Bartolomeu Português was a Portuguese buccaneer active in the Caribbean in the late 1660s, operating out of Campeche and Jamaica. Sailing a small four-gun vessel with a crew of around thirty men, he captured a much larger Spanish ship off the coast of Cuba carrying roughly 70,000 pieces of eight and 120,000 pounds of cacao. Three Spanish warships recaptured his prize near Cape San Antonio soon afterward and took him prisoner. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, who recorded his story in Buccaneers of America (1678), Português escaped custody by stabbing a guard, floated ashore using wine jars, and walked roughly 120 miles through jungle to reach the buccaneer settlement of Golfo Triste. He later gathered a small crew, returned to Campeche, and recaptured the very ship on which he had been held prisoner — only to wreck it near the Isle of Pines and lose the plunder a second time. Exquemelin, the main source for his life, wrote that he later encountered Português again, “dying in the greatest wretchedness in the world.” No other record of his death survives, and his exact birth and death dates are not reliably established.
Bartolomeu Português
