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Satanic Tomatoes and Other Weird Details Not Taught in History Class

Khalid Elhassan July 4, 2020 33 min

South Lawn - Goat — Wilson's sheep. Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

28. “His Only Pleasure Seemed to be to Contemplate… the Number of Dead and Dying“

Montbars the Exterminator. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Montbars left the French Navy after his uncle’s death, and headed to the pirate haven of Tortuga, an Island off the Haitian coast. Between his professional expertise as a naval officer, and his seething hatred of Spain, the buccaneers’ main foe, he was welcomed with the open arms. Before long, he was captaining his own buccaneer ship.

He made a name for himself as a scary weird pirate in early action against a Spanish vessel: “Montbars led the way to the decks of the enemy, where he carried injury and death; and when submission terminated the contest, his only pleasure seemed to be to contemplate, not the treasures of the vessel, but the number of dead and dying Spaniards, against whom he had vowed a deep and eternal hatred, which he maintained the whole of his life“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.