Milenarios, por Juan Carlos Saavedra · Bilenio Actividades Culturales

Amaro Pargo por Marco Polo Alonso

·30 min·2 clips

Who was Amaro Pargo, the real pirate whose life contradicts everything Hollywood taught us?

1. Milenarios, a Spanish history podcast, presents a two-part interview with Marco Polo Alonso about Canarian privateer Amaro Pargo, also known as Amaro Rodríguez Felipe. 2. Marco Polo Alonso is a Canary Islands entrepreneur running businesses in Ghana for over 20 years, who combined his work with a passion for maritime history and research into Pargo. 3. The episode's central argument is that Amaro Pargo has been mythologized by internet content into a Caribbean pirate archetype, while primary archival sources reveal a more complex and largely undocumented figure. 4. Marco's interest began during long drives in Ghana, where he listened to a history podcast that described Pargo as famous and enormously wealthy at death, yet Marco had never encountered him in years of reading piracy literature including Daniel Defoe and Alexandre Dumas. 5. He visited the Biblioteca Hispánica in Madrid and found that even its director, Araceli Martín García, did not recognize Pargo's name, confirming the subject's obscurity in formal historiography. 6. Marco spent a year and a half traveling to the archive of Middelburg in the Netherlands, Campeche in Mexico, the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the military archive in Segovia, and the archive at Simancas near Valladolid. 7. He found that multiple published books had misread original documents, leading to cascading errors in later sources that repeated the same mistakes via copy-paste citation. 8. His first novel, Comprar el Cielo, covers the first documented boarding attributed to Pargo in 1712: a small Irish vessel of 12 crew, including a child, seized under a corsair license issued three months earlier by the governor of Venezuela, José Cáñez y Merino. 9. The sequel, Tela Roja, follows Pargo's 19-year-old brother José Rodríguez Felipe, who was sent to Cádiz to captain a royal frigate as part of the 1714 Compañía de Montesanto expedition to the Caribbean. 10. Felipe V's Compañía de Montesanto was secretly a cover for four royal spies whose orders, sealed until they reached shore, were to assess colonial governance, expose corruption, and send reports directly to the king — all unknown to the ship captains. 11. When the spies revealed their identity in Venezuela, local elites spread false rumors that the new arrivals intended to tax mulattos and harm local populations, effectively neutralizing the royal mission. 12. Pargo spent years in the Caribbean commercial transport circuit, primarily shipping cacao between La Guaira in Venezuela, Veracruz in Mexico, and Havana, using a royal vessel that made him technically a servant of the crown rather than an independent privateer. 13. Around 1718, Pargo fled the port in Venezuela after receiving intelligence that the governor, Marcos Castro de Betancourt, planned to inspect his ship and had authority to arrest or even execute him if non-cacao cargo was found. 14. After his ship's bow broke near Campeche around 1719, Pargo spent three years shipless, constructing a new vessel modeled on the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, a famous 1704 or 1605 Campeche-built ship whose plans he had obtained. 15. In 1722, using his new ship, he intercepted a Dutch slave vessel exiting the Essequibo River in present-day Guyana after it had sold 350 enslaved people — his only fully documented act of unauthorized piracy, committed against a treaty ally using what was nominally a royal warship. 16. Marco argues that Pargo ultimately leveraged his connections to have the Venezuelan governor Marcos Castro de Betancourt removed, and may have offered the royal navy his impressive new ship in exchange for avoiding prosecution for the Dutch attack. 17. The episode notes that Pargo reportedly had a lover in Havana with whom he fathered a child, and he spent time with the child during his years stranded in the Caribbean before returning to Tenerife. 18. The interview is conducted between host Juan Carlos Saavedra and guest Marco Polo Alonso, with a co-host Juan Alberto bridging the two recorded parts, giving the episode a slightly structured but conversational format. 19. Historians and listeners interested in colonial Spanish Caribbean history, primary archival research methodology, and the gap between popular myth and documented record will find the episode substantive. 20. Those expecting adventure narrative or dramatized storytelling will find this is primarily a scholarly interview about research process and documented facts, not dramatized historical narrative.

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