This he heard some declare boasting, and one that was sick confess with sorrow." One contemporary report, quoted by Cordingly, says that "A woman there was by some set bare upon a baking stove and roasted, because she did not confess of money which she had only in their conceit. There were numerous reports of the cruelty of Henry Morgan's crew towards the people of the Spanish settlement of Portobello, which they captured in 1668. After the ship's captain dropped a bag of gold into the sea to keep the pirate from taking it, "Low cut off the said Mster's lips and broiled them before his face, and afterwards murdered the whole crew being thirty-two persons." Hart obtained these details from Low's captured quartermaster, Nicholas Lewis.Ĭaptain Edward England's crew throw bottles at a prisoner lashed to the ship's capstan. Kitts on March 25, 1724, described an attack on a Portuguese ship traveling from Brazil by the pirate Edward Low. Vane's crew believed Catling was dead, but when they pulled his body from the noose he was seen to revive, "whereupon one of the pirates hacked him across the collarbone with his cutlass and would have continued until he had murdered him had not one of the other pirates persuaded him it 'was too great a cruelty.'" Vane's crew then sent fire to the Diamond, but Catling luckily not only survived this treatment, but also escaped to describe the events in an official deposition to Governor Benjamin Bennett of Bermuda.Ĭordingly also tells of how Governor John Hart, writing to the Council of Trade and Plantations in London from St. Vote for the one that you think is the most vile and vicious pirate act! Already voted?Īs David Cordingly relates in Under the Black Flag, on April 14, 1718, pirate captain Charles Vane and his crew took the Bermuda sloop Diamond, beat up the captain and crew, looted the vessel, and singled out one crew member, Nathaniel Catling, to be hung. As many pirates had escaped from the life of a poor merchant sailor, they may have relished the opportunity to exact retribution against merchant crews and upper-class citizens. However, other accounts from the same era show that wealthy merchant ship officers were often no less harsh towards their own crewmen. As these shocking examples of cruelty show, pirates of the Golden Age were not the same lovable or admirable rogues portrayed in popular literature and film today. Too Great a Cruelty: ARCHAEOLOGY's Top Ten Vicious Pirate Actsįrom an eighteenth-century drawing: Captain Francis Spriggs' men force a captued Portuguese sailor to runĪround the ship's mast, prodded on with spears.ĭisclaimer: The accounts that follow, taken from contemporary reports, are not for the faint of heart.
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