A Dutch pirate in the 1600s, Laurens de Graaf was a gentleman’s outlaw. He was seen traveling with violins or trumpets, which he knew how to play to entertain himself and his men. de Graaf is known to have started out law-abiding, then becoming a pirate when he lost his job on one ship and was shortly captured by pirates. Although sources differ about what exactly happened. Some say he was captured by the Spanish as a prisoner or slave, sent to Spain’s property in the Americas as punishment, and then turned to piracy.
Does not really matter, because the important thing is de Graaf ended up in the Caribbean. He took his most famous ship, the Tigre, who began its life as a 24-gun Spanish man-of-war. For decades, Laurens de Graaf and his pirate crew raided Spanish and English garrisons and settlements all around the Gulf of Mexico with forays even further south. Even with a number of pirate-hunters sent after him, de Graaf was never captured, eventually retiring to the southern United States, where he is believed to have died.
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