“After opening fire with cannon and forcing the isolated English vessel to stop, an armed boarding party swarmed over Morning Star’s side.”

By Michael Ford

NO ONE ABOARD the English vessel Morning Star imagined they’d be sailing into history when their ship departed Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) for Great Britain on Dec. 13, 1827. Yet the unarmed merchantman was just weeks away from a bloody and savage encounter with one of the last “great pirates” of history: Benito De Soto.

A Spanish brigand, De Soto and his crew cruised the waters of the South Atlantic as part of a short-lived resurgence of piracy following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Morning Star would be one of the final unlucky victims of this brief outbreak.

Aboard the doomed vessel were several dozen wounded and disease-ridden redcoats who were heading home after fighting in one of the many colonial campaigns against local rulers who refused to submit to British authority.

Stored in Morning Star’s hold were a number of stout wooden crates laden with plundered treasure, seized over time from the rebel forces and which were on their way to London as the Duke of Wellington’s Prize Fund. The famed victory at the Battle of Waterloo by Britain’s most famous soldier would see him elected Prime Minister during Morning Star’s voyage.  

Fifty-three men came aboard Morning Star. At the head of the contingent was British army officer Major William Logie. He was accompanied by his wife and child. A number of the men were ill with disease or were wounded and confined to the sick-bay below deck. There were also five military wives or widows and eight children.

Having first stopped at the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and then Cape Town to take on provisions, Morning Star sailed northwards in the south Atlantic, intending to join a convoy of well-armed East Indiaman ships at the British island of St. Helena. As a hospital ship, she was entitled to the protection of any Royal Navy warships or armed British East India Company vessels heading north for England.

Although merchant ships at the time were armed with cannon to deter pirates, Morning Star was somewhat different. She was built at the port of Scarborough, in the north of England, five years earlier by the Tindall family who, for centuries, had been Quaker shipbuilders. Because their religion was founded on promoting peace, no small arms or cannon could be carried on board a Quaker vessel.

Consequently, when the discharged sick or wounded soldiers were repatriated from Ceylon to England aboard Tindall ships, they were ordered to leave their weapons behind. Morning Star was heavily laden with a cargo of coffee, spices, ebony, gold coins and three heavy chests of treasure.

Morning Star was sailing in calm waters before a light wind in the middle of the South Atlantic on Feb. 19, 1828. She was on the homeward stretch of her voyage.

This year, storms had swept up from the south preventing Morning Star from approaching the tiny harbour at St. Helena to obtain convoy protection. Instead she joined several East Indiamen heading north. The larger, fast-sailing ships were impatient to reach London to catch the lucrative Spring markets and soon the heavily laden Morning Star fell behind with an unknown American vessel at the tail-end of the convoy. The leaders sailed out of sight as the small convoy approached the remote landfall of Ascension Island.   

That’s when trouble appeared. A sail was spotted on the horizon. It belonged to the ship Burla Negra “Black Joke,” a former slave vessel that had recently been taken over by mutineers. They were led by the pirate Benito de Soto.

After opening fire with cannon and forcing the isolated English vessel to stop, an armed boarding party swarmed over Morning Star’s side. With no weapons aboard, the captain, crew and passengers aboard the merchant ship were helpless to resist to the pirates; all were taken captive.

De Soto’s men held everyone aboard at gunpoint for hours. Many of the male passengers were seriously wounded; the women were assaulted. One of the pirates, Barbazan, summoned Major Logie’s wife from the roundhouse after which she was raped.

By the end of the day, the pirates looted not only the passengers’ valuables, but they seized three British military treasure chests containing emeralds, sapphires and rubies which were taken back to the pirate ship.

The pirates then discovered two crates of Madeira wine in the ship’s hold and soon became roaring drunk and continued to torture and abuse the passengers.

The violence continued into the night until eventually de Soto ordered his men to kill all the captives and return to the Burla Negra. At that, one of the raiders bored holes in Morning Star’s hull intending to sink the ship and all aboard before rowing the boarding party back to the pirate ship.

Before sailing away into the night, De Soto ordered the execution of Morning Star’s captain, a man named Gibbs, and the ship’s mate. Both were shot in the head with pistols.

Meanwhile, Major Logie’s wife Anne who, with the other women, had been locked in the roundhouse cabin on deck throughout the raid, realized that Morning Star was listing dangerously.

Gathering the other women together, they rammed the heavy captain’s table repeatedly against the stout locked doors, finally breaking them open and enabling the women to release the men held captive in the hold. As some of the crew plugged the holes in the hull, the women desperately operated the pumps to lower the water level in Morning Star’s hold.

For several days the women, aided by a few able-bodied men, kept the crippled ship afloat. Adrift in the Atlantic and almost out of food and fresh water, they were spotted by a passing British ship whose crew effected temporary repairs to Morning Star’s hull. A month later, she limped into the port of Deal on the south coast of England.

When the news of the disaster made headlines in London newspapers, both the Admiralty and the East India Company blamed the deceased Captain Gibbs for the disaster with not a word of criticism for the captains of the convoy ships who had abandoned Morning Star. As incoming news of the plunder of other ships in the Atlantic spread, the press and politicians turned on the government for ignoring the surge of piracy. By then, the hunt for the pirates was a major priority.

Then, when a vessel answering the description of the pirate ship was wrecked in gales on a beach near the Spanish port of Cadiz, local police arrested her crew. It was soon discovered that these were the same men who attacked Morning Star. They were eventually tried in Spain for many acts of piracy and all but two were hanged.

De Soto managed to evade arrest in Spain, later turning up in British Gibraltar using false identity papers while attempting to sell some valuable cargo there. He was recognized and arrested. Among his possessions were items stolen from the crew of an American ship, Topaz which, it was then realized, de Soto had attacked soon after Morning Star, torching it with all her crew on board.

Benito de Soto was tried, found guilty and hanged by the British on Jan. 25, 1830 despite no witness from Morning Star being able to identify him as the pirate captain. Many damned the verdict as a miscarriage of justice.

It was not until 1926, almost a hundred years later in a remarkable twist of fate, a Spanish builder, digging up some ground in the remote hamlet in Galicia where de Soto had grown up, uncovered an iron trunk containing treasure. Undoubtedly, the contents had been stolen from both the Morning Star and the Topaz – and the clearest posthumous evidence of de Soto’s guilt.

Michael Ford is the author of Hunting The Last Great Pirate – Benito De Soto and the Rape of the Morning Star. Raised in colonial Africa, Ford completed National Service in the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, after which he was called to the bar in England. Returning to Rhodesia in the 1970s, he appeared as defence counsel in High Court war crime trials that arose during the civil insurrection in the country. Later, he practised law in Hong Kong. After years living abroad, the family returned to live in England in the 1990s. He and his wife later retired to the Somerset village where they presently live.