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.

The newspapers all glossed over what the pirates did to the women. Since most of the initial published Morning Star content was correspondence to and from Lloyd’s, the marine insurance house, this was not surprising. An insurer's primary concern was what the pirates stole and the damage done to the ship, not what happened to the passengers. Only one account of the events on board alluded to the women's ill-treatment at the hands of the pirates. The absence of reference to it in other accounts could have stemmed from a desire to protect their reputations. After all, in the patriarchy of British society, a man's honour was traditionally fixed in the purity of his wife or daughter. Yet a deeper look reveals the women of the Morning Star stood at the centre of a turbulent confluence of old and new gender and class constraints specific to the pre-Victorian era in Britain. Early nineteenth-century men expected women at sea to always conform to the mores of their social class on land. This included during extreme situations like shipwrecks, or when subjected to sexual coercion or violence. The early nineteenth-century societal attitudes towards sexual assault in Britain at the time often made women morally complicit in the crimes committed against them. Their society swiftly judged and vilified them accordingly.

Since pirates operated outside of accepted societal conventions, the sexual violence committed against the Morning Star women was a rare exception to this judgement. In Spain, authorities openly treated their assaults with compassion and understanding. However in Britain, excusing the women from judgement over the sexual violence inflicted on them manifested as ignoring their stories entirely. The omission of the women from the Morning Star story obfuscated the fact that if it had not been for their bravery and fortitude, the ship and its occupants would have sunk to a watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

By the nineteenth century women had been on the sea, either intentionally or under duress, for centuries. They remained largely absent from formal records until the escalation of transoceanic passenger travel revealed the increase of their presence on board.

Stranger-painters never comprised the majority of those who painted in England. Yet their influential presence from well back in time, as well as the broad xenophobia with which they were often received, serve as underlying themes to the painters’ occupation. As we’ve seen, the evidence of their work through the fifteenth century and well into the Tudor era suggests that their comings and goings over time were casual, frequent, and relatively unobstructed. But several events in and around the decade of the 1540s turned a page on that long-standing phase of foreign involvement, while shifts in religion and foreign policy under Elizabeth continued to move English visual culture in new directions. Finally, events at the opening of the seventeenth century in both England and abroad ushered in yet another phase of the strangers’ presence in the painters’ trade: one which endured into the Civil War years and, to some extent, beyond.

The dissolution of monasteries and chantries, beginning in the mid-1530s and extending into the 1540s, effectively undermined much of the ecclesiastical patronage which had supported the lively visual display of pre-Reformation times. A wave of even more vigorous iconoclasm and visual austerity followed under Edward VI. These events weighed heavily on painters of all stripe, speciality, and origin. For the stranger-painters feasting on English patronage, these years brought an additional threat. The continual popular resentment of immigrants in general and immigrant artisans and tradesmen in particular, bolstered by the fear of a French invasion in 1539, reached a climactic moment with legislation in 1540. The Act Concerning Strangers of that year (32 Henry VIII, c.16) restated legislative restrictions placed on foreigners extending back to the reign of Richard III, and called for their more vigorous enforcement. Most importantly, it distinguished between those strangers who had received letters of denization from the Crown and those who had not, placing severe restrictions on the economic activities of the latter. The former were still barred from taking on other strangers as apprentices, were limited to the employment of two journeymen strangers each, and were obliged to pay taxes at a higher rate. But they were allowed to take long-term leases, set up workshops, and enjoy many of the other benefits accruing to native-born Englishmen.

In pre-Reformation England men and women throughout the realm lived in a richly coloured environment. Painted works of one sort or another were simply ubiquitous, but not necessarily in the forms or locations which their Elizabethan grandchildren would find familiar. Much of that work, and especially in the ecclesiastical settings of late medieval Catholic worship, will have taken the form of decorative painting. The building and decoration of the great country houses one associates with the Elizabethan and Jacobean years, many of them renovated or built on the bones of dissolved monastic houses, still lay well over time's horizon. A great deal of controversy has surrounded efforts to date the great ‘rebuilding of rural England’ which, amongst its other characteristics, put a great many painters to work in the residences of the nation, but few have seen that phenomenon beginning in the early years of Tudor rule.

The production of portraiture, always front and centre in studies of Tudor painting, bore a very different and smaller profile in the early years of that dynasty. Most early painted, as opposed to sculpted, portraits appeared on walls or wood panelling, sometimes on glass, and mostly in ecclesiastical settings. Generic rood screen depictions of biblical figures, saints, and ancient kings were standard fare in many a parish church. Royal portraiture long pre-dated the Tudors, but rarely in the form of easel paintings. Tomb effigies of both Henry II and Richard I are amongst the few earliest surviving English portraits, whilst a now-lost painting of Henry III and Queen Charlotte, done in 1293, was probably a wall painting. A wall painting of Edward III done in 1363 at St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster, also survives, whilst the portrait of Richard II appears on the Wilton Diptych. It also seems likely that during or shortly after their lifetimes some English monarchs were portrayed outside London and the court. An intriguing reference in an account roll of the Gild Merchant of Reading, Berkshire, records the payment of 12d. to an unnamed painter for ‘a picture of the King for the Guildhall’.

Late fifteenth-century painters frequently engaged in media which have tended to escape the close scrutiny of modern art historical investigation.

In the last decade, the violence against women and femicides in Argentina have attracted the attention of a significant portion of civil society, activists, academics, journalists and the public in the region. The number of women murdered on account of their gender in Argentina reached 298 between Jan-uary and December 2020. On 20 March 2020, the government of Argentina imposed a nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandem-ic. Argentina registered a 70% increase in phone calls to the family violence helpline during the lockdown of April 2020. In 2019, the National Registry of Femicides by the Argentine Justice Department reported 252 victims in the country, of which 26 were under 18 and 90% knew the perpetrator. Of these, 46% of the killers lived with the victim, and 66% were the partner or former partner of the assassinated; at least 42% of the murdered women had taken their gender violence to court prior to their murders; and the victims had at least 222 dependent children among them.

In addition to the National Registry of Femicides, the civil association La Casa del Encuentro has, since 2009, gathered its own unofficial statistics through the Adriana Marisel Zambrano Femicide Observatory. It reports a relatively higher incidence of cases: approximately 50 more cases per year than the numbers reported by the National Registry, although the growth curve is similar. According to the observatory, from 2008 to 2019, there were 3,251 femicides and trans femicides in Argentina. In 2019 alone, 299 women died for reasons associated with their gender. La Casa del Encuentro reports that in 12 years, 4,058 children were left without mothers due to femicide, of which 2,599 (more than 64%) were minors at the time of their mothers’ assassinations.

We will return to this data later. Let us pause for a moment on the elements that perpetuate the phenomenon in the country. To begin with, the femicides are part of a process to dispossess women and girls of the control of their bodies and identities. Female annihilation thus starts prior to the murders and/or disappearances of the victims and continues after them through a set of mechanisms that often end up in the abandonment of the cases.