Capture of the sloop William Bonny, but when his money was gone he returned to his life of crime. On August 22, 1719, Jack and eight men others captured "William" in Nassau harbor. Governor of Jamaica, Nicholas Lawes, directed Captain Jonathan Barnet to take two privateer sloops on a mission to hunt him down. One, "Snow-Tyger", was heavily armed with several guns and carried about twenty Royal Navy sailors and some British Army troops; the other was "Mary Anne" (under former pirate Jean Bonadvis) which carried about twenty men. Bonadvis was the first to spot Rackham, who fired on him; Bonadvis then retreated to report