L'Olonnais, whose real name was Jean- David Nau was known in the Caribbean by the nickname of "the man from Les Sables d'Olonne", a town on the French Atlantic coast that had large sandy areas. He maybe he could have been a fisherman, or a sailor, because, undoubtedly, he knew the sea. Apparently he arrived in the Caribbean as engagé between the years 1650 and 1660, and after three years of compulsory service he went to Hispaniola and later to Tortuga . Having traveled to this island, which was home to buccaneers, on two or three occasions, he caught the attention of the governor, M. de la Place, who offered him a ship and made him captain. L'Olonnais began his career with just 20 men, but thanks to his undeniable leadership skills and, without a doubt, the agreement he signed with the governor to share the wealth, he would soon command 8 ships and 400 crew members.
According to the writer, surgeon and also buccaneer Exquemeling, his most significant attribute was his staunch hatred of the Spanish and the cruelty he showed towards them. Thus, for example, when the prisoners did not offer him the confession he sought, he hacked them to death and “licked the blood from the blade with his tongue…”. It is Exquemeling who gives us almost all the known details of the life of L'Olonnais in his work The Buccaneers of America , first published in Dutch in 1678, in Spanish (translated from Flemish) in 1681, and then in English in 1684.
The first known action of this heinous pirate occurred in Campeche , Mexico, when a storm washed his crew ashore, where they were attacked by the Spanish, who killed and wounded the sailors, including L' Olonnais, although he managed to save himself by covering himself with sand and blood and pretending to be dead . Later, he ran into the thicket, healed his wounds and returned to Campeche where, thanks to the help of some slaves he met in his flight, he got hold of a canoe and returned to Tortuga.
There, he got two big dugouts and a crew of 20 buccaneers, with whom he set sail for Cuba and reached the town of Los Cayos where they were discovered. The inhabitants begged the governor of the island to offer them help and he sent a ship of 10 guns with a large sailor. L'Olonnais and his buccaneers attacked the ship at nightfall, unfolding the canoes on both bows to avoid the cannons and board the ship, after which, together with his men, he forced the crew to go below deck to take them out. one and behead them, including a black man sent to be their executioner. He only pardoned a Spaniard, so that he would take an insulting message to the governor of Cuba that, according to Exquemeling, said "I will never give quarter to any Spaniard and I long to be able to proceed with your person with such a punishment to which I have subjected those whom you have commanded against me." It is possible that this event, together with what happened in Campeche, was the origin of L'Olonnais's hatred towards the Spanish.
Expedition to Maracaibo
Meanwhile, he sailed with the ship that he had seized in Cuba to the port of Maracaibo , in Venezuela, where he captured a ship loaded with silver, then returning to his lair in Tortuga, where he was well received. He then planned a large-scale plundering expedition to the same city and, announcing a major undertaking, his crew was joined by some 400 men. He also reached an agreement with Private Michel Le Basque, who would direct the operations on land while L'Olonnais did it at sea. Altogether, in April 1667, 600 men and 8 ships set out. His first stopover was to stockpile supplies on the north and east coasts of La Española , where he ran into a Spanish ship that was transporting cocoa and which he managed to impose after three hours of fierce combat. He was pleased to discover that, in addition to cocoa, there were 40,000 reais in eights and another 10,000 in jewelry. The pirate sent the ship to Turtle , along with the cargo of it, where the governor gleefully unloaded it and sent it back with provisions (a matter of vital importance to the buccaneers).
Once arranged, L'Olonnais sailed towards his objective at the end of July 1667. At the mouth of the Maracaibo lagoon there was a fort, called de the bar , who protected the narrow access, and who attacked with great courage, armed only with swords and pistols, until they conquered it. After that, they gave the signal to the rest of the fleet to enter the lagoon and go to the city of Maracaibo, whose inhabitants had fled, although some of them were located in the woods and the pirates applied their usual methods to rip them off. the information of where they had buried their treasures. Just as Henry Morgan did, the citizens were passed through the rack of torture to force them to confess where they had hidden their wealth, while L'Olonnais hacked to death an unfortunate prisoner exclaiming, as Exquemeling relates, "if you do not confess where you have hidden the rest of your belongings, I will do the same with all of you." your companions.”
After two weeks plundering the inhabitants of Maracaibo, L' Olonnais and his fleet set sail for Gibraltar , a town at the other end of the lagoon, but the local governor had gathered 400 men who, along with another 400 from the city itself, set up batteries and prepared for the fight. L'Olonnais organized a council of war and decided to attack with approximately 380 men from his fleet, each armed with a sword, one or two pistols and 30 charges of gunpowder. "[...] The first one who shows the slightest fear [...] I will shoot him myself," he told them, although he also harangued them:"Come, brothers, follow me and have courage." Then the buccaneers shook hands and attacked, but the determination of the defense caused them enough casualties to be forced to retreat. It was then that L'Olonnais used the old tactic of pretending he was running away along with his men to draw the defenders behind them and turn suddenly to annihilate them. Thus they managed to capture the batteries and the city. According to Exquemeling, Spanish casualties amounted to about 500 dead and 150 prisoners; and about 500 slaves, women and children were left in the custody of L'Olonnais. The buccaneers must have suffered only about 40 dead and as many wounded, which leads us to think that, most likely, the number of Spanish victims is exaggerated, but we cannot know because L'Olonnais stacked them in two large ships and sank them. in the lagoon.
The well-known tortures of the prisoners and inhabitants of Gibraltar took place to find out where their treasures were hidden. There is no doubt that L'Olonnais also intended to create an image of fierceness to cause immediate surrender of his rivals and encourage prisoners to surrender their belongings. As Exquemeling relates, “it was customary in L’Olonnais, if individuals did not confess after being tortured, to cut slices with his saber and tear out their tongues; wishing to do the same to all the Spaniards of the world”. The method worked because when they left Gibraltar, after a month, the buccaneers had pocketed a ransom of 10,000 reais in eights and, on the way back across the lagoon, they got another 20,000 from Maracaibo, in addition to 500 cows and the bells and images of the church. L'Olonnais and his men then went to Isla de Vaca , on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola, to divide up the loot, which amounted to a total of 260,000 reales of eight, as well as jewels and some merchandise such as silk and linen. Each man received 100 reals of eight – as was the custom among buccaneers and pirates, the wounded had priority and received an amount based on the nature of their injuries – while the captain and professionals, such as surgeons or carpenters, received, also as usual practice, a larger quantity. Exceptionally, even the deceased received their pay, being their friends who took care of their studs to give them to the relatives of the dead buccaneers. Exquemeling claims that the governor of Tortuga also got a cut, as expected, by paying only one-twentieth of the value of the previously captured Spanish ship's cocoa cargo.
Boundless ambition
L' Olonnais then went hunting to the south of Cuba to strip the fishermen of their canoes and use them in his new great undertaking:the invasion of the city of Pomegranate , on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. These boats were essential in the shallow waters of rivers and lakes and also very useful for attacking ships by surprise. Of course, the plan was to try to emulate the previous attack on Granada carried out by Henry Morgan and others between 1663 and 1665, who went up the San Juan River in a canoe to Lake Nicaragua. L'Olonnais left with 700 men and six ships, the last of them a large Spanish ship that he had captured in the raid on Maracaibo in which he himself embarked with 300 men.
However, things did not go so well on this expedition. To begin with, the ships unexpectedly encountered a "heavy calm" and drifted toward Cape Gracias a Dios, on the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. It is probable that the buccaneers decided to attack the coastal towns to obtain supplies, as some used canoes to cross the Aguán River looting millet, pigs and chickens from the native Indians. At sea they finally reached Puerto Caballos , where they emptied two warehouses belonging to the Spanish, set them on fire, took prisoners and seized a Spanish ship with 24 guns and 16 stonemasons. As Exquemeling narrates, the prisoners were tortured with "the most shameless and inhuman cruelties that barbarians ever invented, subjecting them to the worst tortures they could imagine", which perhaps responds to the efforts of the writer to add interest to the story.
L'Olonnais then divided his crew, leaving his lieutenant, the Dutchman Moses van Klijn, in charge of watching the port while he, with 300 men, headed to the nearest city, San Pedro Sula , waging a series of battles along the way against the Spanish ambushes . They made progress by charging furiously and using “fireballs” (grenades), pistols and swords. It is here that L'Olonnais is said to have committed his greatest atrocity, questioning several Spanish soldiers he had captured about other possible ambushes on the road to San Pedro Sula. They said they did not know if they would extend further and could not point out another alternative path to enter the city and, then, according to Exquemeling's account, L'Olonnais was consumed with anger:
Once again this episode seems a bit over the top, but it was part of the bloody buccaneer image de L'Olonnais. In any case, it was of no help, as the Spanish defended San Pedro Sula well with their cannons and frustrated any attempt to approach it by surrounding it with thorny bushes. In the end, with the buccaneers ducking each time the Spaniards fired their pieces, just as they had been told, while responding with grenades and musket fire, the fight reached a stalemate and the Spaniards ended up showing a white flag. Next, a surrender agreement was negotiated according to which the inhabitants were given two hours to leave the town without being harmed, which the buccaneers respected, after which they looted it but only found some sacks of indigo dye, also proving unsuccessful. the persecution of the inhabitants.
L’ Olonnais and his men then returned to shore and spent nearly three months careening their ships in the Bay of Honduras and hunting turtles for food. The buccaneers harbored the hope of being able to capture some succulent ship coming from Spain and waited patiently at the mouth of the Guatemala River until one arrived, armed with 42 cannons and a crew of 130 men. A relentless fight then broke out in which L'Olonnais used his always effective method of deploying four canoes on the sides of the boat and a smoke screen to board the ship "while the gunpowder smoke was still very thick" and capture it. . However, in the end the buccaneers were frustrated as the ship was only carrying 50 iron ingots, some paper and wine.
Cruel ending for a cruel pirate
Always in search of new companies, L’Olonnais then proposed a incursion into Guatemala , but much of his crew, led by Moses van Klijn and Pierre le Picard, were skeptical of the idea and left him in search of their own piratical enterprises. So, short of supplies, L'Olonnais sailed across the Bay of Honduras to the Pearl Cays, searching for food on the coast and being forced to kill monkeys and other animals out of desperation. During this voyage, the ship in which he was travelling, large and dilapidated, the same one that he had seized in Maracaibo, ran aground between the islands. The buccaneers survived here for about six months, growing pods and fruit and eating Spanish wheat, which they baked in their portable ovens, while building a barge out of the wood and nails from the beached ship. Once finished, they drew lots who should embark and who should stay ashore, and L'Olonnais set sail for the San Juan River, where the Spanish and Indians pounced on the buccaneers and killed many of them. Forced to continue the voyage, he and his depleted crew landed near Cartagena, in the Gulf of Darién , willing to seize canoes to rescue the buccaneers who had remained in Cayos de Perlas. Here he would experience disaster, as the local Indians “took him prisoner and quartered him alive, throwing the limbs into the fire one by one and throwing his ashes into the air […]”. Exquemeling heard these details from one of the survivors of the event, as most of the crew was also dismembered and thrown into the fire. This was the end of one of the most notable pirates in history, known for his cruelty.
But was L'Olonnais' behavior exceptional? Most of his torture and abuse were only imitated Henry Morgan's methods and his cruelty to prisoners were for the purpose of gaining wealth or information, meaning that he did not torture for his own pleasure. It could also be that Exquemeling, the main source of knowledge of the character, who was also a buccaneer and lived with Henry Morgan in the assault on Panama in 1670, did not feel any appreciation for the Spanish either and wanted to exaggerate the way L'Olonnais treated them. In addition, it is possible that he intended to make his stories more attractive and dupe the reader by emphasizing episodes of brutality and torture, and it is equally likely that L'Olonnais, like the pirate Blackbeard, wanted to give himself a ruthless image that would help him. in their assaults on Spanish cities and ships and in the interrogations of their prisoners, not to mention attracting followers. That said, there is a certain psychological component to L'Olonnais's actions that seems to make his piratical career more violent than usual, even for the aggressive world of 17th-century Caribbean buccaneers.
Bibliography
- Alexandre O. Exquemelin, Buccaneers of America (Edition by Carlos Barral, Madrid, 1999).
- Konstam, A. (2010):The World Atlas of Pirates. Guilford:Lyons Press.
- Travers, T. (2007):Pirates, a History. Chalford:Tempus Publishing.