Spanish Adventurers

[Salty Dog]

Two years later, in August 1832, two other Spaniards – captain Pedro Gibert and first mate Bernardo de Soto – led their men in an attack on the American brig Mexican. According to Benjamin Brown Reed, “The Spaniards came up and threatened to cut our throats with their knives, they made us go down one at a time, and beat us to make us get the money out quick . . . . The boatswain kicked me forward, and then kicked me down the forecastle . . . [they] struck the captain so hard with the speaking trumpet as to bend it all up . . . . (Trial, 9)

Captain John Groves Butman testified that he:

Heard them . . . close up the hatchways, soon after this heard a great noise as if the mainsail had fallen, soon after a spar was thrown on deck. We were now all fastened below, and half suffocated with smoke coming down from the camboose. From the cabin window we saw them return to [their ship and] made sail. We now got on deck through the cabin sky-light, and found . . . the standing and running rigging was cut away, the mainsail cut into ribbons and hanging over the camboose, the camboose burnt half up, in it was a tub of rope yarns, on fire, and other combustibles. In a few moments the fire would have reached the mainsail and set the masts on fire, all the sails were cut up badly. (Trial, 7)

[Salty Dog]

The Mexican sailed into Salem on 12 October. The pirates were eventually captured and tried. Gibert, de Soto, and five others were found guilty, but the jury felt Bernardo de Soto deserved some mercy. Before he became a pirate, “he saved and brought in the crew and passengers of the American ship Minerva, which had taken fire. . . . De Soto’s conduct was very highly spoken of at the time in Havana, and he was presented with a piece of plate, by the merchants of New Orleans.” (Trial, 50) The judge, however, sentenced them all to hang; De Soto’s wife sought an audience with President Andrew Jackson, who granted her husband a pardon.

Piracy ebbed and flowed in the waters surrounding the New World, but countries with powerful navies strove to stop it. Privateering, for the most part, came to an end with the signing of the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which brought an end to the Crimean War. Although not a participant in the war, Spain eventually agreed in principle to the abolition of privateering, but reserved the right to issue letters of marque, if necessary, during the Spanish-American War of 1898. [/list]