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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

24. The Duel That Launched a Pirate

When Michel de Grammont was born into a French noble family in 1650, few would have expected the weird twists of fate that would lead the aristocratic baby into ending his days as an infamous pirate. Yet that was to be the destiny of de Grammont, who terrorized the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico for a decade and a half.

The weird radical transformation began when a fourteen-year-old de Grammont was angered by a French army officer who was courting his sister, and challenged him to a duel. Despite his youth, he won the duel and killed the officer. That got de Grammont into trouble, and he was forced to flee France. He ended up in Hispaniola, and became a privateer – a pirate operating with a “Letter of Marque” from a government, authorizing him to prey upon enemy shipping in time of war.

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.