Francois L’Olonnais

 

Francois l’Olonnais was a man with a grudge, a man who was feared and despised by everyone who knew him. A lust for revenge and a hatred of the Spanish meant he thought nothing of disembowelling an enemy with his bare hands – in fact he seemed to take pleasure in it. The treasure he collected along the way hardly seemed to matter at all.

 

 

The French pirate l’Olonnais has become notorious as one of the cruellest and most vicious pirates in history. During his lifetime he was feared and hated as a man who would think nothing of disembowelling a fellow human being with his bare hands, or torturing a victim in such a way that his eyes popped out of his head – literally. He had a particular animosity toward the Spanish, and not surprisingly, given his treatment of innocent citizens in the Spanish settlements he raided, the feeling was mutual.

 

Playing dead

He was born Jean-David Nau in 1635, in a place called Sables d’Olonne in the Vendee, France. The name of his hometown later gave him his nickname, l’Olonnais – the man from Olonne. As a young man, he became an indentured servant and was taken to work in the Caribbean. When he had worked out the terms of his contract, he was set free and began to travel around the islands, eking out a living as best he could. Before long, he had teamed up with local buccaneers and was robbing ships plying the Spanish Maine. He soon developed a following, because he was a competent seaman and a successful pirate.

Early in his career, he and his crewmates were shipwrecked off the coast of Mexico. While they were in disarray, they were attacked by a group of Spanish soldiers, who killed nearly all of them. L’Olonnais only survived by covering himself in the blood of his companions and pretending he was dead. It may have been this experience that gave him his lifelong hatred of the Spanish, and his taste for revenge.

 

Mass beheading

After escaping with his life, l’Olonnais gathered together a motley band of thieves and took to robbing towns and settlements on land, one of the first pirates of his day to do so. In one instance, a Spanish rescue party was sent from Havana to protect the town’s civilian population. L’Olonnais beheaded all of them except one, sending him back to Havana with the message, ‘I shall never henceforward give quarter to any Spaniard whatsoever.’

By now, l’Olonnais was a force to be reckoned with. In 1617, he set sail with a large fleet of pirate ships to ransack the city of Maracaibo in Venezuela. On the way, the pirates attacked a Spanish galleon loaded with gold coins, precious jewels and cacao (cocoa or raw chocolate). They then disembarked at Maracaibo and crept up on the city by land, rather than sailing into the harbour. In this way, they captured the heavily armed fort that protected the city. When they got there, they found that the citizens had hidden their treasures, but l’Olonnais was undeterred. He tortured them without mercy until they admitted where the booty was, and then he and his men made off with it.

 

Tearing out a man’s heart

Their next destination was the city of Gibraltar. Here, they managed to fight off a larger force, killing hundreds of soldiers but sustaining fewer than 100 casualties themselves. Having decimated the opposition, l’Olonnais and his men then toured the island, killing the inhabitants and stealing whatever they could find, be it slaves, silver, gold or precious gems. In accordance with the traditions of piracy, the booty was divided between each of his men.

Not surprisingly, l’Olonnais became a hero among the pirates of the region. Lured by the promise of untold riches, they flocked to his leadership. Soon he was leading a band of more than 500 freebooters on various raids against other Spanish cities in the region, including Puerto Cabello and San Pedro. When he met resistance from the Spanish soldiers guarding San Pedro, he terrified them by choosing one victim, cutting open his breast, pulling out his heart with his bare hands, and eating it. He went on to devise ever more cruel tortures, such as cutting into a victim piece-by-piece, progressing from slices of flesh to entire limbs. Another of his favourite tortures was to tie a string around a victim’s eyes and tighten it so that the eyes jumped out of their sockets. This practice was known at the time as ‘woolding’.

 

Just deserts

Eventually, after many more brutal attacks on innocent Spaniards, l’Olonnais met his match in the shape of the native inhabitants of Darien, Panama. When he landed there with his band of pirates, they captured him, and realizing that he was the legendary l’Olonnais, the man who had raped, pillaged and tortured his way through South America, they decided to wreak their own revenge on him. After tearing him into pieces while he was still alive, they tossed his limbs and torso into a great fire, reducing his body to ashes so that nothing of him remained. It was a fitting end to a life of barbarism, and few mourned his loss.