Atrocities
He proved to be one of the most bloodthirsty pirates of any age, murdering crews who fell into his hands and sinking their ships.
The most infamous episode in de Soto's career came on 19 February 1828, when the Burla Negra happened upon the Morning Star en route from Ceylon to England. After killing some of the passengers and crew with cannon-fire, de Soto murdered the captain and took possession of the ship.
Many of the captured crew were killed, while women passengers were raped before being locked in the hold with the rest of the survivors. De Soto then scuttled the ship, thinking to leave no evidence of the attack, but the imprisoned survivors managed to escape and prevent the Morning Star from sinking until a passing merchant vessel rescued them the following day.
Read more about this topic: Benito De Soto
Famous quotes containing the word atrocities:
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think of ... the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)