The Treaty of Amiens signed on 25 March 1802 brought about a fourteen-month period of peace to a war from which Russia had already withdrawn. Desperation for peace in the conflict between Great Britain and France left many questions unsettled or passed over, with regrets emerging on both sides as to terms so quickly agreed. Consequently, Britain, despite agreeing to do so, failed to return Malta to the Knights of St John, with doubts existing in London as to the resilience of guarantees given by France not to interfere in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, Portugal and Naples. Furthermore, Bonaparte, as First Consul, had agreed that, in gaining the return of many lost colonies, he would take no further steps to upset the European balance of power and would withdraw French troops from the Batavian Republic. Not only were those troops not withdrawn, but he consequently went on to annex part of northern Italy (the Cisalpine Republic) while sending troops into Switzerland (the Helvetian Republic). This same period of peace was also used by Bonaparte to substantially strengthen the overall position of France, fortifying the economy and rebuilding the navy. In Great Britain, all this created a fear that if Bonaparte was not immediately challenged, he would become not just over-powerful but unassailable, leading to a realisation that an early renewal of the war was not only inevitable but essential. If Alexander had been persuaded to join Great Britain, hostilities might well have commenced much earlier than 18 May 1803, when Britain made its declaration of war upon France; George III giving as the reason ‘the restless disposition of the Ruler of France’.

Initially, Russia adopted a neutral position in the renewed conflict, but Alexander’s dislike of Napoleon and the threat he represented to the balance of power in Europe saw Russia entering into a short-lived alliance with Great Britain, the two navies engaging the forces of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern bay of the Mediterranean, but with this alliance coming to an abrupt end following a disastrous Russian defeat at Friedland in 1807.

The Crimean War effectively ended the naval alliance that had begun during the reign of Peter the Great. It had flourished throughout the eighteenth century because of Britain’s unquenchable thirst for naval stores, over which Russia had gained a virtual supply monopoly. The inability of the British government to secure, throughout that century, an alternative mass supply source created a relationship with Russia that Britain could not afford to break. In turn, a balance of trade, highly favourable to Russia, and primarily resulting from the export of naval stores into British ports, gave Russia little reason to jeopardise the continuance of that trade. Yet, it was clear, even in the eighteenth century, that all was not well. Given that it was the stores imported from Russia, once these materials had been manufactured into masts, rigging, sails and iron internal support pieces, that ensured the ability of Britain’s commercial and naval ships to put to sea, there was concern in Britain that, for the future good of the nation, this monopoly would have to be broken. In turn, while the trade was commercially profitable, Russia too was placed in a position of dependency, much like a colony supplying an imperial colonial power; with the raw materials sucked out of Russia, while bringing into Russia much needed capital, the trade was seen to be bringing to Britain a much greater level of profit. That such causes of potential aggravation did not unduly upset matters during the eighteenth century mainly resulted from a joint fear of France, Britain’s hereditary enemy and one allied to Russia’s primary foe, the Ottoman Empire. However, the changes wrought in Europe upon the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte heavily impacted upon both the economic relationship between Great Britain and Russia and Britain’s relationship with France. In place of their former enmity, Britain and France were now often working together in an apparent relationship of harmony, the two intent upon securing the continuance of peace across Europe. Thus, Great Britain and Russia now had no joint enemy against which they were united. Equally important, however, was not only an ending of the Russian monopoly over the supply of naval stores into British ports, but a long-time period of peace that saw fewer British warships at sea, so reducing the overall quantity of naval stores that had to be imported.

Over the twenty-eight-year period from 1787 to 1815 the Russian Empire, sometimes with and sometimes without the implicit support of Great Britain, engaged in a series of increasingly bitter wars, broken only by relatively short periods of peace. War broke out with the Ottoman Empire in August 1787 and upon its conclusion in 1792 Russia was confirmed in her possession of Odessa and the Crimea Kharnate. Sweden declared war on Russia in June 1788, the Russo-Swedish War, with this continuing until August 1790. The outbreak of war against Sweden had a serious impact on the conflict still being fought against the Ottoman Empire: Catherine was forced to cancel a projected sailing of the Baltic fleet into the Mediterranean. Here, once again, the intended purpose was that of the Russian fleet inciting a Greek revolt combined with an assault on Istanbul. Shortly after the ending of the Russo-Swedish War, in May 1792, Catherine sent a large army into Poland, on the pretext of opposing constitutional reforms that she argued had opened up Poland to radical Jacobinism. From this, Russia gained further territory to the west, followed by further acquisition of Polish territory in 1795, which was to be administered as the Minsk and Izyaslav Viceroyalties. Also, in 1795 Catherine launched her Oriental Project, an assault to the south upon Persia that was ultimately designed to acquire strategic territory between Anatolia and Tibet, but which was curtailed on the accession of her son, who reigned as Paul I (r.1796–1801). In the end it was the entry of Russia into various coalitions fought initially against Revolutionary France that was to have the most wide-ranging effect on Russia. The turning fortunes of those wars saw Russia closely allied with Great Britain for the greater part of that period, but with this closeness interspersed with periods of neutrality of even outright hostility. While Russia under Catherine was, at the outset of these wars, in alliance with Great Britain, her son, shortly after his accession, began to favour France, becoming hostile towards Britain, a state of affairs that was quickly terminated upon his assassination and the accession of Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I (r.1801–25).

A joint desire on the part of Great Britain and Russia to defeat Napoleon had served as a temporary fixative to an alliance that had long been under strain, the final vanquishing of the ‘Corsican Ogre’ raising the contentious question as to how each had made use of the war to gain advantage over the other. In Russia it was believed that Britain had only financed the war for the purpose of gaining long-term commercial advantage, an accusation evidenced by Britain having attained a swathe of new colonies, the securing of her position in India and a stranglehold on trade in the Levant and Black Sea littorals. This last was of particular significance for Russia; the wartime period, which had seen Britain replace France as the Ottoman Empire’s primary trading partner, had consequently deprived her merchants of trading opportunities that, in these two regions, were believed to be Russia’s by right. Apart from placing Great Britain and Russia in direct commercial competition, this situation had create an added fear, that of Britain, in the event of the Ottoman Empire imploding, being well placed to step into the resulting void to gain both further territory and increased commercial opportunity. No less an irritant, and doubtless emphasised by Napoleon at his meeting with Alexander at Tilsit in 1807, was Britain taking from Russia vast amounts of raw materials, these invariably transported on British ships, which, upon arrival in Britain, were profitably used to advance Britain’s steadily growing industrial economy. Likewise, in Britain, concerns, once the war had drawn to a conclusion, were more readily being expressed as to a number of perceived military and commercial ambitions supposedly harboured by Russia. Muted during the war against Napoleon, it was feared by many that Russia was intent upon a policy of perpetual territorial expansion, with acquisition of the Ottoman Empire her primary objective. If this was achieved, it would place Russia in full control of the Dardanelle Straits and the Sea of Marmara, allowing her to turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake, with a possible blocking of this area to future British trade.

Despite their reputation as the enemies of all mankind, every pirate always needed friends. Few could obtain the financial benefit of their plunder without sympathetic people in coastal port towns to clandestinely buy it from them. Once the pirates had money to burn, more opportunistic people emerged to help them spend it. As the pirate captain who kidnapped Aaron Smith demonstrated, a savvy pirate seeking to establish and maintain a piracy business built mutually beneficial relationships with those on the shore. Unfortunately for Benito de Soto, he was not such a person. Instead, he needed a town like Tortuga, used by the pirates of the Caribbean a century earlier.

Tortuga appealed to pirates because it was ruggedly inaccessible by land and offered a safe harbour, abundant fresh water, hunting, and timber opportunities. The little island's success in the 1660s to 1720s established two other conditions a pirate needed in a port: weak, ineffective and complicit local authority, and favourable geopolitical conditions. For decades, the often substantial gains of pirate plunder benefited Tortuga's residents, including those in charge. Governor Bertrand D’Ogeron, appointed by the French government to Tortuga in 1664, bought the pirate Francois L’Ollonois’ entire cargo of cocoa for a twentieth of its worth. This complicity undermined any sporadic efforts made to drive the pirates away. At the same time, Tortuga sat in the middle of a constant power struggle between Spain, England, and France over the island's political ownership. Eventually, the French gained the upper hand and, by 1726, the British and French won their struggle to secure their colonial assets and drive the pirates out of the Caribbean.

One hundred years later, as we saw in Chapter 3, support for ‘patriotic’ pirate captains like Pepe el Mallorquin, Roberto Cofresi and Diablocito came from their parochial relationships on Spanish-owned islands. They exploited their local communities and the weakened Spanish authority to maintain the profitability of their commercial operations. Puerto Rican towns along the Mona Passage, and isolated islands and towns around Cuba such as the Isle of Pines, Trinidad de Cuba and Matanzas, all supported local pirates. While it is theoretically possible these places could have provided a safe harbour for Benito de Soto, there were several drawbacks for him. Being from mainland Spain meant he was not a local.

After his execution, Benito de Soto's legacy in Spain only grew. He is often believed to be the inspiration for the romantic poet Jose de Espronceda's 1835 celebrated poem La Cancion del Pirata (The Pirate's Song), although there is no evidence to support this assertion. The poem is known to have inspired a series of other widely distributed poems. The Defensor de Pedro story appeared in Alejandro Benisia's 1855 novel El Milano de los Mares (The Kite of the Seas), although it positions Barbazan as the hero of the story, not de Soto. By the twentieth century, the publication of Philip Gosse's History of Piracy in Spanish introduced the Black Joke (known in Spanish as La Burla Negra) myth into the narrative around Benito de Soto. The story was solidified in Spanish folklore in 1955, when novelist Jose Maria Castroviejo titled his version of the Benito de Soto story La Burla Negra. The sanitisation of his murderous piracy into the actions of a folk hero was further memorialised when the local councils of Pontevedra and Cadiz named streets after him.

The so-called discovery of some of Benito de Soto's treasure also fed into his legacy. In 1926, contractors excavating the foundations of a new house in the village of Mouriera, apparently near Benito de Soto's family home, uncovered a thick iron trunk. There was no mention of what, if anything, was inside it. The article also goes on to falsely describe how de Soto's next adventure after abandoning the trunk in Pontevedra was ‘a fight with some Sallee pirates off Mogador’, so its accuracy is rather questionable. However, the local Pontevedra newspaper, El Diario de Pontevedra, confirmed the story. The discovery of the mysterious chest was the talk of the town. A great crowd assembled at the construction site to try and gain a glimpse of it. Yet nobody seemed to know what was inside it. An elderly gypsy lady called Manuela Rodina told the local reporter that she had lived in the house being excavated for many years and it had been previously occupied by members of Benito de Soto's family. A well-known elderly sailor even went to the police to unsuccessfully lay claim to the chest because his wife was a descendant of Benito de Soto's mother.

As Benito de Soto and the pirates of the Defensor de Pedro traversed the Atlantic raiding ships, at least another four raiders were busily following in their wake. Two out of these four were never apprehended, so very little is known about them. One was believed to be an American pirate who spoke Spanish and operated between St Helena and the Brazilian coast around May 1828. He was allegedly responsible for attacks and murders on the British ships Clorinda, Cumberland, George Canning and Eliza, plus two unnamed Portuguese vessels. The other pirate operated further north around the Western Islands (Azores). He was reported to be using Colombian and Buenos Ayres colours and ‘attacking every vessel’. Lloyd's reports deemed him responsible for attacks on Caroline, Bustard, Vine and an unnamed Spanish privateer. There is no indication of his nationality.

The two who were caught were first mentioned in Chapter 6: Captain Taylor and Captain Buysan. Their trials provide an example of a fundamental development in piracy history that occurred in the nineteenth century: the divergence of American piracy law away from the centuries-old precedents set by British law. Joseph Lazaro Buysan, the captain of Las Damas Argentinas, and William Taylor, captain of the Federal, both stood trial for piracy for overstepping their privateering commissions from Buenos Ayres. However, they faced very different consequences.

The British took Buysan, a Spaniard, to British-owned St Christopher Island (St Kitts) for his attack on the neutral British-flagged Carraboo near the Canary Islands. Taylor, an American, was captured by American naval captain Daniel Turner near St Eustatius. Captain Turner took him to newly acquired Florida for prosecution under American piracy law.

Buysan, a former Spanish naval officer, became a privateer for Buenos Ayres in 1826 by taking over the commission of the Spanish brig Bolivar. He then renamed the ship Las Damas Argentinas and legitimately took five Portuguese vessels and a Spanish brig. Then his greed overtook him and he began raiding any ship he encountered, regardless of nationality or neutrality. Lloyd's held Buysan responsible for additional attacks on two British, one Dutch and one American vessel around the Canary Islands in the first half of 1828. He took the British-flagged Carraboo in July.

The Defensor de Pedro did not begin its voyage as a pirate ship. Its first captain, an officer of the Imperial Navy of Brazil called Mariz de Sousa Sarmento, maintained a reliable and steady reputation in the Atlantic seafaring community. In 1827, Captain Sarmento obtained a legitimate commission from Dom Pedro I, the Emperor of Brazil, to trade in slaves and take prizes. He intended to sail from Rio de Janeiro in November. Unfortunately for Captain Sarmento, this was a very precarious and volatile time to be slave-trading and prize-taking on the Atlantic Ocean.

Dom Pedro was the son of the Portuguese king Dom Juan VI. To defend Portuguese colonial interests from Napoleon's advances during the Revolutionary Wars, Dom Juan sent Pedro to Brazil. As Spanish American colonies began agitating for independence after the war, Dom Pedro pushed for Brazilian independence. He authorised Brazilian privateering against Portuguese ships until his father granted Brazil independence from Portugal in 1822. The new Empire of Brazil occupied a huge geographic area and contained a multitude of provinces with competing loyalties and interests. During a visit in 1821, Captain Richard Fox wrote, ‘I observed people to have but little confidence in each other; doubts and mistrust appeared to be the ruling passions, and even in almost every family there appeared to be a division of political sentiments.’ In general, the north held more allegiance to Portugal through the retention of Portuguese military assets and trade ties, while the central south held the true believers in independence in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. This volatile domestic environment persisted and began to complicate Dom Pedro's efforts for international recognition of Brazilian sovereignty.

The first danger for Captain Sarmento was the component of his commission that authorised a shipment of slaves. Brazil's wealthy and influential landowners relied heavily upon slaves to run its lucrative agricultural sector. The deplorable conditions of the slaves’ day-to-day lives, assuming they survived their initial Atlantic crossing, drove a constant need to replenish slave labour. However, a burgeoning anti-slavery movement had already spread across the Atlantic. By 1827, obtaining new slaves from Africa was complicated by the British Royal Navy's active intervention against foreign ships carrying slave cargoes.

Captain Magnus Johnson held news in his hand so distressing there was not a second to lose. It was Saturday, 12 April 1828 and his ship Guildford had just docked in the southern English port of Deal. Instead of overseeing the removal of his cargo from China or walking down to the New Inn for a well-earned pint of ale, Captain Johnson leapt off his ship and rushed into town to find the local Lloyd's representative.

As soon as Johnson found the man and gave him his letter, it was quickly copied and sent to John Bennett, Secretary of the Lloyd's Committee in London. Alarmed, Bennett immediately sent a copy directly to John Wilson Croker, the Secretary of the Lords of Admiralty. This was the branch of the British government that oversaw the nation's maritime affairs. Croker quickly escalated the letter even higher to the Duke of Clarence, the Lord High Admiral and the King's brother. Meanwhile, the press picked up Johnson's news and it spread swiftly across the country. By the time the British brig Morning Star limped into Deal with its bedraggled crew and passengers a few days later, the whole of southern England knew what Captain Johnson had written in his letter: the ship and its passengers had survived a vicious attack by pirates in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Newspapers back then did not employ reporters. Instead, publishers compiled each edition haphazardly with a mixture of personal correspondence, government documents and transcripts, and material from other newspapers. This meant the first news articles about the Morning Star pirate attack published the contents of Captain Johnson's letter to Lloyd's almost verbatim. The power of twenty-first-century historical newspaper archival aggregators showed Captain Johnson's description of events attracted immediate attention of an extraordinary breadth. By 19 April, the story had reached Cornwall, Manchester, Edinburgh, and Cork. As more information from passengers and crew came to light, the Morning Star story spread through newspapers across the world. By the end of 1829, it had reached as far away as the penal colony of Hobart.

Like ghosts, zombies and magic, pirates were already a mainstay of popular culture in 1828. Yet unlike the others, pirates existed as a fantasy and a reality.

This book began in late 2019 when I first realised that piracy in the Atlantic Ocean during the last decades of the Age of Sail was a rich and unexplored era of history. By far the most evidence available surrounded the attack on the Morning Star by Benito de Soto and the pirates of the Defensor de Pedro. This compelling story forms the basis of this book. It also includes true stories, backed by historical evidence, of other Atlantic pirates of the nineteenth century and the circumstances that allowed them to thrive.

The brutal 1828 attack on the Morning Star brought real pirates back into the public consciousness for the first time in a century. Newspapers were now far cheaper and accessible to the masses. This meant even before the Morning Star limped into Gravesend with its dishevelled survivors on board, news of the attack had spread across southern England. The power of twenty-first-century news aggregators revealed that the full story of the Morning Star attack and the pirates who committed it played out across global media over the next two years. Fortunately, a handful of witness accounts survived, most notably by Andrew Beyerman, the Morning Star's steward, and James Johnston, one of the passengers. Absent, as was typical at the time, was any hint of the female passengers’ plight. Fortunately, Spanish records survived to gain some insight into their harrowing experience.

The Morning Star attack may have been the most notorious but it was not isolated. In fact, dozens of British ships reported raids and attacks that same year. Through their sheer scale, these could only have been perpetrated by multiple individuals operating independently. I examine how many of these people gained their raiding experience in and around Cuba during Spain's battles to retain its Latin American colonies after the end of the Revolutionary Wars in 1815. These include Roberto Cofresi, Diablocito, and Pepe el Mallorquin.

That we know so much about the Morning Star pirates is thanks to a Spanish naval officer called Joaquin Maria Lazaga. In 1892, he painstakingly collated and curated thousands of pages of Spanish court documentation and published it into a nearly 500-page volume he called Los Piratas del Defensor de Pedro.

The Morning Star pirates were part of a generation of sea-raiders who trained in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. Of course, the famous pirates of the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy had long ago died out. Their exploitation of the constant state of flux over Dutch, British and French ownership of the various islands of the Caribbean had allowed them to operate with impunity until around 1723, when the three powers began to strengthen their control of the region and laws surrounding piracy. By the nineteenth century, this stronger geopolitical hold over their colonial assets in the Caribbean deterred Dutch, British and French sea-raiders from engaging in piracy there. However, Spain's hold on its colonial assets rapidly deteriorated after the Peninsular War. This meant most nineteenth-century pirates of the Caribbean began their raiding careers as privateers connected to rebellious bids for independence by Spanish American colonies.

The word ‘privateer’ was coined around 1660 to describe the already centuries-old practice of sovereigns and rulers authorising individuals to raid enemy ships on their behalf. Until the mid-nineteenth century, sea-raiding was an important revenue raiser for maintaining power across the world during wartime. It was not just a European practice. Local rulers in the East Indies, at the major trading posts of Tangiers, Algiers and Tunis in North Africa, in the South China Sea, and in the Persian Gulf, among many other seafaring regions, authorised their subjects to engage in raiding the ships of their enemies. As a result, most European merchant ships trading in these regions carried arms for self-protection, even in peacetime.

To avoid accusations of piracy, privateers required evidence of the legitimacy of their raiding. In Europe and European colonies, this took the form of a written commission known as a letter of marque. When a ruler declared war on another ruler, private individuals sought out commissions from their ruler or the ruler's representatives to attack the enemy's shipping on the ruler's behalf for the duration of the war. It was not always necessary for the privateer to be the subject of the authorising ruler. If laws did not prohibit it, anyone with a suitable ship and the ability to muster a crew could obtain a sea-raiding commission.

Just after dawn on 19 February 1828, the Morning Star arrived within twenty four kilometres of Ascension Island. The remoteness of the little windswept island cannot be overstated. Its nearest neighbour in the South Atlantic Ocean is St Helena, over a thousand kilometres away. The coasts of South America and Africa lie across over 2,000 kilometres of ocean either side. It would be a stretch to say Ascension enjoyed a constant flow of ocean-going traffic. However, given the dearth of alternative fixed points for measuring the time for the chronometer and the island's 859-metre high peak that rose majestically into the clouds, it did attract a surprising number of passing ships.

The Morning Star had missed sighting St Helena, so Captain Thomas Gibbs decided it would be prudent to ascertain the ship's longitude on the chronometer at Ascension. The Morning Star had already made excellent time on its voyage from Ceylon so it was a worthwhile diversion. The ship had departed Colombo on 13 December 1827 with a cargo of ebony, pepper, cinnamon and coffee; and a mixed selection of fifty-two crew, passengers, invalid soldiers, wives and children. Fine weather and favourable winds meant the Morning Star had made Mauritius by 6 January and Table Bay (Cape of Good Hope) by the end of the month. Nothing of any real note had occurred on the voyage so far. This all changed that February day at 7 a.m., when Captain Gibbs sighted a mysterious brig about six leagues west of the island. According to one witness, the moment the crew of the brig spotted the Morning Star they ‘made more sail close to the wind, keeping still on the same tack, until the Morning Star had passed her abaft the beam’. Then, the mysterious brig gave chase.

The Morning Star was a new breed of multi-purpose sailing ship that had begun to appear after the end of the Revolutionary Wars (1801–15). Until the late eighteenth century, ship-builders designed sailing ships to carry only cargo. Even for slave cargoes ships were not built to swiftly and conveniently transport people across the ocean.

Most of the Defensor de Pedro pirates tasted freedom in Cadiz for only six days. Perhaps if they had done more laying low and less carousing and drinking they would have been more attuned to the growing suspicions of the authorities around them. The unwanted attention they drew to themselves combined with the suspicions of men like Lirado and Sanchez about the shipwrecked vessel proved their undoing. On 14 May, Don Jose Aymerich y Vacas, the Military and Civil Governor of Cadiz, summoned each pirate separately and demanded they explain why the original documentation of the Defensor de Pedro cited forty-three men on board and only seventeen were on the stranded vessel. At the time, news of the Morning Star's arrival in London nearly a month earlier had not yet reached Cadiz, so Don Vacas had no reason to suspect a connection between the two ships.

Don Vacas began the enquiry with the man who said he was Captain Pedro Mariz de Sousa Sarmento but we know was really the pilot, Rodriguez. The ‘Captain’ told Don Vacas a story about the ship being ordered by the government to swiftly depart Rio de Janeiro with a six-man shortage, meaning a crew of thirty-four men. ‘Sousa Sarmento’ said the destination of the trip was only ever intended to be the islands of Cape Verde, where he would sell the cargo and trade. The armaments were only for self-defence against the privateers known to be active in the area at the time. During the month the Defensor de Pedro sat docked at Cape Verde, ‘Captain Sousa Sarmento’ told Don Vacas, sixteen men left the ship. This left a crew of eighteen. The ‘Captain’ then told how the paperwork to support these assertions had been unfortunately lost. On their departure from Cape Verde, storms damaged the ship and the winds did not favour a return to Rio de Janeiro. Instead, the Defensor de Pedro sailed to A Coruña where it picked up a cargo for Lisbon. However, more bad weather caused it to be wrecked in Cadiz on the way.

It was a feasible enough story on its own but Don Vacas was not a gullible man. He next checked the validity of the story with the Portuguese man who said he was the ship's pilot, Jose Santos.