4. A Macabre Buccaneer
The recently indentured Jean-David Nau changed his name to Francois L’Olonnais and moved to Tortuga, a French island north of modern Haiti. At the time, Tortuga was a nest of piracy and lawlessness, and it did not take long before he joined its buccaneers. He showed such zeal in his new profession that within a short time, Tortuga’s French governor gave L’Olonnais his own ship, a letter of marque that authorized him to prey on Spanish ships as a privateer, and turned him loose. He set himself apart with a reputation for viciousness and ferocious cruelty in the treatment – or more accurately, mistreatment – of prisoners, especially Spanish ones.
An expert torturer L’Olonnais got up to some pretty macabre stuff. Among other things, he liked to slice off strips of his victims’ flesh, burn them, or tighten ropes around their skulls until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets. Early in his career, he was shipwrecked off Yucatan. A majority of the crew survived and made to shore, only for most of them to perish soon thereafter when Spanish soldiers found and fell upon them. To survive, L’Olonnais covered himself in blood and viscera, and hid among the corpses. Later, he snuck into a nearby town that was celebrating the deaths of the pirates and arranged for an escape back to Tortuga.
