The best history books are packed with vivid details about characters and events (sometimes prompting readers to say a good history “reads like a novel”). But reconstructing scenes and events from hundreds of years ago when only the scarcest of evidence has survived can be painfully difficult. Often the only surviving archival evidence is a brief recollection — a letter, a journal entry — from a single observer or participant. As Paul Schneider writes in his book Brutal Journey, what we know today about even significant historical events can be a “mosaic of pedigreed ‘facts'” that offer “a plausible rendering of the story” — but there are always, Schneider adds, “some tiles missing from the mosaic.”

It is a rare and thrilling treat to uncover two or more separate, independent descriptions of an event that occurred hundreds of years ago. In my research on Philip Ashton’s odyssey and the pirate crews of Low and Spriggs, the logbooks of the British warships that battled with these pirates, still preserved even three hundred years later in the National Archives in London, often provided important additional insights to events described by pirate captives and other seafaring witnesses. These rich logbook entries helped me reconstruct, for example, a nearly fatal battle between the pirate Francis Spriggs and the warship HMS Diamond on August 31, 1724. That morning, Spriggs and his consort, the pirate Richard Shipton, were sailing near the coast of present-day Belize when they were surprised by the Diamond. The journals of two captives aboard the pirate ships at the time mention the battle but provide only the barest of details, mentioning that they encountered the Diamond and that Shipton and Spriggs were forced to separate as they tried to escape. But there were a number of trading vessels in the area that day, which yielded several other eyewitness accounts. One report comes from men aboard the Joseph Galley, a vessel from London that had come to Belize to take aboard a shipment of logwood. Another account was provided by a sea captain named John Cass, who returned to Rhode Island about three months later. What’s more, the specific details included in the actual logbook kept daily aboard the Diamond truly bring the events to life. “Little wind fair weather,” begins the logbook entry for Monday, August 31. “At 1 pm saw the pirate ship & sloop at anchor….at 2 the ship weighed [anchor] and stood towards us.”

The battle began only a little while later with a blistering exchange of cannon fire. Spriggs’ crew initially fired seven or eight shots at the Diamond and Shipton’s men fired at least twice. But the Diamond returned fire on Spriggs and came close to ending his career as a pirate then and there — at least two of the Diamond’s cannon blasts struck Spriggs’ ship head-on, ripping off his bowsprit and tearing away the front edge of his foresail. Half a dozen men aboard Sprigg’s ship were killed, and others were seriously wounded, some of them losing an arm or a leg. Clearly outmatched, Spriggs turned to flee. The light winds made it hard for him to pick up any speed, but they also made it impossible for the Diamond to catch up to him. Eventually Spriggs navigated his ship into some shoal waters among the cays that, at many points, were only twenty feet deep or less. As a result, the Diamond was unable to capture Spriggs. “We gave her chase,” the captain of the Diamond recorded in his logbook, “but by reason of the shoal water she got away.”

In the days before their fateful sail back to shore for the weekend, Philip Ashton and his five-man crew of Marblehead fishermen had been hauling cod anywhere from ten to more than thirty miles off Cape Sable, at the southern tip of what is today Nova Scotia. Leaning over the low rails at the side of their schooner, the young men caught cod by hand-lining, a tedious method of fishing that was prevalent before the introduction of large nets on offshore trawlers. The men dropped weighted lines into the sea, each of the men typically handling at least two lines at a time. As the fish were hooked, the men hauled the lines back up and lifted the heavy cod over the rails of the schooner and into a box on the deck. When the pile of fish sitting on the deck of the schooner grew large, it had to be stowed below in the hold. Every few hours some of the crew would break away to clean and pack the cod; with a few rapid slices of a knife, a fisherman would remove the head from each fish and slice its belly almost completely open. The gutted fish were then spread out flat like an open book and packed away in salt below deck.

Included in the many objects on display in the museum at the Salt Pond Visitor Center on Cape Cod are some of the tools used by early handliners. These tools include a handline winder — a wooden frame used to coil fishing lines as they were hauled in — and an iron gaff, which was used to haul the large cod into the boat once they were brought to the surface.

As suggested by the size of the gaff shown here, many of the cod Ashton and the other fishermen landed in 1722 were large fish, much longer than the Atlantic cod caught today, and often twice as heavy. Even a century after Ashton’s lifetime, a fisherman off the coast of Massachusetts landed a six-foot cod that weighed 211 pounds.

More of the pirate Sam Bellamy’s gold may still be buried on the ocean floor off Marconi Beach on Cape Cod. Barry Clifford, the diver and explorer who discovered Bellamy’s shipwrecked vessel, the Whydah, is in the news again this week. Clifford’s team of divers has continued to explore the shipwreck site since its discovery in 1984, and based on work conducted late this summer, Clifford believes there may be far more gold coins and other artifacts still hidden under the sand on the ocean floor.

The shipwreck of the Whydah, in April 1717, was big news in colonial New England — and an ominous event for Philip Ashton, who was just fourteen years old that year. A few members of Bellamy’s pirate crew survived the shipwreck near Cape Cod and, as I note in At the Point of a Cutlass, set off in search of a new vessel. The pirates held a small fishing shallop and its crew for a few days before they decided to take another vessel instead. So, less than two weeks after the Whydah shipwreck, that fishing shallop sailed back to Ashton’s hometown. The fishermen’s brush with the pirates from Bellamy’s crew was the talk of Marblehead for days. The young Philip Ashton, who would also soon be setting off on fishing voyages to the Canadian coastline, could never have anticipated his own dramatic capture by a pirate crew just five years later.

Video: Cape Cod Times.

The pirates who terrorized the Atlantic in the 1720s were a rebellious group, defiantly rejecting the traditions and authority figures of their time, unleashing their greatest fury on the sea captains they captured. But on several occasions there were rebellions within a pirate crew, as well. Members of Edward Low’s crew eventually abandoned him because they grew tired of his excruciating torture of captives. My trip to Martha’s Vineyard this summer provided another reminder of an attempted rebellion aboard a pirate ship, one under the command of John Phillips in 1724.

“Phillips was completely despotic,” wrote John Fillmore, one of the captives aboard the ship at the time, “and there was no such thing as evading his commands.” Even members of Phillips’ own crew hated their captain, and when the pirates captured a snow in early February 1724, the men sent over to take control of the vessel tried to desert Phillips’ in the dark of the night. They planned to head north to what at the time was called Holmes’ Hole — the protected harbor of Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard.

The pirate captain Phillips refused to be beat, however, and after a three-day chase at sea, he came within firing range of the deserters aboard the snow. As soon as the rebellious pirates surrendered and came back aboard Phillips’ ship, the captain immediately shot them in the head. It was not until two months later that Fillmore and several other captives were able to stage a successful uprising against Phillips, kill him, and bring their vessel safely back to Boston.

When convicted pirates were executed in Boston during the 1720s, their bodies were often buried out on one of the Boston Harbor islands. Two surviving members of John Phillips’ pirate crew were executed near the Boston shoreline in May 1724 and their bodies were hauled out to a small patch of land known as Bird Island. One pirate, William White, was buried on the island. The other, John Rose Archer, was hung in a gibbet “to be a spectacle, and so a warning to others.” Bird Island no longer exists — it was originally situated near where Boston’s Logan Airport is now located.

Two years later, as I recount in my new book, At the Point of a Cutlass, three members of another pirate crew were executed in Boston. Their corpses were taken to Nixes Mate Island, a small patch of land less than six miles from Boston. In July 1726, before much of the slate on Nixes Mate had been dug up, it was a sizeable patch of land. Two of the pirates were buried there while the body of their leader, William Fly, was hung in chains. Today, most of Nixes Mate Island is gone, as well. It stands as little more than a mound of rocks capped by a cone-shaped harbor marker with black and white stripes.

At the Point of a Cutlass was released in June 2014 and is on sale now.

During a recent visit to the Province Lands Visitor Center in Provincetown, MA, I discovered a nearly century-old video that shows life aboard a working whaleship, the Viola, from 1916.

This grainy footage provides a rare glimpse into what it was like to be aboard a working fishing vessel during the final days of the age of sail. The video shows the crew mending sails on the deck of the ship, launching the whaleboats after sighting a whale at sea, cutting up a whale, and working the fire and tryworks on the Viola. There are two parts to the video — part 2, which even includes video of a whaleboat being dragged by a harpooned whale, is particularly interesting.

When he escaped on the uninhabited island of Roatan, Philip Ashton desperately needed to find food — but he did not recognize many of the tropical fruits growing wild in the woods. He was reluctant to try many of these fruits, including mango, which he thought were poison. One of the strangest fruits he encountered had a brown, fuzzy skin and was about the size of a pear. It had a thick outer skin, but broke open easily when struck against a rock or tree trunk or, sometimes, when it fell from the tree and hit the ground.

This was the sapote fruit, which is native to Central America and the Caribbean, although the name Ashton uses in his narrative is “Mammees saporters” — and even today, islanders still call it the mamey apple. The inside of the sapote is mushy, like a banana, with a bright pinkish-orange color. Ashton didn’t dare eat these at first. But before long, he saw wild hogs eating the fruit where it had fallen to the ground, and he decided they probably weren’t poisonous. So he tried one. The soft inner-fruit had a custardy taste similar to watermelon. Ashton ate many of the sapote, describing it as a “very delicious sort of fruit.”

Because sapote were a staple in Ashton’s diet during his time on the island, I was determined to find some sapote fruit when I went to Roatan to research my new book about Philip Ashton, At the Point of a Cutlass, published this summer. But the trees can be hard to find today. After a long, winding trek through the thick woods, my guide Randy Matute found a tree with fresh sapote growing on it — which he proceeded to climb in order to knock down several of the sapote fruit onto the ground.

At the Point of a Cutlass, now in its ninth week on the Boston Globe bestsellers list for nonfiction, is on sale now.