The Rushdie bit looks good. For going over-the-top with period colour I'd recommend a paperback novel of 1980 called Bloody Bay, by Sandra Lee - it's about the two historical pirate women Anne Bonny and Mary Read, friends of Captain Kidd and others and most probably hanged in Haiti in 1720. Old Defoe had already written about these two, who began dressed as men but finally fought and necked their enemies without hiding they were women (there's no way of telling how much of Defoe's account of their background was true, but Ms Lee accepts it, even says in the afterword that "Defoe's integrity would have prevented him from inventing a story as outrageou as the one about 'Mistress Mary and the three spoons', an episode of Mary's orphan childhood).
It's a good story right through, but the slight trouble is Ms Lee makes everyone talk in hard-nosed 17th century style, real Shakespeare/Pepys English, all the time. Captain Blackbeard sweeps into a room in Carolina wher young Anne is sitting with her dad the Governor, fires a pistol, and shouts:
-Bastards! Stand back, ye son of a harlot. Dost know who I am?
-Aye Sir, thee be Master Ned Teach, known and called the infamous Blackbeard, comes the reply.

My fave is when Mary, still a sailor in the British trade navy and dressed as a man of course, is serving under a brutal captain. She's sentenced to be whipped by the "cat" - nobody says whipped - she doesn't get it and asks one of the other sailors:
-Brother, what be the cat?

:-)