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The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

Khalid Elhassan January 7, 2020 32 min

25. The Tortuga Privateer

At the end of his term of indentured servitude, Francois L’Olonnais moved to Tortuga, a French island north of modern Haiti that was a nest of piracy and lawlessness at the time, and joined its buccaneers. He quickly impressed, and within a short time, Tortuga’s French governor gave L’Olonnais his own ship, a Letter of Marque authorizing him to prey on Spanish vessels as a privateer, and turned him loose.

In going about his legalized piracy, L’Olonnais set himself apart with a reputation for viciousness and ferocious cruelty in the treatment of prisoners, particularly Spanish ones. An expert torturer, L’Olonnais reveled in slicing off strips of his victims’ flesh, burning them, or tightening ropes around their skulls until their eyeballs popped out of their sockets.

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.