Patrick S. and Patricia Mesmer. Pirates and Smugglers of the Treasure Coast. History Press, 2019.
Pirates and Smugglers of the Treasure Coast is an entertaining book to people interested in piracy and lawbreaking at sea and to those living on the Treasure Coast of the state of Florida, roughly the stretch of seaside land between Fort Pierce and Palm Beach.
The authors begin a little with the aboriginal inhabitants of the region and early European explorations, which included some acts of piracy or privateering among the French, English, Spanish, and Dutch.
Soon they take us to that period of 1670-1720, the so-called Golden Age of Piracy. We have reviewed one good history of this period, The Pirates. Pirates and Smugglers of the Treasure Coast reminds us that pirates in the Western Hemisphere were more or less headquartered in the Bahamas, just seventy miles east of this part of Florida. So we read about men like Blackbeard and Sam Bellamy who were known to operate in this area. The sparsely populated marshy shoreline back then made for good places to hide and to operate with impunity. It also happened to be where a significant Spanish gold fleet sank in a storm in 1715.
Like the book on The Whydah, it notes that most pirate organizations at the time were fairer and treated its sailors better than the ships of the national navies. Each sailor got an equal share, and there were even provisions like insurance for men wounded in action who could no longer sail.
There is more. Because of the long shoreline and lack of population in this region, it continued to be a place for seafaring lawbreakers through the time of the Civil War. A notorious crew headed by Spaniard Pedro Gibert (or Gilbert) used this area as a base for piracy and smuggling. After 1808 when the United States outlawed the slave trade, slave smugglers would often bring African captives to the islands and rivers of this region to escape detection from the authorities. We also read about the Seminole War and the Civil War as they affected this region.
Lest we think this is all in the past, we are reminded that this was one of the four busiest locations for smuggling alcohol during Prohibition. Detroit was easiest because it was just across a river from Canada. The Treasure Coast was also a fairly easy place to smuggle liquor into because it was not far from the British Bahamas and had many remote locations. Here we meet some pretty successful rumrunners of the time. Even Al Capone made a visit to this region.
Today this area is still affected by waterborne smuggling, mostly of drugs. We are told that in the 1970s and 1980s the DEA just assumed that most fishermen in the area also had a side business of offloading drugs to bring ashore. Fishermen and residents on the beaches would sometimes find “square groupers,” that is bales of marijuana, washed ashore or floating nearby.
Tourists and residents to this area might be familiar with a number of local fairs and reenactments that have a pirate theme. So we are also introduced to a number of men and women who serve as pirate reenactors. The authors note that in many cases modern concepts of pirates come from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Sabatini’s Captain Blood, and the film interpretations of those works. Blackbeard may have never said “Arrrgh!” but we can tell that the authors are proud of the local reenactors that keep the tradition alive in a legal and lighthearted way.