25. Plundering For a Good Cause?
To help sustain the recently established French settlement in Canada, Jean-Francois Roberval became a pirate, preying upon English merchant ships. His friend and patron King Francis I enjoyed tweaking the English, but to avert open hostilities with England, he rebuked Roberval. It amounted to a wink-wink-nudge-nudge slap on the wrist, and Roberval continued plundering English ships.
The Canadian settlement eventually failed, and the survivors were repatriated back to France. Roberval remained in the New World, however, and continued his career, now focusing on Spanish ships and possessions in the Caribbean. Throughout much of the 1540s, he terrorized the Spaniards, attacking Cartagena, Rancheras, and Santa Marta in Colombia, plus Baracoa and Havana in Cuba. Roberval finally ended his weird experiment with piracy, retired from plundering the high seas in 1547, returned to France, and converted to Protestantism. He got tangled up in France’s Wars of Religion, and was assassinated in Paris in 1560.
