Most pirates die broke, drunk or at the end of a rope. Peter Easton is remembered for the opposite reason: he seems to have got away with it. He ran the English fishing coast of Newfoundland for a season or two, was offered a royal pardon, and then left the record altogether. Almost everything usually said about his end is tradition, and it is worth saying where the paper trail stops.
The Horror
Easton is thought to have been born around 1570, though his origins are disputed. One account calls him of low birth, another a gentleman of London, and the early part of his life rests largely on folklore rather than primary sources. In 1602, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, he sailed to Newfoundland under a letter of marque from Elizabeth I, in charge of protecting the fishing fleet. After James I came to the throne and made peace with Spain, commissions like his were cancelled. Easton kept attacking ships. That made him a pirate.
By 1612 he had reached Newfoundland again, with about ten ships. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is clear that Harbour Grace, in Conception Bay, became his base. There he repaired his ships, built a fort, and recruited crews “by persuasion or, if needed, force”. Newfoundland in summer was crowded with English, French and Portuguese fishing vessels and almost no law, and he went through them. The same source records that he plundered about thirty English ships in St John’s harbour, took provisions from every vessel he stopped, and raided French and Portuguese shipping at Ferryland. A contemporary estimate put the damage to the fleets at £20,400. That is a period figure, not a verified total.
The fishermen were not only robbed. Near Harbour Grace he took two ships and about 100 men. How many men he took in all is where the sources fall apart. The popular version says around 1,500, and the figures in circulation range from 100 to 1,500. The upper number carries a “citation needed” tag on Wikipedia and rests on no known document. The pirate admiral with a thousand pressed men is a good picture, but it is the weakest part of the story.
Easton also seized Richard Whitbourne, the English naval officer who was vice-admiral at St John’s. Whitbourne’s own account, which the Dictionary of Canadian Biography relies on, says he was held for about eleven weeks and that Easton tried to recruit him. He was released on condition that he went home and sought a pardon. So the pirate who held the coast was, by his own choice, trying to buy his way back in.
The Legend
Here the sources thin out and the stories multiply, so treat what follows as tradition.
The pardon was granted, on Whitbourne’s account, but it never reached him. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says a first pardon was granted in February 1612 and a second on 26 November, carried by Captain Roger Middleton, by which time Easton had gone to the Mediterranean after Spanish treasure. Most of this comes from Whitbourne alone. The popular line that he was twice pardoned and twice slipped away is a compression of that: he was pardoned on paper, and the paper arrived too late.
The Canadian Encyclopedia adds colour. It says French Basque pirates took his Harbour Grace fort while he was away raiding and that he destroyed them, at a cost of 47 of his own men. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography does not mention it, so this is one source against silence. The same encyclopedia reports a 1614 raid on the Azores that captured a Spanish silver fleet, with the loot carried to Tunis, and also an attack on El Morro in Puerto Rico, which it notes some experts consider more fiction than fact. There is also an Irish princess, Sheila Na Geira, supposedly rescued from Dutch pirates and married to his lieutenant, which the same encyclopedia presents plainly as a legend. Some retellings have him fighting the Barbary corsairs. Nothing confirms that.
The Modern Relic
Harbour Grace is a small town now, and the sources do not say where on the shore Easton’s fort stood. The one thing to say with confidence is that he built it there, in the sense that the Dictionary of Canadian Biography states it. Wikipedia dates his headquarters there to 1610 and the other two sources to 1612, so even the year is uncertain.
The town’s Conception Bay Museum is in the old 1870 customs house, but a display about Easton there has not been confirmed.
The part of the legend that makes him unusual is what happened next. By March 1613, still without his pardon, he reached Villefranche, a free port in the domains of the Duke of Savoy, where pirates were welcome. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says he bought a palace and stored his plunder there. Wikipedia gives the date as 20 February 1613 and says he arrived with four ships and 900 soldiers. It also says he was promised a pension of £4000 a year, took an oath to the duke, became a Catholic, married an heiress and was made a marquis. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography treats the marquisate and the marriage as unconfirmed, and the rumoured fortune of £2 million in gold as uncertain. An English agent, William Parkhurst, described him as about forty, “rude and savadge” in his looks, and courtiers still called him Il cosaro Inglese, “the English corsair”.
After that he stayed in the duke’s service until at least 1620, and then he disappears. There is no record of how or when he died. The tale of the pirate who died an old nobleman in a warm bed is a guess. All the sources actually show is a man who walked out of the record rich, and nobody wrote down what became of him.
