Henriques the Englishman, or Henry Johnson, operated around
1730, and was born in Northern Ireland. Little is known of Henry Johnson
early life. All we know is that by 1730 he was operating a pirate ship off
the coast of Rhode Island. His ship was the Two Brothers a sloop armed
with 18 guns and a crew of around 50.
As pirates go, Henry was an odd lot. He picked up the
moniker Henriques the Englishman from his crew. Johnson was actually Irish
but his mostly Spanish crew considered anyone from the British Isles an
Englishman. It was somewhat uncommon for an "Englishman" to command a crew
of Spanish pirates. Henriques managed to do this for one very good reason.
He was very successful at what he did.
There were other qualities about Henriques that made him
stand out from other captains. Often we see pirates in movies who are
missing a hand or a leg but rarely do we read such accounts of real pirate
captains. Henriques is an exception. Henriques was missing a hand. This
did little to slow him down. In battle, he would often start off by
balancing his rifle on the stub of his arm and firing his expert accuracy.
Afterwards he would drop the rifle and attack like a beserker swinging his
cutlass madly at anyone in his way.
This was the case when he attacked the John and Jane off
Swan Island near Jamaica. The John and Jane was armed with eight carriage
guns and ten swivel guns and possessed a crew of twenty five. After
fighting off the pirates for almost five hours, the John and Jane was
boarded. Henriques was known as pirate who gave no quarter and asked for
none in return. An exception was the John and Jane.
The pirates had stripped the crew and was preparing to hang
everyone on board in pairs. Suddenly, from a cabin, Henriques heard the
scream of a woman. When Henriques entered the cabin he found a woman
stripped of her clothing and about to be raped by a pirate named Pedro
Poleas. Henriques fired one of his pistols in the air, dropped it and then
drew a second pistol. He then exclaimed "I'll blow out the brains of any
man who should raise the least violence to this woman."
The woman was a Mrs. Groves, her husband, a doctor had been
killed earlier in the fighting. They had been passengers on the ship.
Henriques was so enraged by the actions of Poleas that he made his pirates
gather up any personal belongings of Mrs. Groves and her husband and insure
that no further sorrow would come to her. Following this Henriques and
another pirate named Echlin, stopped the hangings that were about to take
place.
Henriques and his pirates then departed the ship leaving
much of the booty behind. This was just one sign of the complexity of the
"Englishman" who sailed with Spaniards. Henriques was wanted throughout
the Americas, by all nations. There was not a safe port for him in
anywhere yet he managed to have a long career, confounding all pursuers
and terrifying all in his wake. With the exception of his staunch rule
against violence against women, he was an extremely blood thirsty pirate.
Despite being wanted everywhere, there is no record of him ever being
killed or captured.
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