Hunting the Last Great Pirate: Benito de Soto and the Rape of the Morning Star

By Michael Edward Ashton Ford

A true, century-spanning saga of terror at sea, a dramatic trial, and a mystery at long last solved . . .

In 1827 the Duke of Wellington—former Commander-in-Chief of the British Army and British Prime Minister—ordered the withdrawal of British soldiers from the island of Ceylon after years of bloody conflict there. English cargo vessels, including the unarmed English Quaker ship Morning Star, were dispatched to sail to Colombo to repatriate wounded British soldiers and a cargo of sealed crates containing captured treasure.

By January 1828, Morning Star was anchored at Table Bay, Cape Town, before joining an armed British convoy of East Indiamen heading north. Heavily laden, she struggled to keep up with the ships ahead. But a heavily armed pirate ship and its master, the notorious Benito de Soto, were lying in wait off Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic to pick off stragglers from passing convoys.

This book tells the full story of how Morning Star was easily overhauled by the pirate and stopped with cannon fire, the bloody events that followed, the long quest to hold de Soto to account—and the remarkable discovery that was made nearly a century later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526769312

Book preview

Chapter One

Louisiana 1803–1823

Early morning on 23 July 1822, the overnight mail coach from the port of Liverpool to London clattered to a halt outside the Houses of Parliament in Whitehall. There, a small group of travel-weary businessmen from the industrial north of England representing dozens of Merseyside merchants, factory-owners, shipping and insurance men alighted with a petition from numerous complainants addressed to senior British government officials. Liverpool – the second most important trading port and industrial city in England – was facing a financial and humanitarian crisis. The plea of the petitioners, backed by hundreds of prominent individuals in manufacturing and commerce in their city, was for urgent assistance from government ministers over a spate of pirate attacks in the Caribbean against Liverpool-registered merchant ships.

The blunt-spoken northerners held nothing back from their parliamentary representatives, describing numerous atrocities committed off the coast of Cuba against locally-registered ships, their passengers and crews. Sworn eye-witness accounts brought to London shocked the parliamentarians and government officials. It was agreed the same morning that Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings, would publish the testimony of one survivor of an horrific attack filed in support of an insurance claim lodged by ship-owners with the insurers, Lloyd’s of London:

Within 5 miles of Cape San Antonio, Cuba, a British ship bound for Liverpool was stopped by a crew of armed men who boarded her demanding to know from the steward if there was gold coin on board. The reply, being in the negative, caused the man to be instantly stabbed. The pirates further endeavoured to extort a confession from the captain by compelling his crew to hoist him up by the neck to the yard-arm where he entreated his own Mate to fasten weights to his feet that his misery might be more speedily terminated. When taken down and while lying on the deck in a state of insensibility, the wretch who had stabbed the steward, blew out the brains of the captain. The pirates were all either Spaniards or Portuguese.

Horrified British government officials agreed that the petitioners’ plea should be referred to the Lords of the Admiralty, but the Liverpool men were wise to the ways of government servants accustomed to shifting responsibility to others. Having received numerous assurances in the past that the government would do its utmost to combat piracy, such promises mostly came to nothing. The problem was that Royal Navy escort ships which officials in Whitehall claimed were actively hunting down pirates and providing convoy cover for British merchant vessels were far too thinly stretched in the early 1820s. Unarmed cargo ships were often left to the mercy of marauding pirates and the situation was particularly dangerous in the Gulf of Mexico for arriving and departing Liverpool ships trading at New Orleans. Concerns had been made about the absence of security in the Mississippi River delta area for international shipping since the years after the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and this was still a major problem.

Despite the danger, in the early 1800s enterprising Liverpool merchants and industrialists had been enjoying a surge of trade after President Jefferson purchased a vast tract of territory west of the Mississippi River from France. By creating the fledgling State of Louisiana, Jefferson not only opened up trade in the Gulf of Mexico but, in doing so, he doubled the size of the United States, opening up new trading opportunities with Britain and Europe. Soon, a horde of businessmen, adventure-seekers and get-rich-quick buccaneers headed for New Orleans, turning it into the largest port in the southern United States. While Liverpool manufacturers were quick to seize a share of this windfall, their efforts were met by a surge of pirate activity across the Caribbean.

One enterprising Louisiana-raised character, Jean Lafitte, having made his reputation in the Indian Ocean plundering English shipping in the seas off French Mauritius, by 1805 was driven from the region by armed Royal Navy ships. He moved to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean Leeward Islands where Lafitte was able to claim French citizenship. Once established on the island, he was entitled to purchase ‘Letters of Marque’ from government officials at the capital, Pointe-à-Pitre, licensing him to operate as a privateer and entitling him to plunder foreign merchants in French Caribbean waters on the condition that he shared the spoils with the island’s revenue officials. When the time came for him to pay the government’s share of the plunder, Lafitte disappeared to Louisiana. There, he set up in business in New Orleans selling plundered goods to customers across the southern United States.

In 1807, Lafitte’s enterprise was closed down after the US government passed laws prohibiting persons from dealing in illegally obtained contraband. Lafitte – one step ahead of the authorities – was aware that 15 miles down-river from New Orleans, where the Mississippi River delta disgorges its waters into the Gulf of Mexico, were densely forested backwaters local folk called ‘Barataria Bay’. Bordering the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, to the west of the Mississippi delta, Barataria extended inland into a maze of impenetrable backwoods and forested mangrove swamps inhabited by a mix of native Houma Indians and French-speaking Cajun settlers.

More precisely, Lafitte’s interest in the territory of Barataria was at Bayou Lafourche, a 12 x 15-mile inland lagoon surrounded by dense sub-tropical forest, accessible by small ocean-going vessels from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico through a narrow channel. This natural harbour was shielded by a cluster of three small off-shore islands creating a barrier against the hurricanes that often blasted across the Gulf. The largest of these islands, known as Gran Terre, was where Lafitte planned to realize his dream of founding a trading base for smugglers, beyond the reach of New Orleans’ officials and State militia. What Lafitte had in mind was a private fiefdom operation controlled by him called Barataria, founded on the profits of piracy.

Soon, from every corner of Europe, South America and the Caribbean, fly-by-night characters were drawn to Jean Lafitte’s settlement at Gran Terre. Luxury foreign goods plundered from merchant vessels were sold at knock-down prices to eager bargain-hunters. The charismatic, shrewd and enterprising Lafitte’s trading post attracted hundreds of buccaneers and pirates eager to join his community of adventurers. A flourishing bordello industry was soon established at Gran Terre, attracting respectable American gentry and government officials from across the Deep South. What these respectable visitors to Lafitte’s fiefdom were most eager to purchase were high-value luxury items at knock-down prices, even if they had been plundered from foreign merchant ships

* * *

At the time, Great Britain was engaged in a bitter war against Napoleon’s armies threatening to rampage through Europe. The industrial might that sustained England – her iron, cotton and textile manufacturing industries – were now the subject of blockades imposed at European ports, bringing about a deep economic depression across the nation. By 1807, with Europe in turmoil, the ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte sought to expand his empire by driving his armies southwards to conquer Spain. The British army, supported by Portuguese forces, intervened when the Duke of Wellington, then holding the rank of lieutenant general, halted an all-out invasion by French forces after he re-supplied the Spanish army and counter-attacked the French.

With hostilities engulfing much of Europe, in 1812 the United States declared war against Great Britain in a conflict fought almost entirely at sea. It was this that unexpectedly presented Lafitte with a longed-for opportunity to secure control over Barataria. Despite the horrors of war in Europe, accounts of the licentious lifestyle enjoyed by Lafitte’s freebooting pirates at Gran Terre thrilled American and English newspaper readers alike. A year later, the British launched a sea assault from the Gulf of Mexico, intending to capture both the harbour at Gran Terre and Lafitte’s fleet of vessels moored there. Lafitte’s buccaneers not only repulsed the invaders but the famous London publisher, John Murray, printed a generous tribute to Lafitte as a footnote to Lord Byron’s poem The Corsair, depicting the rogue as a heroic figure.

Another extraordinary character of whom we will learn more later in this account emerges at this time. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nicolls, better known as ‘Fighting Nicolls,’ was a strapping, bearded, British Royal Marine of intimidating bearing. One of six brothers, Nicolls first achieved fame in the Caribbean when he led Royal Navy men in a night attack against French navy vessels off the island of Hispaniola (Haiti). During the engagement, Nicolls, with a raiding party of Marines, boarded the French cutter Albion. Hit by a musket ball in one arm and sustaining a sabre slash wound to the stomach, the bloodied Nicolls continued close-quarter combat before killing the captain and capturing his vessel.

* * *

At about this time, Benito de Soto and Nicholas Fernandez were rumoured to have served as boy ‘powder monkeys’ for Lafitte’s men fighting the British at the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815 in a plantation south of New Orleans. It was said that the youngsters were used as gunpowder barrel carriers for American cannon and in ferocious close-quarter combat, Jean Lafitte’s rag-tag militia were lauded for their courage in routing the British. It was this defeat that brought an end to a calamitous war. Fighting both Napoleon, who the British had narrowly beaten at Waterloo, as well as the Americans, had exhausted their resilience.

Only a few months later – in June 1815 – the ambassadors of the leading European nations, who were seeking a permanent peace among nations, resolved at the Congress of Vienna to secure the long-term security of Europe. In an astonishing reversal of fortunes, it was acknowledged by the Europeans that because the Royal Navy remained the world’s most powerful naval force, Britain was the preferred choice as the protector of European merchant shipping against piracy and hostile nations on the world’s east-west shipping routes. The Royal Navy, the Congress decided, would control the sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope on the trade routes to India and the Far East, despite the obvious security void this would create in the Caribbean. Soon thousands of lawless buccaneers were plundering a vast swathe of the Atlantic Ocean from Halifax in the Gulf of St Lawrence down to Colombia and Venezuela on the northern shores of South America. It was because of this new danger, which forced the United States Marines and the Royal Navy to put aside years of enmity, that an alliance was formed to combat this new upsurge in piracy.

* * *

This story begins around the year 1819 when Benito de Soto, a wiry, sharp-eyed 13-year-old and his Galician friend and compatriot Nicholas Fernandez, were deck hands eking out an existence as crew for some of the most ruthless buccaneers ever to have sailed the Caribbean. After enduring the horrors of war-torn Galicia in northern Spain when the boys were children, then living through bloody years of conflict against the British in Louisiana, de Soto was still a youngster when he spent time among criminals at Cajun gambling dens and bordellos in the backstreets of New Orleans. It was there where he first vowed to Fernandez that one day they would lead the lives of true buccaneers. Barely out of childhood and with minds warped by horrific experiences on the battlefield and at sea, the two were about to become fully-fledged Caribbean pirates.

On the western tip of Spanish-ruled Cuba, the San Antonio peninsula was a lawless, jungle-like terrain so impenetrable that the place was beyond the control of Spain’s naval and military forces. From pirate bases there, buccaneers from all nations were free to roam the Caribbean plundering British and European merchant shipping. Horrific accounts of attacks reached newspaper readers in England. One such report told of a trio of English vessels – Martha, Harborough and Alexander – being boarded and ‘… seized by piratical crews and their Masters and crews executed’. Once again, outraged Liverpool traders and ship-owners received assurances from hand-wringing government officials in Whitehall that the latest petition brought to London expressing their ‘indignation at the rapine and cruelty practised on British subjects and the British flag’ would be promptly acted on. Yet all that was done was for letters of protest to be delivered by a British envoy to Spanish government officials in Madrid. The reality was that without a committed and determined intervention by the Royal Navy, little could be achieved in London by complacent government politicians.

A sympathetic George Canning, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, declared in an open letter to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War, that the actions against British ships by pirates ‘have been shown by their destinations, commissions and crews, to be essentially Spanish’. Yet less than a decade earlier, the British army – at enormous cost in terms of human casualties – had rescued the Spanish from defeat at the hands of Napoleon during the Peninsular War. A furious Canning reminded Lord Bathurst that between 1808 and 1814 British army casualties numbered some 34,690 men with 940 officers wounded or killed in the campaign against the French in order to save Spain from capitulation.¹

Intelligence sources reaching London confirmed that armed privateer vessels were being fitted out under Spanish Royal commission at Puerto Rico for use against English merchantmen in the Caribbean. As Whitehall politicians bickered over what course of action to take, the City of London and the insurers, Lloyd’s of London, received a flood of new complaints from traders and sea captains over new atrocities. Much of this was too graphic for newspaper publication, but yet again it was being alleged that the Admiralty in London was more concerned with political posturing than taking action to defend the nation’s merchant ships.

This time, however, a respected pillar of the London business community, Lloyd’s of London at Tower Street in the City of London, felt compelled to intervene. Since 1688 Lloyd’s had sold insurance of all descriptions to shippers, businessmen and traders and it was Lloyd’s global intelligence service which, by the nineteenth century, was playing a crucial role in support of British merchant shipping. John Bennett, the influential secretary at Lloyd’s, was so incensed by the threat piracy posed to British commercial interests that he lodged a letter of protest with the Admiralty’s First Secretary, John Wilson Croker in Whitehall, London.

Bennett informed Croker that Lloyd’s was receiving, on average, at least three credible complaints a day of pirate attacks perpetrated against British merchantmen off the American east coast. He drew Croker’s attention to the horrifying experience of one captain – whose story was published in a recent London newspaper – in which he described ‘crews being bludgeoned and hacked to death, captains shot and hanged from their own yard-arms, seamen and passengers cut to pieces by cutlass-wielding savages and burned alive.’

The Times joined in the furore, expressing outrage over the fate of a British schooner, the Exertion, and how recently, after she was attacked off Cape Cruz, southern Cuba her master narrowly escaped death. An anonymous informant who had been a passenger aboard the same vessel wrote ‘it is not possible, to fully describe the filthiness of the (attackers) … who wore black whiskers and long beards.’ Yet more personal accounts arrived in London about other instances of mutilation, rape and torture of passengers and crews while the perpetrators were escaping detection by simply executing all their captives. Outraged London merchants joined the Liverpool protesters, demanding to know why the Admiralty was not doing more. In particular, the Lords of the Admiralty in Whitehall were accused by the angry protestors of complacency, relying on the United States navy to hunt down the perpetrators, while alleging that the Royal Navy – with an infinitely greater number of armed fighting ships than the Americans – appeared to be doing very little to save British lives.

Endnote

1. See Samuel Dumas and K.O. Vedel-Petersen, Losses of Life Caused by War (Clarendon Press, 1923).

Chapter Two

The Pirates: 1824

According to Fernandez, in November 1824 after visiting family in Havana, he returned to New Orleans where he met de Soto one night at a bar off Bourbon Street, where they learned that a schooner was moored at a bayou some distance from Gran Terre, near the Mississippi delta. Her cargo of baled fine silks – plundered from a European vessel off the coast of Cuba – had been sold to a purchaser in New Orleans. Departing the bar within the hour, de Soto hatched a plan, inviting Fernandez and several trusted associates to join him. They would depart within the hour for the spot where the schooner was believed to be moored.

Before dawn de Soto, Fernandez and the other men were sailing down the Mississippi to Gran Terre; later walking for over an hour through dense undergrowth where they spotted the handsome two-mast coastal schooner moored in a wide stream, moving gently on her anchor rope. From a distance de Soto judged her to be around 80 tons and built for a good turn of speed. Throughout that day, they lay invisible in forest thick with cypress trees and hanging vines of Spanish moss observing the ship’s guards. Later the same evening de Soto’s men were tormented by mosquitoes and the tiny ‘no-see-um’ midges, but satisfied that they could not be seen, the men lit a fire, roasting grey snapper and crawfish. At dusk, de Soto’s patience was rewarded when he saw two guards leaving the schooner, walking downstream to take an evening meal at a nearby Cajun settlement.

The young Galician was in no hurry over his next move, permitting himself a thin smile as he noted the schooner’s fine construction of the best North American pine and that it was her shallow draft that enabled her to be brought upriver to this spot. Fore-and-aft rigged, the schooner’s removable centre board and masts had been unbolted and laid flat on her foredeck. De Soto knew she would make a perfect smuggler’s vessel. Armed with eight conventional cannon – four each on her starboard and port sides – and with a deck-mounted swivel gun, her beam was no more than 16ft. With strong cypress tree poles, de Soto’s men reckoned they could propel her along the stream in the direction of the Mississippi River and the Caribbean. On this, the first evening at this spot, de Soto shadowed the two guards from the ship to a shack at a Cajun encampment deep in the forest, where they drank raw whisky until late.

Soon after dusk on the second evening after the guards returned to the Cajun shack for their meal, de Soto beckoned Fernandez and the other men to collect their possessions. He led the party chest-high into the warm waters of the bayou, each clutching pistols and muskets wrapped in oiled sailcloth, with hunting knives at the ready to repel alligators. As de Soto clambered aboard the schooner, he raised her anchor and lowered tow-ropes fore and aft. Then, with his men all heaving in unison, they inched the schooner forward. It was hard, slow work for almost an hour, but as they reached deeper water, she gathered momentum and all four men clambered aboard. With long poles propelling her into faster-flowing water, on the whiff of a warm night breeze, the current drew them towards the mighty river ahead.

At dawn, a brilliant orange sun rose high over the Mississippi delta as they guided the schooner into the vast, swirling waters of the mighty river that would now carry them towards the Gulf of Mexico. In a stiff breeze, de Soto jubilantly called out to the men to unfurl all her sails.

Days later, Benito de Soto and Nicholas Fernandez hired a crew of young seafarers at Barataria, all of whom had already served time aboard pirate vessels. As master of this, his first-ever vessel, now renamed Defensor de Pedro, de Soto sailed into the pristine waters of the Gulf of Mexico, heading for the Dry Tortugas islands north of Havana. Neither as fast as the US navy’s sloops nor as nimble, de Soto’s newly-acquired schooner was well-armed, carrying eight mounted cannon and capable of out-sailing most merchant ships plying the waters of the Caribbean.

It had been agreed at New Orleans among the four young men that it would be de Soto’s undisputed preserve to decide which merchantmen to attack and when and where to sell their plundered cargoes. All had learned from time spent as crew aboard Lafitte’s vessels that what well-heeled buyers across the southern United States most craved were luxury foreign goods: French cognac, expensive Swiss clocks and watches and Italian wines were often carried in European vessels destined for New Orleans’ markets. For the most part, high-cost luxury goods were the plunder most sought by de Soto’s men, only robbing merchant ships of general cargoes if their crews could be coerced – usually at gunpoint – to offload them into Defensor’s hold.

Rules of engagement were simple: if a cargo was too bulky to plunder they would either permit vessels they stopped to proceed unhindered, or simply torch them. Such decisions were rarely logical, depending for the most part on the whim or temper of their captain. Following the practice of most pirate captains, the young Galician de Soto delegated the implementation of his orders to his friend Nicholas Fernandez to take charge of the boarding parties while he remained on board, in command of the schooner.

Adopting a crude form of democracy to avoid a mutinous crew, de Soto encouraged each man to engage in decision-making as to what share of the plunder would be de Soto’s and what would be left for the men. From the outset, though, Nicholas Fernandez led the raiding parties against unarmed merchantmen, while de Soto directed each raid from the bridge of his vessel.

* * *

Fernandez’ confession, made years later to the priest after his capture, suggests that he held little back in truthfully describing the trail of terror the men left in the Caribbean. Clearly his hope was to save his neck. When his ‘Dying Declaration’ was translated decades later from the original Spanish into Victorian English, the reader would be struck by the resigned candour of a condemned man awaiting his fate in a prison cell:

In the course of the next fortneight [sic] we were cruising on the north side of Cuba. Two or three times we took a look into Havana harbour, which produced in my mind sorrowful reflections of my home and friends there. I could not but feel that I had much to reproach myself for the anxiety I caused my parents, but I drowned these feelings with drink.

What is striking is how little one gleans from Fernandez’ confession about their leader Benito de Soto himself, indulging in acts of murder as freely as he did without any sign of remorse or Catholic conscience. One learns that in his last hours, Fernandez begged forgiveness from the priest to make his own peace with God; admitting that in the course of his and de Soto’s raids against merchant ships, their crews committed ‘acts in which none of us were going to give or take any quarter’.

* * *

The chief threat faced by de Soto’s men on the high seas was capture by the naval squadron led by Commodore David Porter of the United States navy who, in 1823, headed a specially trained force of American Marines hunting down pirates in the Caribbean. In the last hours of his life though, Fernandez spared little of the awful detail while confessing to the priest how, for instance, soon after December 1824, they embarked on a final orgy of plunder off the coast of Cuba, during which time they attacked no fewer than twelve American cargo ships. In one incident – involving a merchant vessel of unknown flag or nationality – Fernandez admitted that the pirate crew engaged in acts of depravity committed ‘for the singular pleasure of spilling blood’ and how each pirate was always armed with cutlasses and knives ‘ground to an edge’.

There appears to have been a turning-point in their murderous activities after Commodore Porter’s Marines captured and killed the notorious pirate ‘Diabolito’. Yet despite the numerous atrocities committed by de Soto and his crew, they escaped detection; perhaps because so few of their victims survived:

After January 1825, we were fortunate in taking many Prize ships. Eleven or twelve vessels (mostly American) were captured by us, bound to and from various parts of Europe and the West Indies, some with valuable cargoes. Our place of rendezvous was a small cay on the coast of Cuba where our Prizes were conveyed and disburthened [sic] … of their cargoes. ‘Dead men tell no tales’ was a common saying among us, and as soon as we got a ship’s crew in our power, a short consultation was held. If it was the opinion of the majority, that it would be better to take a life than to spare it, a single wink from our captain was sufficient. Regardless of age or sex … all entreaties for mercy were in vain.

Fernandez described an encounter with an American brigantine they found run aground on a reef near Havana. With the crew still aboard the stricken vessel, Fernandez merely refers to ‘our chief ... signalling us to kill them all and in less than twenty minutes this was done, except for one man, who jumped overboard and succeeded in reaching the shore.’

It was not until a century later that society began to understand from studies of human behaviour criteria identifying the signs of psychopathic conduct arising from an individual’s traumatic early life experiences. The conditions of hunger and starvation in Galicia during times of war when de Soto was a young child might have provided some explanation for his inability as an adult to demonstrate any sign of remorse, guilt or conscience when