Born to Be Hanged

The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune

Keith Thomson

As you’ve most likely gathered from the lengthy subtitle, clever reader, this is a non-fiction pirate story. An unputdownable, supremely exciting, swashbuckling pirate story.

It begins in 1680 when a bunch of mostly English pirates are approached by the leader of a tribe from the Darien province in Panama. He tells the pirates that Spanish colonizers have kidnapped his granddaughter — his beautiful granddaughter, the light of his life. His proposal? He’ll lead the pirates through the Panamanian jungles to the Spanish garrison, a small fort conveniently located next to a gold mine. Together, the pirates and the tribe will take the fort and rescue the girl. The grandfather returns the girl to her village; the pirates take their just rewards in the form of the gold — an estimated 18,000 to 22,000 pounds of gold.

For context, that’s enough gold that every man in the company — all 366 of the marauding bunch — would be set for life. They could each buy a plantation or a 200-ton Dutch ship and still have half their gold left. No fools, they agree to do it. And that’s when the proper adventure starts.

This book tells the story of the pirates through this escapade and its fallout during the following two years. Author Keith Thomson tracks them throughout Central and South America through raids, treasure hunts, and parlays with the colonies and local tribes.

Released in 2022, this book has a very modern vibe. The author had previously written thrillers, and it shows. He knows how to build suspense and play out an action scene. He recounts history with the flair of a storyteller.

The pirates have names and character. They’re motivated; they have agency. One of the things that helped Thomson was the contemporaneous accounts: Seven of the pirates kept extant journals, so we know why the pirate Basil Ringnose was in Panama in the first place.

This is the best kind of history, rich with personal, and potentially inconsequential, details that humanize these pirates. For example, Basil Ringnose liked strawberries. Yes, there are high stakes at play in this mission for the gold. But when you know that bit about the strawberries, you worry that Basil might get shot. Or drown. Or be eaten by an anaconda. Before the strawberries, he’s another pirate. After the strawberries, we’ve got a character.

We learn that another pirate, William Dampier, kept notes that would eventually be credited to the Oxford English Dictionary. He ultimately introduced more than 1000 words into English, including avocado, barbecue, and cashew. He’s also the first Englishman to describe the effects of smoking marijuana: ‘Some it keeps sleepy, some merry, some putting them into a laughing fit, and others it makes mad.’

Thomson’s prose casts a light on the pirate subculture: He writes about these tattooed tough guys who created an early democracy, voting on almost everything. He tells us that pirates never wore boots. He explains that they instituted a form of worker compensation — ‘the Custom of the Coast.’ Lost your right arm? You were entitled to 600 pieces of eight.

This is history written on a human scale; the fact that it’s about pirates makes it all the better. If you want more dangerous capers and interesting rogues in your life, this is the crew for you.

Basil Ringnose now had three choices. First, he could join the Santa Maria expedition. Second, he could opt out in favor of a saner venture; it would be only a matter of time before he caught on with another of the buccaneer crews that routinely stopped in the San Blas Islands for provisions and ship maintenance. Third was the sensible option, the one that took into account his nascent awareness of this band of buccaneers’ utter disregard for risk—perhaps even a pathological affinity for danger: he could write off his brief involvement with them and return home to London. Although he frequently committed hundreds of words at a time to his journal, he wrote nothing about his decision. That was also typical of him: he was his own least favorite topic. Among the most intimate personal revelations in his journal were that he had been to Calais once, that he could speak Latin, and that he liked strawberries. — Keith Thomson

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