A LUSTY, BRAWLING NOVEL ABOUT SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PIRATES Fore My Great Folly, which was first published in 1942, is the powerful story of a young scholar who leaves his books to join a pirate ship—and achieves manhood fighting side by side with the legendary buccaneer John Ward. Fore My Great Folly re-creates the fascinating era of English pirates who waged a private war with Spain in the seventeenth century. For My Great Folly was the beginning of Thomas B. Costain's great career in historical fiction, and it remains of one of the truly great sea stories in modern literature.