[Quick set-up: The famous French pirate, L’Ollonais, and his crew become stranded in the Las Pertas Islands, after beaching their ship and being then unable to remove it. After breaking apart the ship and building a smaller one from the materials, which took almost 6 months, the men cast lots to see who would use it to set out for Nicaragua, where they hoped to find some canoes, take them back to the Las Pertas, and carry the rest of the men back to Tortuga. Unfortunately for him, the famous pirate meets his end at the mouth of the Nicaragua River.]
L’Ollonais was attacked by both Spaniards and Nicaragua’s Darien Indians, who were one of the few tribes that the conquistadors were never able to defeat. The Frenchman, always lucky in battle, escaped and decided to try one last stab at fortune by heading for Cartagena, the great galleon port in present-day Colombia. But he did not get far. “God Almighty, the time of His Divine justice already being come,” Esquemeling tells us, “had appointed the Indians of Darien to be the instruments and executioners thereof.”
They captured L’Ollonais and tore him to pieces while he was still alive, “throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air; to the intent no trace nor memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.”
The men left behind suffered an equally bad ending; they were rescued by another pirate in canoes and set off for Cartagena. But starvation soon haunted them again, and they were forced to eat their own shoes and the sheaths of their swords, to hunt for Indians to eat (they never found any); the majority of them starved to death or faded away from hunger and disease.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “The Art of Cruelty.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 100. Print.
Further Reading:
Looks like we need a new way to erase the memory of a person. Not sure if it needs to be more or less brutal.