19th-Century Piracy
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Charles Gibbs
Charles Gibbs, born James D. Jeffers in Rhode Island, was an American pirate active in the Caribbean and Atlantic in the 1820s, among the last people executed for piracy in the United States. Before his execution, he confessed to involvement in numerous killings, though historians regard the scale of his claimed confessions as likely exaggerated.…
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Benito de Soto
Benito de Soto was a Spanish pirate who seized control of the slave ship Defensor de Pedro following a mutiny in 1827 and turned to piracy in the Atlantic, most notoriously attacking the British ship Morning Star in 1828, during which the crew and passengers were brutalized. He was eventually captured, tried in Gibraltar, and…
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Sadie the Goat
Sadie the Goat is a figure described in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York as a Manhattan street criminal and gang member who later led river piracy raids on merchant boats along the Hudson River around 1869. Because Asbury’s book is the sole source for her exploits and is known to blend…