La Burla Negra

On January 25, 1930, Benito Soto, a young Galician man, was executed in Gibraltar. Just three years earlier, he had become the most bloodthirsty pirate in the Atlantic tropics. Born in Pontevedra in 1805, he began his career fishing with his father in the Aldán estuary. At the age of twenty-three, while serving on a Brazilian slave brig, he mutinied, seized command, and dedicated himself to piracy for several months, attacking ten ships and causing more than seventy deaths. Escaping from Cádiz, where his ship had run aground, he was arrested in the British colony, tried, convicted, and hanged at the young age of twenty-five.