The pirates of the Defensor de Pedro (1828–30) and the sanitisation of a pirate legend

The basic narrative

After a mutiny in 1827, the remaining crew of a Brazilian slaver, the Defensor de Pedro, became pirates. On 19 February 1828, off the island of Ascension, they attacked a British ship, the Morning Star, returning from India with a cargo of coffee and spices, and many wounded soldiers. Led by a young Spaniard from Galicia named Benito de Soto, the pirates killed the captain, beat up several crew, and raped some of the women passengers. Then they sabotaged and tried to sink the ship. But, commanded by the first mate, the Morning Star staggered on and, helped by another British ship that came across them, the crew sailed home. The pirates sailed on too, captured an American ship and massacred the crew, and ransacked several other ships that they released. Eventually, they reached Galicia where they landed their booty, then set off for the Mediterranean. On 9 May, de Soto ran the Defensor de Pedro aground near Cádiz. The local authorities arrested 17 of the crew, but two escaped to Gibraltar, where one disappeared and Benito de Soto, the leader, was arrested. Working in concert, the British and Spanish tried the pirates separately. In January 1830, the British hanged Benito de Soto and the Spanish hanged and imprisoned the others.

The trials are documented in great detail in the trial papers in the Gibraltar National Archives and in the Spanish legal records; indeed, many of the papers were later published. ² Reports in the British, American and Spanish newspapers provide a chronological framework, although they are self-referential: the Baltimore Journal reproduced a long account written by a passenger as a letter to the editor of the Morning Herald in London. ³ The Morning Star’s steward, Andrew Beyerman, wrote a short book, ⁴ and records from Lloyds of London entered the personal papers of John Wilson Croker, the First Secretary of Admiralty. ⁵ There are some minor differences of detail, and one very marked one: the Spanish records covered the rapes in forensic detail, but de Soto was not charged with rape because although he commanded the pirate ship, he did not go aboard the prize. So British sources glossed over the rapes.

This is not the narrative that dominates even the most recent published histories, both popular and academic, which are discussed below. These mutant accounts differ over dates, the order of the pirates’ victims and when the rescue ship arrived and other details of the attacks and trials. The captain of the Morning Star has different names, de Soto has different nationalities, and the pirate ship is renamed from Defensor de Pedro to Black Joke (Burla Negra in Spanish). The supposed name change has underpinned a re-interpretation of the affair, which changes the pirates from violent criminals into romantic bandits and social heroes.

The account based on contemporary sources

An unusual source for the attack itself is an independent, third-party eye-witness. Lt. Col. Edward Nicolls commanded a small garrison of marines on Ascension, an isolated outpost of the Royal Navy’s campaign against the slave trade. Nicolls, a much-wounded and effective officer, hated slavery. ⁶ With no adequate ships of his own, he could only chafe at his inability to stop the attack, a league offshore, by ‘very fast Brig-rigged Cruizer’, typical of an ex-Brazilian slaver. ⁷

Yet, the Morning Star was not particularly slow: despite being very badly damaged, Bushby (the mate) sailed home in 48 days, roughly the average for a regular voyage between St Helena and England. ⁸ Eventually, the Defensor de Pedro overhauled the merchantman and hoisted a British blue ensign, and Captain Gibbs was told to stop. The pirates then hoisted a blue and white striped flag, presumably that of Buenos Ayres, but confusingly said they were Colombian. When he did not stop, the pirates fired a shotted charge followed by a canister shot. Gibbs then hove to. After some dispute, the pirates compelled him and his second mate to bring their papers aboard, boarded the Morning Star and sailed her to the other side of the island, out of sight of Lt. Col. Nicolls.

These pirates were brutal: they forced some of the men to help them ransack the ship, then they locked the crew and male passengers below, in the hold, and the women in the roundhouse on the deck. Finally, they held an alcohol-fuelled party on the deck. What they then did to the women was only hinted at in the Gibraltar records, but broadly enough: ‘Here Gentlemen I draw a veil over the brutal scene which followed,’ as the trial prosecutor put it in Gibraltar. ⁹ The Gibraltar trial papers include the deposition of one of the ringleaders, St Cyr Barbazan, that the Spanish authorities had passed to the British:

the women to the number of 6 they carried to the Cabin and Jose de los Santos Nicolas Fernandez this Deponent Domingo Antonio and Francisco Caraballo committed various assaults upon their persons. ¹⁰

Then the pirates sailed away, having cut almost through the mast, disabled the tiller, smashed the binnacle and drilled two large holes through the hull, believing the ship would soon sink. They also killed both Gibbs and his mate, who were still on board the Defensor de Pedro.

But two women broke free and released the men, and the mate, George Bushby, organised to repair the ship. Helped by a passenger, Mr Smith, who was perhaps a former naval officer, he set off for home. On 14 March, the Guildford, returning from China, came upon the crippled ship. Captain Magnus Johnson gave the survivors essential stores and equipment and detailed two of his own sailors to help sail the Morning Star. ¹¹ When the Guildford reached Deal on 12 April, news of the attack reached England. Then Bushby brought the Morning Star home. He reached Falmouth on 15 April, and on 18 April passed Deal and disembarked the invalid soldiers at Gravesend. In its shipping report, one newspaper reported the arrival of the Morning Star, with Bushby as commander, and the sensational news spread. ¹² This was the crisis of the moment and the Admiralty sent out two frigates to protect British commerce. ¹³

Despite Bushby’s skill in getting his ship home, one newspaper denigrated his achievement by suggesting that he relied heavily on Mr Smith. The steward, Beyerman, bluntly dismissed this as the work of a malicious landsman, and the anonymous letter to the Morning Herald made clear that the passengers and crew were grateful to both men. The passengers subscribed to present Smith with a handsome snuff-box, but the owners, Quakers from Scarborough, did nothing to thank him and treated the crew equally poorly. ¹⁴ Even at this stage, there were disagreements over how to tell the story, but there were none over chronology.

The pirates were a third focus, and many witnesses described these incompetent but violent thugs. They had been part of the crew of the Defensor de Pedro, a Brazilian slave ship that left Rio de Janeiro in November 1827 to load slaves in West Africa. The captain, Pedro Mariz de Sousa Sarmento, ¹⁵ was a Brazilian naval lieutenant, and his crew was mainly Portuguese, with some Spaniards and Frenchmen. On 26 January 1828, they mutinied while he was ashore. Benito de Soto, from Galicia in Spain, then murdered the ringleader and took command. He was a remarkably violent young man, born on 22 March 1805 in Mouriera, a hamlet (now a suburb) of Pontevedra, ¹⁶ one of 11 half-brothers and sisters. ¹⁷ How he got to Rio de Janeiro at the age of 23 and became the second mate of the Defensor de Pedro is unclear. ¹⁸ De Soto never went aboard the Morning Star, but directed the prize crew through a megaphone. It included Victor St Cyr Barbazan, a young Frenchman of supposedly aristocratic origins, who later confessed that he shot Gibbs under duress from Soto, ¹⁹ and that he raped one of the women, although he maintained she was a willing victim who had agreed so as to save her husband. He kept a lock of her hair as a trophy. ²⁰

According to the archival accounts, the Morning Star was the pirates’ first victim. Their second was an American ship, Topaz, and they killed all but one of the crew – this was mass-murder. The last to die perished jumping through the rigging to escape the flames after the pirates set the ship on fire, which greatly amused them. ²¹ They forced a lone survivor to serve them until the voyage had almost ended, when de Soto shot him. ²² With no survivors from Topaz, it was the depositions of the pirates that provided the details. They also confessed to plundering four other ships – the Cessnock sometime in early March, the New Prospect on either the 19 or 23 March, the Sunbury on 8 April 1828, and in early April a Portuguese vessel, the Ermelinda, laden with coffee. ²³ These were not such deadly attacks: the Cessnoc continued trading between Britain and the West Indies, ²⁴ and the New Prospect, ²⁵ and Sunbury, returned to their home ports (Falmouth and Cowes). ²⁶ With no tragedy to recount, these attacks got much less coverage.

Laden with booty, Benito de Soto took his crew to Pontevedra. They arrived on 10 April 1828, left the portable booty with his uncle, and sailed to La Coruña to sell the silk they had taken from the Topaz: it was illegal to unload baled goods in Pontevedra. Then they sailed towards the Mediterranean. But de Soto ran the Defensor de Pedro aground near Cádiz, on 9 May. De Soto relied on a surrogate, the ship’s pilot, to pose as the captain and kept his own role as boatswain, but he remained in charge and tried to sell the wreck. It was an unconvincing charade and the Spanish authorities saw through it. They arrested 17 pirates, but de Soto escaped to Gibraltar, along with José Santos who disappeared. For several days de Soto moved in and out of Gibraltar, exciting no suspicion until an English merchant denounced him as a suspected pirate. The garrison police then arrested him and searched his lodgings in a tavern, where a maid said he kept a dirk under his pillow and that the fine clothes she washed were embroidered with other people’s names. The police authorities linked those embroidered names with men from the Topaz. ²⁷

The Spanish tried the pirates in Cádiz, including de Soto and Santos in their absence, but the British wanted to try de Soto themselves and agreed to arraign him in Gibraltar. At some expense, they brought three witnesses from the Morning Star, first to Cádiz and then on to Gibraltar. The Spanish court found 16 pirates guilty and sentenced five of them to imprisonment and 10 to death. Six of them were to be quartered after being hanged. They acquitted a black African slave boy, because he was young, but made him watch the executions and returned him to the heirs of his former master. According to Beyerman’s Narrative of the Atrocities, one of the crew, the Frenchman Barbazan, tried to save himself by offering to act as executioner, alleging there was no executioner in Cádiz. The executions took place on 11 and 12 January 1830. The following day, in Gibraltar, a Grand Jury heard the evidence against de Soto. His trial on 20 January was followed by his hanging five days later. ²⁸

The Spanish and British trial records largely concur, although the emphases are sometimes different. The Spanish accounts say more about the rapes and record more meticulously the pirates’ aliases and changes of identities. Barbazan was also known as Francisco Ricardo or Francisco Victorio; Francisco Goubin called himself Jorge Latwile, to hide his desertion from a French ship. De Soto used two other names – Ramón Pereo and Benito Barredo. And the pilot Manuel Antonio Rodríguez posed as the original Brazilian captain in Galicia and Cádiz. The ship’s identity changed too: during the attack on the Morning Star, de Soto used first the British and then the Buenos Aires ensigns, and in the approach to Pontevedra, he told a coastguard boat that she was the Buen Jesús y las Ánimas, carrying fruit, kidney beans, gunpowder and gunshot. The pirates’ ship was now flying the Brazilian flag, and continued to do so until the wreck at Cádiz. ²⁹ All this personation had practical purposes. There was no symbolism here and above all no record at all of De Soto and the pirates changing the name of their ship from the Defensor de Pedro to the Black Joke (or Burla Negra), a feature of later narratives.

The emergence of an Anglo-American narrative

A few days after Bushby brought the Morning Star home, another ship left the Downs. The captain soon spied a ‘wicked looking craft’ and cleared for action and the passengers ‘with our heads and hearts full of that atrocious affair, rushed on the poop’. A change in the wind drove the suspicious vessel off. When this story was reprinted six years later in the Nautical Magazine, it needed no explanation: ³⁰ the Morning Star was still fresh in the public imagination.

The press kept the memory of it alive too, even in America. Shortly after de Soto’s execution, the United Services Journal in London began publishing a series of eight ‘Letters from Gibraltar by the Author of the Military Sketchbook’, the first two of which described the trial of the pirates. ³¹ By the end of January, the New York Morning Herald had reprinted these two letters in an abbreviated form. ³² ‘The author of The Military Sketch-book’ seems to have been Daniel Wedgworth Maginn, an assistant surgeon in the 42^nd Royal Highland Regiment. ³³ Even though in 1936 a dedicated amateur historian, Joseph Muddiman, identified him as Lieutenant John Fraser of the 53rd Shropshire regiment, ³⁴ and The Military Sketch-book was slight and whimsical while the letters about de Soto were more substantial, the identification with Maginn still seems more solid.

Maginn said he interviewed Beyerman, and de Soto in his cell. His account resembled the archival and press narrative of the mutiny and attack, but gave a scant account of the stopover in Galicia and the wreck in Cádiz. But Maginn provided one new detail concerning de Soto’s companion who parted from him on the neutral ground outside Gibraltar. He did not name him but quoted Beyerman to say he was tall, stout, fair-haired with a fresh complexion, a mild and gentle countenance, apparently a Frenchman, and the worst of all the pirates. There were also two important differences: that the (unnamed) relief ship came up on the day after the attack on the Morning Star and took the crew and passengers to England; and that the pirates attacked the Topaz first.

A new narrative now began to develop, relying heavily on the plagiarism that underpinned the market for cheap books in early nineteenth-century Britain and America. These ‘cottage library’ books were pocket-sized volumes, showily bound, and sold by pedlars and hawkers. Many were reprints: the Milner and Sowerby company of Halifax inserted an enormous ‘Cheap List’ including Arabian Night’s Entertainments, Fatherless Fanny, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, White Slave and Young Man’s Best Companion at the end of the Lives, Exploits and Cruelties of the Most Celebrated Pirates (1859). ³⁵ This book was anonymous and incorporated much material from an earlier, equally anonymous, series of pirate biographies that began in Liverpool in 1840. ³⁶ It is extremely rare, ³⁷ but a second edition (1845), giving T. Douglas as its author and with a slightly different title, was published by J.S. Pratt whose offices, supposedly in London, ³⁸ were really in Stokesley in Yorkshire. Between 1832 and 1853, Pratt published over 300 titles, and sold them in Britain and across the Empire. ³⁹ These different collections varied – the Liverpool version included 28 pirates, including Benito de Soto, with a frontispiece showing the death of Blackbeard. The Pratt edition had only 24 pirates – some of them new additions – and the frontispiece showed ‘Soto leaving the Morning Star to her fate after endeavouring to scuttle her.’ De Soto had been promoted in importance (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

‘Soto Leaving the Morning Star to her fate, after endeavouring to scuttle her’.

In Boston, a few years earlier, Charles Ellms also used Maginn’s account for The Pirate’s Own Book (1837), his claim to lasting fame. Ellms was a stationer and bookbinder, who since the early 1830s had been publishing pamphlets about famous trials, astrological almanacks and anthologies of sea-stories about maritime disasters and pirates, with sensational engravings. ⁴⁰ His pirate anthology incorporated material from Exquemelin and Johnson, often very closely paraphrased in slightly updated language. For Benito de Soto, he hardly changed the wording of Maginn’s account at all. Ellms’s last edition of this book came out in 1859 but for the rest of the century it was remembered and cited, not always with approval. ⁴¹

Maginn-Ellms was the backbone of the deviant narrative of the Defensor de Pedro. In 1870, an article about piracy in the Cape Monthly (South Africa) quoted Maginn at length, and in 1877–80 Frederick Whymper’s two-volume compilation of naval biographies included a chapter on Benito de Soto. All these accounts made the Topaz the first capture of the pirates in their ship, still named as the Defensor de Pedro. ⁴²

The emergence of a Spanish narrative

In Spain, things were not remembered in the same way, because there was a powerful corrective to the inaccuracies. The first supposedly historical account was largely fantasy. A nine-volume collection of biographies of famous mid-century Spaniards, edited by Nicomedes Pastor Díaz, included a section on Manuel Montes de Oca, a government minister shot in a military pronunciamiento in 1841. As a young naval officer, he had defended one of the pirates at the trial in Cádiz. This was only a minor part of his career and his biographer, Salvador Bermúdez de Castro, got nearly every detail wrong. He said that the pirates’ ship was wrecked in 1829 rather than 1828, and that Montes de Oca defended the pirates’ leader, rather than de Fretyas. He described that leader as a young and handsome Frenchman, and specifically distinguished him from Manuel José de Freytas, his real client, who was one of the crew. The Frenchman was tried and executed in Cádiz: this, then, was Barbazan, not de Soto, who was Spanish. The Pastor Díaz collection is generally seen as a reliable historical source and the famous novelist Benito Pérez Galdos used it for his historical novels, the Episodios Nacionales, which encapsulated the history of nineteenth-century Spain. There is a volume on Montes de Oca. In 1900, Galdós, answering the criticisms of a more pedantic historian, asserted that he considered the Bermúdez de Castro version to be a reliable account of Montes de Oca’s life. ⁴³

It is often asserted, particularly in online texts, that de Soto also inspired the famous romantic poet José de Espronceda to write his celebrated poem ‘La Canción del Pirata’ (1835), ⁴⁴ although no source is ever given for this. The trial in Cádiz, in January 1830, took place under the reactionary absolutism of Fernando VII, when the liberal literary elite had fled into exile. Between 1827 and 1834 the young romantic poet, José de Espronceda, moved between Lisbon, London and Paris. ⁴⁵ Espronceda was ‘the Spanish Romantic par excellence’, ruled by a passion for complete freedom, and ‘a tendency to rebellion for rebellion’s sake’. ⁴⁶ His pirate was king of the sea, a romantic hero who sought personal liberation from a society he despised, but did not seek to change. He hoped to control and use it for his benefit, not for the down-trodden poor. He was selfish, not altruistic. ⁴⁷ The poem does not mention de Soto, and situates its hero’s activities in either the Sea of Marmara or the Black Sea, ⁴⁸ but it was the core of a series of other pirate poems, distributed as pliegos sueltos:, printed and folded sheets, produced and sold cheaply, often by the side of the street: what would be called in English ‘chapbooks’. Some of them pirated Espronceda’s poem in a literary sense, using its metric arrangement and his lines. ⁴⁹

The first novel based on the Defensor de Pedro affair was Alejandro Benisia’s El milano de los mares [The Kite of the Seas] (Madrid, 1855) in four volumes, usually bound into two. It gave correct dates for Soto’s birth and death and recounted the mutiny and how he murdered the pirates’ first leader, took control and led the attacks on the Morning Star and then the Topaz. The final part described events in La Coruña and Cádiz, and the arrest trial and execution of the pirate crew and de Soto himself. ⁵⁰ But the middle half of the book was fantasy. Aboard an entirely fictional British prize, De Soto discovered the head of his brother, whom the British had beheaded and pickled and were now sending back to be used by Edinburgh phrenologists. De Soto determined on vengeance. Was this inspired by a strange story in the Spanish trial records – that the pirates found a bottle containing an embalmed human head and two hands aboard the Morning Star and Soto, conceiving it an augury of his own death, flung it into the sea? ⁵¹ The real hero of the book was Barbazan, de Soto’s faithful friend, who was motivated by love for a young woman, simultaneously the wife and niece of a rich and unpleasant English merchant. Barbazan killed his rival and fled with her to Ascension Island. This novel was about male friendship and romantic love. ⁵²

In July and August 1888, the newspaper La Palma de Cádiz ran several stories mocking the literary and historical value of Benisias’s novel. ⁵³ The anonymous author, who said he had once been mayor of Cádiz, can be identified as Adolfo de Castro. De Castro relied on the Morning Herald account of 1830 and Lloyds List, skating over the rapes on the grounds of taste. Other details came from Lazaga – particularly the defence speech for the pirate Manuel José de Freitas by Manuel Montes de Oca, who a decade later became Minister for the Navy and an important moderate politician. Adolfo de Castro shared these political leanings and recast the case accordingly, ⁵⁴ adding a detail of his own. While he was mayor of Cádiz, in 1855, the public executioner came to him seeking a retirement pension. De Castro asked him how he had hanged so many men from the Defensor de Pedro on the same gallows. ‘Nothing easier,’ was the reply, ‘I had as many blankets as there were pirates. When one was executed I covered him with a blanket, fastened it with big pins and moved the whole thing out of the way to one side to leave the middle of the scaffold clear.’ ⁵⁵ Clearly, Barbazan had no realistic chance of helping out with the executions and perhaps the story of his offer was fabricated too.

Then, in 1892, came the corrective: Joaquín María Lazaga’s text of the Spanish trial records. ⁵⁶ Unlike the British archival documentation, Lazaga edited them for publication. They were incomplete – part of archive vanished during a revolutionary rising in 1873 ⁵⁷ – and the Navy excluded other documents that made far too clear the incompetence, carelessness and corruption of the authorities in La Coruña and Cádiz. ⁵⁸

The emergence of the mutant canon of the Defensor de Pedro story

The first, and for a long time the only, English writer to use the Lazaga trial account was Joseph Muddiman, who published an account of the Morning Star affair in the Christmas Eve edition of The Times in 1936. Today, Muddiman would be called an ‘independent scholar’. A London solicitor, he had written extensively about the execution of Charles I of England, and the history of journalism. Notwithstanding his ‘overblown and fanatical Royalist views’ and being sometimes ‘blinded by his prejudices’, he was a ‘solid digger out of actual facts in obscure places’. ⁵⁹ Lazaga and the ‘Letters from Gibraltar’ in the United Services Journal were his sources, and he calls the pirate vessel the Defensor de Pedro. His account ends with the comment that ‘it is the essential modernity of the proceedings that is the remarkable thing about them’.

Muddiman’s observation was acute, because an alternative narrative was fast developing that paid no attention to such things, but linked the pirates of the Defensor de Pedro to the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ in the eighteenth century. This trend had started in the early-to-mid 1920s in a spate of books about piracy. The most prominent author was another independent scholar, Philip Gosse, a medical doctor in general practice who had served in the British army in France. Gosse was a serious researcher in two fields: natural history ⁶⁰ and the history of piracy, in which he was a pioneer. In 1926, he published The Pirate’s Who’s Who, ⁶¹ followed, in 1932, by The History of Piracy, ⁶² a best-seller that was translated into French (1933), Spanish (1935), Dutch (1932), Italian (1957), Japanese (1994) and Polish (2012); the latest English edition was re-published in 2012. Both books concentrated on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the preface to The Pirates Who’s Who, Gosse wrote that he wanted his biographical dictionary to rank with such works of reference as the Peerage, sitting beside Whitaker’s Almanac or the ABC Railway Guide on the tables of London gentlemen’s clubs. He had an acerbic sense of humour. Although this was an attachment to the banner of accuracy, his page-long entry on de Soto included two new elements: that Soto changed the name of his ship to Black Joke and that the attack on the Morning Star took place in 1832. ⁶³ Then, in his chapter on the Defensor de Pedro in The History of Piracy, Gosse revised the date of the attack to 13 February 1828 and added some accurate new details: that the Morning Star belonged to the Quaker firm of Tindalls and was a good sailer. But he repeated the assertion about the Black Joke, and named the captain of the Morning Star as Souley, not Gibbs. None of this came from Ellms or Maginn, so what was Gosse’s source?

In 1902, Captain Henry Holmes, who had spent a very long lifetime at sea, published a little volume of reminiscences of his first voyage as a very young ship’s boy to Calcutta and back. According to his memoir, based on a personal journal that he kept at the time, he sailed from West India Dock in London on the Susan in October 1831. The Susan was a rather elderly but well appointed ship, on hire to the East India Company to carry passengers and troops as well as cargo to India. ⁶⁴ The outward voyage passed uneventfully, though it was exciting enough for young Henry, but on the return journey they ran into a pirate scare when they reached Saint Helena. They found several merchant ships waiting there ‘on account of a European pirate cruising between the island of St. Helena and Ascension Island’. The captains decided so sail in convoy, led by the Susan, the best- armed ship. The convoy soon broke up because some ships were much faster than the others and after three days only one other ship was left: ‘the “Morning Star,” a very slow vessel’. The two captains agreed to separate and avoid delaying the affluent passengers on the Susan, which sailed on to Ascension where there was more news of a pirate ship lurking in the offing. ⁶⁵ Finally, they got home. ‘The good Frigate I was aboard (if my memory is correct), arrived at Spithead the day King George the Fourth died, for the Royal Standard was hoisted half-mast.’ ⁶⁶ That detail is important because George IV died on 26 June 1830. Holmes finished his memoir with a chapter carrying more details of the Morning Star affair, drawn partly from his journal and partly from the colourful reminiscences of an ‘Old Salt’ who, Holmes said, had been on of the crew of the Morning Star. ⁶⁷ Holmes described the Susan’s encounter with a pirate brigantine flying ‘his black flag and crossed bones’ after separating from the Morning Star, but the captain sailed out of danger by pretending to be much more powerfully armed than he was. The ‘Old Salt’ named the Morning Star’s captain as Sonley, renamed Major Logie, an important passenger, as Lobie and gave the date of the attack as 1832. But if the year was four years out, the day and month – 21 February – were almost precise. He also named the pirate ship as the Black Joke and described the murder of Captain ‘Sonley’ and the ransacking of the ship in graphic terms. The question of rape was glossed over by a reference to ‘scenes of such awful savagery as no language could recount nor any pen describe.’ ⁶⁸ But he made no mention of a black flag. The survivor of the Morning Star described the pirate coming up on his ship flying no colours at all before first hoisting the British Ensign and then the Colombian flag. ⁶⁹ When the attack was over, the survivors in the Morning Star struggled on for only a day before they were rescued by another ship that gave them enough help to get them back to London. While Holmes’s account is inaccurate in dating and in some of its details, that is not surprising after so much time had passed – 74 years – between the publication of the book and the events it described. It would not be surprising that an elderly man should recall seasons of the year and great public events rather than years and precise names.

Gosse did not cite Holmes in The Pirates Who’s Who, nor indeed any other source for nineteenth-century Atlantic piracy. But he acknowledged his debt to Basil Lubbock for ‘useful information about Captain Kidd’. ⁷⁰ Lubbock was an established naval historian: an early member of the Society for Nautical Research, who sat on its council between 1921 and 1924, and contributed to its journal, The Mariner’s Mirror. ⁷¹ Like much maritime history of the time, Lubbock’s writing was anecdotal and largely unreferenced. ⁷² His book, The Blackwall Frigates (1922), included a long description of the attack on the Morning Star, which he dated to 1832 and incorrectly said that the pirates’ first victim was the Topaz. According to Lubbock, Morning Star was a slow sailer, and after leaving St Helena in convoy with another ship, trailed behind; the captain was Souley, not Gibbs, or even Sonley, and it was de Soto who killed him; an unnamed ship met with the Morning Star on the day after the attack and provided aid; Benito de Soto’s ship was the Black Joke. ⁷³

The following year, Francis Bradlee published Piracy in the West Indies and its Suppression, which included Lubbock’s section on the Morning Star nearly verbatim, except for some misspellings (Sauley and Dafensor de Pedro). ⁷⁴ Gosse used Lubbock’s spellings, so Bradlee was not his source. Bradlee also incorporated an illustration of the ‘Black Joke’ leaving the Morning Star sinking, which did not happen, and had the pirates’ ship flying the black flag. The Gosse-Lubbock account, apparently built on Holmes’s memoir, had become the starting point of the most extreme mutations of the narrative.

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Figure 2.

‘Pirate Brigantine "Black Joke" sinking the Indiaman "Morning Star", February 21, 1832.

Souley, Sauley and Sonley are unusual names and they do not appear in either set of trial records. But there was a real Black Joke, a former Brazilian slaver named Henriquetta, that HMS Sybille captured in 1827. ⁷⁵ Once renamed and incorporated into the Navy, HMS Black Joke’s notable career kept her firmly in the public eye. She was a favourite among naval men: when Charles Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle, the captain had a gig named Black Joke. ⁷⁶ In 1925, Lubbock even edited a lavish album of sea pictures, with a coloured engraving of HMS Black Joke capturing the slaver Almirante in February 1829. ⁷⁷ Lubbock was careless, but his mistakes were incorporated into a sensationalist stream of books about piracy.

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Figure 3.

The ‘Black Joke’ and ‘El Almirante’ 1829 Aquatint in colour by Edward Duncan after William John Huggins (1840), in the possession of Messrs. T. H. Parker.

In 1933, Charles Grey’s collection of pirate biographies, Pirates of the Eastern Seas, 1618–1723: A Lurid Page of History, included a chapter on ‘Benito de Soto – The Last of the Most Notorious Pirates’, although he was an Atlantic pirate of the early nineteenth century. ⁷⁸ This was the starting point of the cliché that de Soto was the last pirate. Grey was a friend of his editor, General Sir George McMunn, himself a prolific author of articles, novels, historical works and short stories about the British Army and India. ⁷⁹ MacMunn commended the book to ‘lovers of history and drama, as worthy of their perusal. They will not find the story elsewhere.’

Grey’s pirates were romantic patriotic heroes:

mostly English or American, and, like most of those countries, never killed in wantonness, often enough sparing where other nationalities would have slain, burned and sunk without mercy. ⁸⁰

That description hardly fitted the crew of the Defensor de Pedro, and Grey described them as ‘the usual ruffianly collection of the scum of the Continents’, and while he avoided the details of the rapes, he did not hide that they happened: ‘Having satiated themselves with drink and gratified their lust to the utmost . . .’ ⁸¹

Most of Grey’s errors (Souley, 1832 not 1828, and many others) came from Lubbock rather than Gosse. But he added his own: that de Soto hoisted the ‘Skull and Crossbones (which may derive from Bradlee)’; that his mate (or right-hand-man) was named Brabazon (not Barbazan), who was English, not French; that Soto was arrested in Gibraltar but hanged in Cádiz. He also speculated that the changed name of the Black Joke, was ‘in a spirit of grim humour, maybe’, a line of thought that would coincide with later theorising.

Gosse acknowledged another source in The Pirate’s Who’s Who: A.H.Verrill, ⁸² author of numerous books ranging from knot-tying to South American travel. ⁸³ Verrill’s Love Stories of Some Famous Pirates (1924) ⁸⁴ , left De Soto out, but the lack of any evidence about his love life did not deter Henri Musnik, a prolific French author of potboilers. Of Musnik’s 79 books between 1930 and 1957, often under pseudonyms, only one, Les Femmes Pirates outlived him: a Spanish translation appeared in 2007. ⁸⁵ Musnik dreamt up a female companion for de Soto and inserted her into a framework based on Maginn, whom he implied was his main source, in a translated extract ascribed to ‘a journalist of the time’. ⁸⁶ The beginning and end of Musnik’s account – de Soto’s origins and the trials and execution – were conventional enough, ⁸⁷ but the middle was a wild fantasy. Musnik’s candidate for female pirate was the only one who got away. He left in English Maginn’s description of ‘one of the worst villains of the whole piratical crew’, but this, he said, was a woman in disguise. She revealed herself to Soto after he murdered the pirates’ first leader, promising to help him achieve his destiny. ‘The scene that followed was worthy of a description by Dante. Love on a pallet still spotted with the blood of a dead man, under the fixed and glassy stare of the body thrown into the corner of the cabin.’ Soto’s mistress was the tactician behind the capture of the Morning Star, and choreographed the terrible theatre on the Topaz. This embodiment of evil abandoned de Soto outside Gibraltar, saying that she loved life more than money. ⁸⁸

In 1925, a hack journalist named Jack Blay, apparently British, ⁸⁹ wrote two articles on women pirates for Crónica, a famous picture-magazine published in Madrid, but edited in Paris. Crónica specialised in light journalism (sport, society gossip, art theatre and cinema) interspersed with artistic photographs of nude women. ⁹⁰ His two-part series covered Bonney & Reade, and Soto’s wicked mistress. ⁹¹ Blay’s first paragraph was a direct translation from Maginn, and he used sentences from Musnik’s fantasy, adding more lubricious aspects to the story: Blay made her the motive force behind the rapes. Titillating drawings illustrated the article. When she left de Soto’s at the Gibraltar frontier it was because ‘I have had enough of giving lessons to men’.

The cliché about pirates’ buried treasure also reappeared. In 1904, fishermen burying the discarded heads and innards of tuna fish on the beach at Cádiz had found a horde of gold coins, which rumour said came from the Defensor de Pedro. ⁹² In January 1926, in Pontevedra, construction workers supposedly uncovered yet more treasure in a deeply buried steel chest. No-one ever saw it, but the reports were repeated in newspapers across Spain (and even in England). ⁹³ These Spanish versions all referred to the Defensor de Pedro rather than Burla Negra.

The mutant narrative, politicised and commodified

By 1955, Spanish usage had shifted to Burla Negra as the name of the pirate ship. It is not clear whether this was inspired by the Spanish translation of Gosse’s History (1935), but José María Castroviejo used it as the title for his novelised version of de Soto’s life, published in 1955. ⁹⁴ Castroviejo, a Gallego, was a prominent intellectual supporter of Franco. In recent times, local government in Pontevedra and Cádiz latched onto the Black Joke story. The ayuntamientos (city councils) memorialised Benito de Soto in the cities he came from, and where his crew were hanged and dismembered. The victims vanished: with no local population in the mid-Atlantic to remember them, they would have disrupted the sanitisation that commemoration needed: it is harder to lionise rapists and mass murderers than swashbuckling heroes.

This resembles the celebration of Guy Fawkes in Britain, where local authorities organise bonfires on Guy Fawkes night. The Ayuntamiento of Cádiz made the treasure the centre of the city carnival, with an anthem about its discovery by a famous local songster, Antonio Rodríguez Martínez, as the high point. ⁹⁵ In Pontevedra, there was already a small street, almost a back alley, named after Benito de Soto; it was near the church of Santa María where de Soto was baptised. The Ayuntamiento later incorporated ‘Pirate Night’ into the annual Pontevedra Carnival, dividing the crowds into supporters of the Burla Negra and the Morning Star. ⁹⁶

But Guy Fawkes is also a radical hero: modern political figures, mostly right wing or centrist, are burned on bonfires in Lewes in East Sussex, and protestors from the Occupy Movement have used his face as a mask. ⁹⁷ In Galicia, political radicals made the Burla Negra the symbol of opposition when an oil tanker, Prestige, sank off the coast in 2002, leaking its cargo ashore. Groups of fishermen, students, environmentalists and cultural activists formed a broad movement, Nunca Maís (‘Never Again’) to attack the incompetent but well-entrenched right-wing local government. Musicians stood out: the ‘Platform against the Black Joke (A Plataforma contra a Burla Negra)’ organised concerts, ⁹⁸ and a many-times-removed cousin of Benito de Soto, Marcos Aboal Vázquez, nicknamed Pulpiño Viascón, with an avowedly anti-establishment, ‘anarchistic’ outlook, sang about Benito de Soto in a folk-rock band, O Jarbanzo Negro. ⁹⁹ Another local band, called ‘Burla Negra’, made a black pirate flag the backdrop to its stage set. ¹⁰⁰

To recast the story, the rapes and mass-murder were cloaked. Commercial interests helped. A microbrewery in Pontevedra brewed BE:SO, ‘a beer with a pirate soul’, and a bar in Vigo was named ‘Burla Negra Coffee et Spirits [sic]’. Far away, a South Australian vineyard produced ‘2018 Burla Negra Tempranillo’, supposedly ‘inspired by de Soto’s Spanish roots and uncompromising attitude’. ¹⁰¹ Most up to date of all were ‘Benito de Soto jammies’, virtual nightware for the male and female avatars of Second Life, a virtual reality world, which could be bought with virtual money. The tops had red and black stripes with superimposed skull and crossbones. ¹⁰²

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Virtual pyjamas ‘Second Life Marketplace – *plowwies* Benito de Soto jammies female’.

The modern mutations: the Defensor de Pedro in general histories of piracy

The triumph of the mutant version of the story relied on what was now the received wisdom about the Defensor de Pedro case, validated by a flood-tide of interest in piracy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This focused on the ‘Golden Age’ of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates. The repeated editions of Johnson’s General History, both usefully out of copyright, did not cover de Soto, of course, but Ellms’s Pirate’s Own Book was also reprinted several times and is freely available online; so was Grey’s chapter on Benito Soto, most recently as a stand-alone article – 'Last of the Black-Hearted Buccaneers’ in an American magazine, Sea Classics. ¹⁰³ This publication presents itself as a serious magazine for amateur naval historians, ¹⁰⁴ and claimed the article as its copyright, implying it was original.

The increasingly serious academic work on pirates (by people like by Robert Ritchie, David J. Starkey, Kris Lane and Peter Leeson) focused on the early modern period. Nineteenth-century piracy was less well explored, apart from privateering during the South American wars of liberation, and the warfare between the newly independent states, such as Brazil and Buenos Aires, that followed. ¹⁰⁵ Scholarly writing in English on these events left out the Morning Star story, but a 2004 Spanish thesis on South American privateering covered the Defensor de Pedro in depth. ¹⁰⁶ The few mentions of the affair that cropped up in academic literature were connected to contingent issues. Stephen Constantine used the transcript of the Gibraltar court in a scholarly article on the policing of nationality in early nineteenth-century Gibraltar, ¹⁰⁷ and Natalie McManus’s thesis on the Spanish romantic literature of piracy analysed fictionalised tellings of Benito Soto’s story in great detail. ¹⁰⁸

Coverage of de Soto and the Morning Star was left to general histories of piracy. A Spanish overview, published in 2013, used Spanish local history sources about de Soto’s origins, and Lazaga. In consequence, it described the rapes in blunt terms. ¹⁰⁹ English-language accounts relied on the mutant cannon, ignoring both Spanish and English-language archival sources.

Two well-known general surveys of piracy in English are those of Angus Konstam and Tim Travers. Konstam, a popular military historian, has written at least 10 books on piracy, including Piracy: The Complete History (2008). ¹¹⁰ Travers, a widely published academic historian, used early modern documentary sources in the earlier chapters of Pirates: A History (2007), but both books gave similar accounts of the Morning Star attack. The pirate ship was the Black Joke and Soto murdered Gibbs. The pirates engaged in an orgy of destruction and rape, though neither author described it in any detail. Both said an unidentified ship rescued the Morning Star on the day after the attack. Only Travers correctly dated the attack to 1828; Konstam gave 1832. ¹¹¹

Yet scholars have frequently cited Travers as an adequate source and a Google Scholar search in July 2019 produced 91 citations of Konstam. For example, a theoretical article on piracy in a special number of Anthropological Quarterly in 2012, listed Konstam alongside Hobsbawm’s Bandits, Kris Lane’s Pillaging the Empire, Peter Leeson’s The Invisible Hook and Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. ¹¹²

Conclusion: What does all this mean?

This article has described how murders and rapes in the South Atlantic in 1828 turned into officially patronised fun and radical chic. Substituting Burla Negra/Black Joke for the name of the Defensor de Pedro, shifting the focus away from the victims of the piracy, and moving the location to from the sea to Galicia and Cádiz, were key elements in turning Benito de Soto into a ‘good criminal’. ¹¹³ Typically, the literature of the good criminal is more than accounts of true-life crimes with ghoulish descriptions. It certainly can include macabre details like those the Australian street criminal Mark ‘Chopper’ Read included in his autobiographical memoirs. He portrayed himself as ‘the harder-than-hard man – the man of implacably and utterly ruthless violence who will stop at nothing because, ultimately, he fears nothing’. Scholars have compared him with the most famous Australian bandit of all, Ned Kelly, although Kelly’s resonance with a social and political agenda is far clearer than Read’s. But what Read and Kelly had in common was a degree of self-determination: by writing about themselves they sought to rescue their own personality. ¹¹⁴ Other people, particularly his descendants, sought to justify Kelly, to create his goodness as a criminal. In January 2020, his great-grand-niece, Joanne Griffiths, attacked the film of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang as a personal affront to now-living members of the family and a corruption of the national heritage. ¹¹⁵ De Soto’s modern descendants and the Ayuntamiento of Pontevedra did much the same, but the man himself played no part.

Beyond defining and guarding a personal or public memory, the story also goes to historiographical approaches to the history of piracy and a theoretical approach to the history of piracy that has helped form the piratical canon. Markus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, scholars of the lives of Atlantic mariners, fitted early modern pirates into a tradition of autonomous maritime communities: pirates rebelled against an unjust social order on shore and aboard naval, privateering and merchant ships. The harsh maritime life, impressment, savage punishments and poor wages that unscrupulous officers often defrauded them of, led seamen to revolt. Pirates formed autonomous, egalitarian and proto-democratic communities opposed to the hierarchies that oppressed them. Egalitarianism was accompanied by riotous, carnivalesque and gluttonous eating and drinking, and by a mutual concern for each others’ welfare. These pirates were ‘class-conscious and justice-seeking’ and they assaulted and occasionally executed the captains they captured. They voted to decide ‘Affairs of Moment’. ¹¹⁶ Rediker grouped pirates in Eric Hobsbawm’s category of social banditry, an ‘endemic peasant protest against oppression and poverty: a cry for vengeance on the rich and the oppressors’. It aimed at ‘a traditional world in which men are justly dealt with’. ¹¹⁷

Hobsbawm showed how the lords and the state regarded bandits as merely peasant criminals, but the peasants from whom they sprang often understood them as ‘heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to he admired, helped and supported’. ¹¹⁸ They were mythologised as social bandits, as symbols of a pure past – men who could right wrongs or correct injustices. ¹¹⁹ These social bandits themselves dreamt of a world of equality and brotherhood and freedom, ¹²⁰ and by necessity they had to trust each other and be honest between themselves; they lived in self-governing communities that resembled a conception of political anarchy. ¹²¹ The terror that was part of their public image was usually directed against those who should be terrified. These bandits proved that ‘even the poor and weak can be terrible’. ¹²² So, ‘official’ culture could assimilate them by turning them into nobles, both morally and hierarchically: a lowly born Robin Hood became a wronged Earl of Huntingdon. ¹²³ But Hobsbawm drew distinctions between ‘social bandits’ and bands of thugs. Not all raiders and criminals were social bandits, whom he carefully distinguished from robber gangs, freebooters and nomadic raiders like the bedouin, who were strangers and enemies of the poor. ¹²⁴ And there is little hard evidence that Benito de Soto dreamed of brotherhood and freedom as a social objective ¹²⁵ – did he, like Espronceda’s pirate, rather seek untrammeled freedom of action for his own benefit? And beyond the small group of men he led and, at times, terrorised, did people of his own time make him a symbol of justice and freedom?

Little academic scholarship has tried to explain de Soto, but an article by Jess Bier in the radical philosophical magazine Krisis, ¹²⁶ did adopt Rediker’s perspective. Bier used her sources eclectically: without resolving the contradictions between them, she cited Lazaga as well as Gosse, the records of the Gibraltar court and Beyerman’s Narrative of the Atrocities. She also made some careless errors: conflating Beyerman’s initials (A.B., which he used instead of his full name on his title page) with the place of publication (London). So and she listed ‘A.B London’ as the author of Narrative of the Atrocities; and she wrote that de Soto lived during the decline of the ‘Golden Age of Caribbean piracy’. ¹²⁷

Bier focussed on symbols whose meanings were more important than events. To this end, she fixed firmly on the Black Joke name change. Presumably she derived this from Gosse, the only one of her texts to mention it. Bier recast the allegations of ‘theft’: was the seaman-turned-pirate the thief, or was it those who exploited him? For her, de Soto’s story crystalised the perversion of language and texts inherent in accounts of piracy. It was words, the names of victims embroidered on de Soto’s clothes, that betrayed him to the authorities. Did he wear those texts, Bier asked, as tokens of defiance, from ignorance that embroidery could give him away, or through pragmatism, needing clothes to wear? In any event, the pirates were toying with identities: their own names, and the name of their ship, with its ‘black’ or morbid humour. ¹²⁸

Her idea that the pirates’s trials and executions were a masquerade echoed, probably unwittingly, Grey’s ‘spirit of grim humour’. ¹²⁹ But if Bier’s perspective focused on the background to their crimes, what about the foreground, how they related to each other as criminals, or to their victims? This is an approach suggested by Jack Katz’s book, Seductions of Crime, which explains violent criminals as individuals subject to enticements, determined by their social background and by ‘sensually dynamic attractions and compulsions’. ¹³⁰ In this, the world of ‘the badass’, deviance is regarded as a good thing. The essence of being bad is being tougher than everyone else, a baddass ‘must not be morally malleable’. A badass must be dominant and his violence demonstrates that he does as he wills. ¹³¹

Violence, Katz says, is fun; its aesthetic shifts responsibility for violence onto the victim. The escalation of sensual violence demonstrates who is in control. ¹³² Murder becomes righteous slaughter: the victim deserves to be a victim because the assailant perceives the victim’s actions as defiant and disrespectful. ¹³³ The criminal demands the victim’s respect. ¹³⁴ The violent criminal acts not out of righteousness, but of self-righteousness. Murder is not always a single simple act, but portentous and exaggerated. ¹³⁵

There is no space here to make a detailed examination of these pirates in Katzian terms, but a quick consideration of de Soto’s angry order to kill Gibbs, who disrespected him by not heaving-to at once, or of the exaggerated and grim theatre of the burning Topaz, or of how he dominated his fellow pirates by force, or of Barbazan taking of a trophy from his supposedly willing victim, all make the concept of the badass suggestive. Equally, de Soto’s impoverished background, the seamen’s brutalisation by their conditions of work, and by their participation in slavery, the ties that bound them together in a self-reliant group, can all be viewed through the perspective of Rediker and Linebaugh. It is a perspective that ultimately draws on Hobsbawm’s ideas of social banditry. In short, there are alternative paradigms, but historians can only test them if the evidence they have comes from records of what happened. The Black Joke version that is now the dominant narrative deviates from contemporary sources; it is largely based on records that later historians have constructed. This article has demonstrated that they have put the cart before the horse.