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Olivier La Buse
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Salty Dog
Sailing Master
Posts: 10060



191991 Gold -

PostPosted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 4:24 am    Post subject: Olivier La Buse Reply with quote

Olivier La Buse -- also known as Louis Labous, La Bouse, La Bouche, La Buze, and Olivier Levasseur -- was the
leading French captain of the pirate republic in the Bahamas, and one of the most successful pirates of the
Golden Age of Piracy. He is often said to have been born in Calais, although I was unable to find corroborating
evidence for this assertion while researching The Republic of Pirates,

La Buse first appears in English records in early 1716, when he was the captain of the pirate sloop Postillion and
operating in consort with Benjamin Hornigold and Sam Bellamy. Most of the crew of the Postillion and La Buse's
subsequent commands were French, but this did not prevent him from assisting and collaborating with
English-domianted pirate crews. After weeks of successful cruising in the vicinity of Cuba, La Buse and Bellamy
had a falling out with Hornigold, abandoning him to embark on a successful cruise to the Eastern Caribbean
together in the fall and early winter of 1716. The two appear to have remained close partners and allies.
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Salty Dog
Sailing Master
Posts: 10060



191991 Gold -

PostPosted: Sun Sep 30, 2018 4:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

In January 1717, off the coast of South America, La Buse's company decided to go solo, apparently intending to
capture a large "ship of force." He appeared seven months later off the New England coast in command of a
26-gun ship crewed by some 200 men, making La Buse one of the most formidable pirates at the time. He
captured several small vessels crossing the Gulf of Maine before vanishing for several months. It is possible that
he was the pirate who built a fortified base in Machias, Maine and raided vessels off Newfoundland, actions
falsely attributed to Sam Bellamy by Captain Charles Johnson, the author of the General History of the Pyrates, a
hypothesis I put forward in an August 2007 article in Down East magazine.

In June 1718, La Bous lost his ship and barely avoided being captured by Captain Francis Hume of the HMS
Scarborough at La Blanquilla in the Eastern Caribbean. Escaping with 60 men in a small sloop, he eventually
migrated to West Africa, where, in early 1719, he was voted captain of large pirate ship. Another refugee from the
Caribbean, Paulsgrave Williams, served as his quartermaster in this period. La Bous outlived most of his
colleagues and had a long and generally prosperous career in West Africa and the Indian Ocean until his capture,
in 1730, by French authorities on the island of Reunion. His grave is a popular tourist site there.
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