Badass

by Ben Thompson

  Some historians think that Anne Bonny and Mary Read were lesbian lovers and not just best friends and comrades-in-arms. These people need to stop watching so much porn.

  Another tough Irish pirate chick was the notorious Grace O’Malley, the “Pirate Queen of Connacht,” who terrorized the British coastline in the sixteenth century. This tough-ass seafarer commanded a small fleet of ships and led a crew of nearly two hundred pirates on daring raids against the merchant vessels of Queen Elizabeth.

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  BADASS PIRATES

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  Since being a pirate is one of the most hardcore professions in the history of the world, all students of badassitude should familiarize themselves with some of the masters of the craft.

  BARTHOLOMEW ROBERTS

  In terms of plunder and mad crazy bling, “Black Bart” was the single most successful pirate to ever live—he captured more than four hundred ships in the span of thirty months and terrorized the coasts of Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean. At the helm of his forty-two-gun warship Royal Fortune, Roberts once captured a merchantman carrying forty thousand gold coins (not to mention a collection of custom jewelry handmade for the king of Portugal), plundered the city of Principe, and personally executed the governor of Martinique by hanging him from a yardarm. Roberts was eventually blown up by a broadside of grapeshot from a British warship.

  FRANÇOIS L’OLONNAIS

  Once a slave of the Spanish Empire, L’Olonnais escaped to a life of piracy and dedicated his life to seeking brutal revenge on his former masters. He was notorious for viciously torturing and killing Spanish prisoners in exceedingly brutal ways, including one account where he pulled a dude’s heart out, ate a piece of it, and threw it in the face of another prisoner. Somewhat ironically, L’Olonnais himself was later killed and eaten by cannibals.

  HENRY MORGAN

  This Welsh privateer led a pirate armada in the name of the British Empire, sacking dozens of South American towns, capturing the Panamanian silver train, and bludgeoning the entire Dutch navy to death in an hour and a half by swinging a two-ton ship cannon like a baseball bat. Then he ate a twenty-four-pound cannonball in one bite just to prove how awesome he was. Captain Morgan was eventually appointed lieutenant governor of Jamaica by Queen Elizabeth, retired to a life of luxury on a multimillion-dollar sugar plantation, and now has a popular brand of rum named after him.

  CHING SHIH

  From an entry-level brothel girl to “the Dragon Lady of the South China Sea,” she commanded a massive fleet of three hundred ships and forty thousand pirates operating off the coast of China in the nineteenth century. Not only did her “Red Fleet” sack innumerable towns and ships, but this chick actually went up against the Chinese navy and kicked its ass, sinking half the government’s warships in a single battle. The only way the emperor could stop her from killing everything in sight was to give her full amnesty for her crimes and allow her to keep her amassed wealth. Ching agreed, and in 1810 she retired and opened up a wildly successful casino/brothel in Canton.

  HAYREDDIN BARBAROSSA

  The greatest and most feared of the Ottoman corsairs, Barbarossa carved out a privateer empire that dominated the Mediterranean for decades, sinking European shipping anywhere he could find it and wiping out scores of sword-swinging Christian knights in the name of the great Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Barbarossa installed himself as governor of Algiers, served as grand admiral of the Turkish navy for over twenty years, won dozens of pitched battles, and established the naval supremacy of the Ottoman Empire.

  BLACK CAESAR

  This massive, powerful African tribal chieftain led a revolt on the slave ship that was transporting him to the colonies, survived a brutal shipwreck, and settled into a career of piracy off the coast of Florida. He recruited a crew of like-minded swashbucklers, terrorized Caribbean shipping, and had a harem of over a hundred women living at his base on Elliot Key. Caesar later joined up with Blackbeard and served as the infamous pirate’s lieutenant right up until the grisly end.

  Calico

  Blackbeard

  Bonnet

  Roberts

  Thomas Tew

  SOMALI PIRATES

  The days when wooden warships ruled the sea are long gone, but piracy is still alive and well off the coast of Somalia. Zipping across the waves in fiberglass skiffs packed full of GPS systems, satellite phones, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades, teams of crazy Somali pirates are making life miserable for any container vessels or cruise ships stupid enough to come within 250 miles of the African coast. In true pirate fashion, these guys swarm on board, overpower the crew, release the ship in exchange for a massive ransom, and go back home to live in giant mansions surrounded by scores of hot babes. Despite the best efforts of every civilized nation on earth to destroy these bazooka-toting buccaneers, Somali pirates are still believed to have collected roughly $50 million worth of ransom in 2008 alone.

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  25

  PETER FRANCISCO

  (1760–1831)

  Without him we would have lost two crucial battles, perhaps the War, and with it our freedom. He was truly a one-man army.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON

  ON A FOGGY NIGHT IN 1765, A FIVE-YEAR-OLD BOY WAS ABANDONED, MOSES-STYLE, ON A QUIET, LONELY VIRGINIA WHARF. Speaking no English and having little recollection of where he came from or how he arrived in the New World, this young man, much like the biblical figure whose origin story his own loosely mirrors, would grow to be a powerful hero who would deliver his people from the clutches of tyranny—and kill hundreds of people in the process.

  Taken in by a wealthy judge and raised on a large Virginia farm, Peter Francisco grew to be a massive, Andre the Giant–style behemoth who easily dead-lifted Dodge Vipers, bench-pressed beer kegs with his eyelids, and did a bunch of other tremendous feats of manliness that you don’t usually witness outside of those awesome strongman competitions on ESPN 8 at four in the morning. Standing six foot six and weighing over 280 pounds at a time when the average man stood about five-seven, Peter was like the Jolly Green Giant of colonial America, only instead of being jolly or green he was pissed off and more than willing to epically fracture your skull by relentlessly cracking you in the dome with the stock of his musket.

  One day Peter went to go hear his adopted cousin—a dude named Patrick Henry—give a rousing pump-up speech to the Virginia legislature about how the English were being total wankers, and Peter quickly decided that he would dedicate all of his energy to punching British people in the dick and pulling out their vas deferens. So in 1776, when the Americans and the Brits threw down their leather jackets, whipped out their switchblades, and started snapping their fingers menacingly at each other, Peter Francisco immediately enlisted in the Continental Army and prepared to start whacking biznatches in the esophagus with a billy club.

  In the early years of the war, Francisco fought on the front lines of a number of fierce battles, survived two gunshot wounds, and almost died from a terminal case of freezing his balls off at Valley Forge. His unrivaled strength and bravery on the battlefield soon became so legendary that George Washington himself awarded “the Virginia Hercules” with a special prize—a five-foot-long broadsword. With this badass weapon in hand, General George set him loose to smite some British ass-clowns and lacerate the carotid arteries of anybody who didn’t think democracy totally kicked ass.

  Peter got the perfect opportunity to put this ridiculous new sword to good use when he participated in a raid on the British garrison of Stony Point in 1779. At the head of a twenty-man suicide charge known as Operation Forlorn Hope, Francisco pulled his giant blade and charged balls-out toward the heavily defended fortifications. He avoided all the cannonballs and musket fire the Brits could fling at him (an impressive feat, considering the fact that a screaming, pissed-off, six-foot-six giant with a broadsword is probably a relatively high-priority target) and was the first man to hit the wall. Peter vaulted over the fortif
ications, cut three men down with his blade, cleared the enemy off the parapet, and breached into the fortress. Peter didn’t stop there, though—this hellhole of awesomeness plowed his way through the courtyard, killed a dozen soldiers, got slashed in the chest by a cavalry saber, and still managed to pull the British flag down from the battlements and signal the Colonial victory.

  But pwning everyone in Capture the Flag was just the beginning. When the American lines crumbled at the Battle of Camden in 1780 and Peter Francisco found himself completely surrounded by dead Colonials and cranky Brits waving rifles in his face, he didn’t even flinch. He just stabbed a cavalry soldier in the gallbladder with his bayonet, pulled the guy off his horse, jumped on, and rode to safety. When he reached American lines and found his commanding officer nearly dead from exhaustion, Francisco gave the horse to his commander and then—on foot—ran back to the battlefield to save an American cannon from falling into enemy hands, pulling the 1,100-pound gun from the field by himself. Then he probably body-slammed a horse through a concrete slab at Stonehenge and suplexed a 747 over the Grand Canyon.

  Francisco had already earned a reputation as a one-man wrecking ball when his regiment marched into the critical Battle for Guilford Courthouse. This fight was one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolution, thanks in a large part to the sword-swinging mayhem brought about by our boy Peter. When the carnage degenerated to close-quarters hand-to-hand combat, Francisco unsheathed his massive weapon and went nuts on anything wearing red, taking down thirteen British soldiers during the melee—including one guy who had his entire head sliced in half. Longways. When the redcoats saw this insane gigantic berserker freaking out and slaughtering everyone around him, they all decided to swarm him with bayonets, sabers, and rifles. Francisco was stabbed several times and finally passed out on the field from loss of blood. He was left for dead on the battlefield but somehow managed to regain consciousness and crawl to a nearby town, where he was found by a local farmer and nursed back to health.

  Now, around this time a dashing young British cavalry colonel named Banastre Tarleton was raiding towns up and down the Virginia countryside. This famous commander, affectionately known in the colonies as “Butcher” Tarleton, was much loved by the citizens of England because of his expert skill in cutting down the filthy rebels, smoking out seditionists, and emotionlessly disposing of any traitor he got his hands on, usually with extreme prejudice all the way up your ass. While Tarleton’s raiders were in the process of despoiling the countryside, plundering supply depots, and massacring unarmed prisoners of war, a small detachment of his men came across the colonial war hero known as “the Samson of the West.” Our protagonist was alone—and still pretty severely wounded at this point—but it took more than a few gaping flesh wounds to keep Peter Francisco down, and for this guy merely brushing his teeth was a mass-casualty event. The British squadron commander approached the wounded veteran, ordering that he surrender immediately.

  Peter said nothing.

  The officer calmly approached, then looked down and noticed the silver buckles on Francisco’s shoes. He demanded that the prisoner hand those over as well.

  Peter told him that if he wanted the buckles, he would have to take them himself.

  The British officer thought for a moment, then leaned down to remove the silver ornaments. As he did, Peter Francisco reached out, grabbed the redcoat’s saber, drew the weapon from its sheath, and smashed the guy in the freakin’ head with the pommel. The officer dropped to his knees, pulled his pistol, and shot Peter in the side. Peter responded by chopping the guy’s hand off and then kicking him teeth first into the gravel road. Another raider, hearing the commotion, rode up, jammed the muzzle of his rifle in Peter’s face, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Francisco grabbed the misfiring rifle with one hand, pulled the guy off his horse, and slashed him with the saber. Off in the distance, a group of about ten raiders hastily rode up toward the fray. Peter turned toward a nearby forest, cupped his hand over his mouth, and called out to an invisible army waiting in an imaginary ambush: “Now’s your time, boys! We’ll dispatch these few and then attack the main body!”

  On hearing this, Tarleton’s raiders screeched to a halt, turned tail, and fled as fast as they could. Peter Francisco leisurely trotted off with six riderless British horses and several captured weapons. He rejoined his unit, served valiantly with the Marquis de Lafayette during the decisive Yorktown campaign, and ultimately helped the United States win its independence from Great Britain. After the war, he went home, learned to read, became a successful blacksmith, and married three different women. When he wasn’t reading Shakespeare, procreating, or knocking shoplifters unconscious by throwing anvils at their heads, he performed impressive acts of strongmanitude to impress the ladies.

  Peter Francisco died in 1831 at the age of seventy-one, one of the great unsung heroes of the American Revolution.

  THE MAROUIS DE LAFAYETTE

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  Americans love to talk smack about France and how we bailed their asses out after Germany kicked the holy living God out of them in World War II, but we tend to forget that if it wasn’t for France—and particularly a dude known as the Marquis de Lafayette—we here in the States would all be speaking with unintelligible British accents, watching soccer on the telly, and eating a whole lot of spotted dick with our fish and chips.

  Lafayette’s dad was exploded by a cannonball while battling the English, so you can be pretty sure that the marquis of mayhem didn’t have any love for the Brits. Eager to exact vengeance as soon as he possibly could, he enlisted in the French army on his sixteenth birthday. By nineteen, he was already a captain in the dragoons, one of the toughest cavalry units in the world at the time—and a pretty righteous ass-kicker.

  It was around this time that the American Revolution broke out. Lafayette was so pumped up about rocking British faces and helping the oppressed colonists battle for their freedom that he immediately put together a company of soldiers to sail across the Atlantic and get busy with the ass-kickings. Unfortunately, the French were being total prudes at the beginning of the war, and Lafayette—being a member of French royalty—was officially forbidden from committing any of his soldiers to the American Revolution. Dudes were sent to arrest him and stop him from single-handedly dragging France into the Revolutionary War, but Lafayette and his men hopped a ship, evaded the British and French navies, and sailed two months across the Atlantic, landing on American soil in 1777.

  It wasn’t long before the marquis met up with fellow badass George Washington, and the two quickly became the Thelma and Louise of kicking British people in the junk until they barfed. When the Colonial government told Lafayette they didn’t really have any money to pay him or his soldiers, Lafayette basically told them, “Screw it, dudes. I’m loaded already, and giving me the opportunity to jam my cavalry saber into English faces is all the payment I need!” He was promoted to major general, attached to General Washington’s staff, and immediately set out to sever some aortas. At the Battle of Brandywine he was capped in the leg while leading his men on a bayonet charge, and at the Battle of Barren Hill later that year Lafayette’s forces managed to stop the British Army from capturing Valley Forge by incinerating them with a flamethrower.

  Despite his tremendous ass-kicking prowess, Lafayette’s greatest contribution to the American Revolution was his ability to get the French Crown off its ass and bail us out when we needed it most. Lafayette pretty much sent missives to the king every day demanding that he send cash and supplies to fund the war effort, and most of the time they gave in just to get him to shut the hell up about it. He rallied his crew, contributed $200,000 of his own money to the cause, and eventually convinced the French to join in on all the sweet face-melting action here in the U.S. of A. France officially declared war on England, and at only twenty-one years of age Lafayette participated in the Yorktown campaign and helped the United States achieve its autonomy from Great Brit
ain.

  After the war, Lafayette thought that sweet, delicious freedom was so damn awesome that he helped author the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—one of the documents that kicked off the French Revolution. During his own country’s struggle for liberty, he was the commander of the French National Guard and advocated religious tolerance, popular representation, trial by jury, and freedom of the press—the same ideals he kicked ass for in the colonies. Unfortunately, things got out of hand pretty quickly when folks started chopping everyone’s head off with the guillotine, and Lafayette was eventually arrested and thrown into an Austrian prison. He would sit for five years until finally being busted out by Napoleon, a man who knew a good badass when he saw one. Lafayette spent the final years of his life living in a gigantic mansion, where he would sometimes shelter refugees trying to escape execution at the hands of murderous revolutionaries. He died in 1834.

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  26

  HORATIO NELSON

  (1758–1805)

  First, you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and, thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.

  ADMIRAL LORD VISCOUNT HORATIO NELSON, ONCE REFERRED TO BY LORD BYRON AS “BRITANNIA’S GOD OF WAR,” WAS THE MOST BALLS-OUT COMMANDER IN THE HISTORY OF THE ROYAL NAVY—AN ORGANIZATION THAT PRIDES ITSELF ON BEING THE DEADLIEST AND MOST INSANELY POWERFUL MILITARY FORCE CAPABLE OF AQUATIC FLOTATION. Throughout his long and illustrious career as a gallant and indomitable war hero who repeatedly demonstrated his astonishing ability to donkey-punch his enemies unconscious and then spit on their watery graves, Nelson’s unorthodox tactics and ability to motivate his soldiers to kill the hell out of French people firmly established England’s utter dominance over the high seas and frustrated Napoleon Bonaparte’s expansionist ambitions.