The last pirate... and the plucky women who foiled his deadly plot
When bloodthirsty Benito de Soto plundered the Morning Star in an orgy of destruction, he was determined to leave no one alive... but the female passengers fought back
IN THE calm waters off Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Morning Star sailed on a light wind. After nearly three months at sea she was on the homeward stretch of her voyage back to Britain. On board were trunks laden with treasure; gold coins, sapphires, rubies and diamonds, as well as 53 crew and passengers. Among them were soldiers, many of them wounded, along with five wives and eight children.
Anne Logie, the wife of Major William Logie – the senior Army officer on board – was nursing their baby daughter, when first a loud boom, then a second and third blast sounded, followed by shouts from the deck. With utter terror, the couple realised they were under attack. And the man orchestrating it is now considered to be one of the 19th-century’s last pirate captains and one of the most brutal. Logie rushed on deck and saw a ship bristling with cannons bearing down rapidly. As it came closer, Morning Star’s second mate rowed over to see what they wanted. He returned with the dreaded news: they were pirates, and they demanded Morning Star’s captain come on board, or they would destroy his ship.
CAPTAIN Thomas Gibbs had no choice but to comply, but as he rowed over, another cannonball and then another hit the ship, shredding her sails and rigging. Then a rowing boat set out from the enemy ship and within minutes came the panicked shout: “Strangers boarding!”
Over the sides of the crippled ship came a group of filthy, wild-looking men armed with cutlasses, knives and pistols.
Anne Logie had heard what pirates did to female passengers so she quickly barricaded herself and the other women and children in the stout roundhouse on the quarterdeck. It was the start of a terrifying, 14-hour ordeal that would leave the decks stained with blood.
This shocking attack on February 19, 1828, a century after the age of widespread piracy was supposed to have ended, was largely hushed up by the British authorities. But in a fascinating new book, author Michael Ford reveals the true story of how those on board Morning Star were left to their fate, after uncovering the story while researching his own family’s history.
His ancestors ran the shipping company that owned Morning Star. As Quakers, the company’s directors insisted that there could be no arms on board, so there were no cannon and the soldiers even had to leave their weapons behind before boarding at Colombo, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), leaving the ship completely unarmed. The ship was loaded with a cargo of coffee, spices, ebony, gold coins as well as the chests of treasure, gold, silver and jewels, looted from the Ceylon royal family whom the British had finally defeated after a long war. Having stopped off in Mauritius and Cape Town, Morning Star sailed north through the Atlantic, joining a convoy of well-armed East Indiaman ships at the island of St Helena.As a hospital ship she was entitled to armed escorts, especially where pirates were known to be at large. American and British navies had successfully waged war on pirates in the Caribbean, forcing them to seek fresh hunting grounds. One of them, a Spanish pirate named Benito de Soto, had sailed to the Atlantic to prey upon merchant shipping.
Even among pirates, de Soto was notorious for being utterly ruthless and bloodthirsty. After boarding and robbing a ship, he would slaughter all on board, with the brutal logic that “dead men tell no tales”. One of his crew claimed to be haunted by the screams of the women and children who were burned alive on one ship.
As cargo ships often stopped to restock at Ascension, de Soto took his ship, the stolen Defensor del Pedro, to lurk off the coast.
A‘Even among pirates, de Soto was notorious for being utterly ruthless... slaughtering all on board’
S THEY neared Ascension, the East Indiaman captains grew impatient to get their cargoes back to London in time for the lucrative spring markets. With the heavily-laden Morning Star struggling to keep up, one by one these ships abandoned her, until she was left alone and defenceless. All Captain Gibbs could do now was pray.
But when the Defensor del Pedro’s attack began, he knew his prayers had been in vain. Once on board the pirates’ ship, along with his second mate, he was taken prisoner and forced to watch as the raiders, led by a French pirate named Barbazan, began ransacking the Morning Star.
In the cabin, Barbazan discovered Major Logie’s military medals. Pressing his pistol to Logie’s head, he demanded to know whether the major had fought at the battle of Waterloo, 13 years earlier. Logie, who had indeed fought there, desperately distracted the pirates by pointing out a stash of gold coins hidden under a floorboard.
The pirates’ fury turned to delight as they discovered not only the gold, but one of the three treasure chests. Hacking it open, they scattered emeralds, sapphires, rubies and
‘Hacking open the treasure chests, they scattered rubies, emeralds, sapphires and gold’
more gold across the floor. Barbazan then discovered the two other treasure chests and made the two ship’s boys – aged 10 or 11 – and an elderly soldier row these back to the pirate ship.
Barbazan summoned Logie’s wife from the roundhouse. Numb with dread, Anne handed her baby to another woman and stepped onto the deck where a horrific sight met her eyes. Soldiers and sailors who had been hurt by the cannon fire or slashed by pirates’ swords lay groaning in welters of blood. The pirates had uncovered two crates of Madeira wine and were roaring drunk.
Determined to exact a sick revenge for the deaths of his relatives at Waterloo, Barbazon dragged Anne Logie across the deck, his intentions all too clear, while other pirates locked her struggling husband in the hold with the other men. Eventually the pirates shut Anne and the rest of the women in the ship’s roundhouse.
At around 10pm, de Soto ordered the raiders to kill all the captives and return to the pirate ship. Most of the pirates were so drunk they could barely move and only their carpenter was capable of action. He bored holes in Morning Star’s hull to sink her, then rowed the drunken raiders back to the pirate ship where he assured de Soto that Morning Star would soon sink, drowning all on board.
De Soto ordered Barbazan to kill Captain Gibbs and his mate by shooting them in the head. The two boys and the old soldier had already been murdered.
Back on Morning Star, Anne Logie realised that the ship was listing and would soon sink. Determined to survive, she bravely gathered the other women together, and they repeatedly rammed the heavy captain’s table against the locked doors, breaking them open before releasing the men from the hold.
While the sailors plugged the holes in the ship, the women desperately pumped out water. For several days they managed to keep the ship afloat, crippled and drifting around the Atlantic till, nearly out of food and water, they were spotted by another British ship whose crew patched up Morning Star.A month later, she limped into Deal on the Kent coast. The Admiralty and the East India Company hastily blamed the dead Captain Gibbs for the disaster, not the convoy for abandoning him in pursuit of profits, nor the Navy’s failure to patrol the waters around Ascension. But with news of other ships being attacked and plundered in the Atlantic, the press and politicians furiously attacked the government for allowing piracy to go unchecked. The hunt for the pirates was on.
So when a vessel answering the description of the pirate ship was wrecked near the Spanish port of Cadiz, the Spanish authorities arrested her crew, who managed to escape the wreck.They were tried and all but two were hanged.
De Soto evaded arrest but later turned up in Gibraltar, using a false identity and trying to sell some valuable cargo. He was recognised and arrested. Damningly, he had items stolen from the American ship, Topaz, he had attacked shortly after Morning Star, burning it along with all on board. He was tried, found guilty and hanged on January 25, 1830 – even though no witness from Morning Star had been able to conclusively identify him as the pirate captain, since de Soto had remained on his own ship.
Yet Morning Star’s treasure had mysteriously disappeared.
It was not until nearly a hundred years later a Spanish builder, digging in the hamlet in Galicia where de Soto had grown up, uncovered an iron trunk – it contained treasure from Morning Star and Topaz, smuggled inland and buried on de Soto’s instructions – posthumous evidence of his guilt.
● Hunting the Last Great Pirate: Benito de Soto and the Rape of the Morning Star by Michael E A Ford (Pen & Sword, £19.99) is out now. For free UK delivery, please call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk