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The collection illustrates the history of piracy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It includes a journal of the voyage of Captain Bartholomew Sharp in the MAYFLOWER, 1680 to 1682, kept by his second-in-command, John Cox; it was on this voyage in the Pacific that Sharp captured a Spanish derrotero and the navigational information in it was used in the atlases of William Hack ([1656]-1708). Two letters from Sir Thomas Lynch (1603-?1684), Governor of Jamaica, give many details about measures taken to suppress piracy; the first, written to Sir Leoline Jenkins (1623-1683), Secretary of State, in 1683 relates principally to the interruption by privateers of the sugar trade of the West Indies; the second letter was written in 1683 to the Secretary of State for Northern Affairs, Lord Sunderland (1640-1702), and gives an account of the attack, led by Vanhorne (d.1683), on Vera Cruz. There is a journal and narrative account of the burning of La Trompeuse and other pirates in port at St Thomas's Island by Captain Charles Carlisle (d 1684) in the FRANCIS, 1683, and a collection of documents received by Sir Evan Nepean with some draft replies while Nepean was Governor of Bombay. These are mainly concerned with the expedition against piracy in the Persian Gulf between 1817 and 1819. There are also personal papers of Dr Gosse, which all relate to his publications on piracy.

Papers of Capt George Alexander Waters, consisting of logs, 1842-1843, and 1852-1861. There are loose letters, 1857-1858, including those from Captain Peel and the officers of the Naval Brigade concerning the Indian Mutiny and a book in Chinese endorsed 'taken from the house three or four miles below Nanking, 26 Aug. 1842', which is a coal-merchant's receipt book.