Movies and cartoons often depict a pirate
as a gallant swashbuckler with a parrot on his shoulder, saying
"Arrrr!" and ordering people to walk the plank. In truth, most were
ruthless thugs, licensed by various European governments to target
Spanish galleons on the high seas.
The Golden Age of Piracy lasted roughly from 1690 to 1730, and
during this time, pirates, or privateers, as they were called, kept
busy by attacking ships on the trade routes between South America
and
Europe.
Pirates favored the
Caribbean for its central location and lingered
in seventeenth-century haunts like Petit-Goave in Haiti; Port
Royal, Jamaica; and the island of Tortuga. Along the coast of
Mexico's Quintana Roo, buccaneers would lie in wait for galleons
coming up from
Colombia. By setting lanterns along the Chinchorro
Reef, pirates would fool the ships' captains into thinking the
treacherous undersea shelf was easily navigable. When the vessel
ran aground or sank, the pirates pounced.
Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, and Jean Lafitte are familiar to
anyone interested in pirates. Fermín Mundaca de Marechaja is lesser
known, especially to Americans.
Mundaca made a fortune shipping slaves from
Africa to the New
World. He also worked the opposite direction, selling kidnapped
Mayan slaves to plantation owners in
Cuba. The Spaniard was
technically not really a pirate, but he insisted on referring to
himself as such, because, some say, he thought it was more
respectable than calling himself a slave trader.
When the British Royal Navy started cracking down on slave trading
in the mid-1860s, Mundaca thought it prudent to retire and
purchased nearly half of a tiny island off the coast of Mexico.