← Back to the front page

The Golden Age of Piracy’s Most Terrifying Pirates

Khalid Elhassan March 7, 2025 16 min

Piracy - A Tortuga buccaneer — A Tortuga buccaneer. Wikimedia

3. A Vendetta Against Spain and the Spanish

L’Olonnais endured so much mistreatment and so many humiliations that, by the end of his term of indentured servitude, he had come to hate Spain and all things Spanish. The recently indentured Jean-David Nau changed his name to Francois L’Olonnais and moved to Tortuga, the French buccaneer haven island north of modern Haiti, where Montbars the Exterminator, above, also got his start. L’Olonnais joined the buccaneers, and showed great zeal in his new profession. That attracted the attention of the island’s French governor, who gave him a ship, a letter of marque that authorized him to prey on Spanish ships as a privateer, and turned him loose. L’Olonnais set himself apart with excessive viciousness and cruelty in the treatment – or more accurately, mistreatment – of prisoners, especially Spanish ones.

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.