07 - The Atrocities of the Pirates

·24 min·1 clip

The governor says the narrator is “rather an object for pity and commiseration than for prosecution.”

1. The Atrocities of the Pirates, Episode 07, moves from the Corsair at Morilia to Havana, where a French vessel is stripped of cargo and left with its mizzen-mast and starboard main rigging cut away. 2. The narrator remains central throughout as prisoner, witness, and escapee, while the Havana authorities, the governor, and the interpreter Payne shape the legal aftermath. 3. The episode’s core thread is the collapse of pirate justice: plunder on the sea, a broken anti-piracy flotilla, and prison hearings that turn on altered testimony. 4. After the French vessel is taken, the crew argues over accusations that the captain secreted money, and the dispute nearly turns to “murder and massacre” before a gunboat alarm interrupts it. 5. The supposed suppression expedition fails completely when the commanding officer says he knows the schooner is a pirate but has “no time to go in chase of her.” 6. The narrator then uses the captain’s fever, the drunken fishermen, and opiate-laced arrowroot and wine to engineer an escape in a canoe from the Corsair. 7. He reaches Havana after about forty miles at sea, meets Captain Williams, and is then arrested by a Spanish officer as a pirate and taken to a “dark dungeon” with a ration of two ounces of meat, two of bread, and a pint of rice. 8. During the first examination, Payne translates the narrator’s answers into Spanish, but the deposition omits the forcible detention and inserts material the narrator says he never uttered. 9. At the later hearing, the judge asks for money, cites “four hundred doubloons,” and the governor ultimately says the case is fit for “pity and commiseration” before the surrender to the admiral. 10. Readers interested in pirate captivity, colonial courts, and naval imprisonment will find this episode useful.

As heard by us

A pirate raid leads to prison, a disputed record, and an admiralty acquittal.

A pirate raid turns quickly into a study of suspicion. After the Corsair takes money and valuable cargo from a French vessel, the pirates wreck and disable what is left, cutting away rigging and a mast before sending the ship off crippled.

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Want a pirate raid, a stolen-trousers jailhouse brawl, and a courtroom turn toward acquittal?

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