Pirate Soul Museum, Key West, Florida

The brainchild of entrepreneur Pat Croce, Pirate Soul Museum boasts the largest collection of authentic pirate artifacts under one roof, all of them displayed in a state-of-the-art setting.

In 2004, PhotoAssist helped Croce fulfill his dream of creating a pirate museum by researching more than 100 hard-to-find images. We located vintage engravings, we negotiated the rights to use several historic portraits, and we obtained images from maritime-history museums in the U.S. and abroad.

While researching the rights to illustrations in books that were decades out of print, we even tracked down the illustrators themselves, finding some of them as far away as Scotland.