That mischievous monkey Chee Chee leads Kittitian schoolboys Mark and Kyle, on holiday in Jamaica for two weeks in order to visit Kyle's grandmother, into another adventure in the past in this second installment of Carol Ottley-Mitchell's Caribbean Adventures Series. Stowing away in Mark's bag, just as he did in Adventure At Brimstone Hill, Chee Chee makes it to Port Royal with the friends, but runs off on his own while they are visiting the historical museum at Fort Charles. Pursuing him, the boys suddenly find themselves in 1669, and are soon caught up in an adventure with the pirate Henry Morgan, sailing with his fleet to confront the Spaniards on Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo.

Pirates at Port Royal was an engaging story, with many of the same qualities that I enjoyed in Adventure At Brimstone Hill. The child characters are likeable, and their adventures involving, while the historical background - the series of disasters that overtook Port Royal, the conflict between England and Spain, in the late seventeenth century Caribbean - is fascinating. The artwork by Ann-Catherine Loo, done in what looks like pencil to me, is appealing. All that said, I continue to feel that these stories are a little too brief, given the scope of the adventures involved. Ottley-Mitchell is a capable writer, but I was left with the feeling that she needed to flesh out her narrative a bit. There needs to be more detail, and a little more showing, rather than telling, when it comes to working in some of that historical background. As is noted in the author's afterword, the voyage from Jamaica to Venezuela, which is covered in a few pages here, would have taken weeks, possibly even months in real life. While I appreciate that the realities are dealt with honestly, in the afterword, I couldn't help feeling (much as I did upon learning that the author changed the outcome of the battle being depicted in her first entry in this series), that this isn't the best way to deal with history, in children's fiction.

Despite these issues, I did enjoy this second entry in the Caribbean Adventure Series, and plan to proceed to the third, Trapped in Dunston's Cave. I would recommend this one to young readers who like time-slip tales, or who have read and enjoyed Adventure At Brimstone Hill, and to anyone looking for children's stories from Caribbean writers. ( )