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Thomas Goldsmith, a sailor from the British town of Dartmouth, was the captain of the privateer Snap Dragon under Queen Anne Stuart in the early 18th century. Converted into a pirate by chance, his adventures on the high seas allowed him to collect important wealth. But his name has not survived to the present day as a result of ruthless deeds or an agonizing and legendary end, but rather by surrendering to extraordinary normality, dying in bed in his house in 1714.
Goldsmith's case is even more unique because his is the only known tombstone marking a pirate's burial, located in the churchyard of his native Dartmouth church. The stela also had a literary and endearing epitaph: "The virtuous serve the Lord; / The Devil is adored by their partisans; / According to merits they are placed / Between the blessed or the reprobate. / Tell me, learned ecclesiastics, / Where will the brute go? Tom Goldsmith? / All his life he strove wickedly / To outwit God and Man and the Devil."
The end of most of the pirates and a good part of the buccaneers —bandits of the sea who plundered the Spanish overseas possessions— was sudden and violent, marked by macabre and bloody tales. Very few died peacefully in their beds. An extreme example is the biography of Captain Jean David Nau, alias Francis L'Ollonais, architect of the capture of many Iberian ships in the West Indies and famous for his barbaric treatment of prisoners, who ended up quartered alive by a tribe of indigenous people who threw their limbs into the fire and their ashes into the wind.
An 18th-century illustration of the pirate Henry Every. Wikimedia Commons
"Many fell in combat, as many drowned. Not a few drank to bursting strong Jamaican rum, while great numbers of buccaneers died of malaria and yellow fever contracted in the jungles of Central America; of those who survived all these calamities, most were hanged," writes British historian Philip Gosse in Who's Who in Piracy. That was the final punishment imposed on the Scottish captain William Kidd, one of the piratical characters that has aroused the most fantasy in the general public, executed by hanging accused of murdering a gunner from his galley, the Adventure.
The same fate awaited the fearsome Captain John Rackman, alias Calico Jack, also after being tried by the English in Jamaica in 1720. Among his crew were two women, the famous Mary Read, capable of defeating a pirate in a sword duel and gun to save his lover and died in prison victim of a strong fever, and Anne Bonny, Rackman's partner, whose end is a mystery. Both, dressed in men's clothes, fought with great bravery before being captured.
Spanish corsairs
All these fascinating biographies are recounted in the form of brief and agile pills in the classic work by Gosse (1879-1959), which has just been republished by Renacimiento with a prologue by Luis Alberto de Cuenca within the framework of his Isla de la Tortuga collection, the only publishing project in Spanish dedicated exclusively to piracy. The series has biographical volumes, memorandums, generic studies and testimonies that cover all the geographical areas in which maritime predators acted, from the Barbary corsairs who sailed the Mediterranean in the Middle and Modern ages to the raids of corsairs, buccaneers and Basque filibusters.
The English historian, grandson of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and son of the writer Sir Edmund Gosse, draws up an essential —and sometimes humorous— biographical dictionary of piracy, a subject on which he was one of the world's leading specialists. Surely, he points to it, the third oldest profession in history. But its protagonists belong to the so-called "classical piracy", the one that spread terror in all the seas, but with preference for the Caribbean and its surrounding coasts, from the end of the 16th century to the beginning of the 19th century. Therefore, those who captured a young Julius Caesar and collected a ransom for him that would end up going awry do not appear: the future dictator caught them and crucified them, already demonstrating at that moment his ruthless personality.
Cover of 'Who's Who in Piracy'. Renaissance
Yes, all the other great figures are in this encyclopedia, such as the elusive and enigmatic Henry Every, captain of the Fancy and author of one of the most lucrative crimes ever in the waters of the Indian Ocean governed by the Great Mughal —Turner has recently edited more than a year ago, a stupendous biography written by popularizer Steven Johnson—; or the notorious and fierce Blackbeard, actually called Edward Teach, who shook the entire American coast from Newfoundland to Trinidad. He, too, was the subject of a violent death in a fierce battle—he was wounded twenty times before falling—against Royal Navy Captain Robert Maynard, who hung the pirate's head from the yardarm of his corvette.
Gosse includes, although not with certain suspicion, a few lines about Francis Drake, one of the most feared pirates of all time in Spanish eyes —the English, on the other hand, would end up ordering him a knight—. He says that he was "properly a buccaneer" with the sole purpose of plundering Philip II's ships. But as he himself admits, everything depends on the point of view.
There is also no shortage in this collage of biographies —a reading full of amusing surprises— the names of curious Hispanic sailors, such as that of Captain José Gaspar. An officer of a certain rank in the Spanish Navy, he was discovered in 1782 stealing jewels from the Crown and became a pirate. He was noted for enormous cruelty, murdering all the men he captured and imprisoning the women in a fort built in Port Charlotte. In his misdeeds he was accompanied by subjects like his brother-in-law Juan Gómez, supposedly dead at the incredible age of 120 years.
