Canoot (
fl. 1698, real name unknown) was a French pirate active off the coast of
New England
New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...
.
History
In early 1698 John Redwood of
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
was sailing out of Maryland’s
Sinepuxent Bay
Sinepuxent Bay is an inland waterway which connects Chincoteague Bay to Isle of Wight Bay, and is connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Ocean City Inlet. It separates Sinepuxent Neck, in Worcester County, Maryland from Assateague Island, and W ...
toward
Cape May
Cape May consists of a peninsula and barrier island system in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is roughly coterminous with Cape May County, New Jersey, Cape May County and runs southwards from the New Jersey mainland, separating Delaware Bay fro ...
when he was attacked by Canoot and his pirates. They exchanged ships with Redwood, leaving him their slower vessel and taking his
sloop
A sloop is a sailboat with a single mast typically having only one headsail in front of the mast and one mainsail aft of (behind) the mast. Such an arrangement is called a fore-and-aft rig, and can be rigged as a Bermuda rig with triangular sa ...
. That September Canoot sailed to the waters off
Sussex County, Delaware
Sussex County is located in the southern part of the U.S. state of Delaware, on the Delmarva Peninsula. As of the 2020 census, the population was 237,378. The county seat is Georgetown.
The first European settlement in the state of Delaware w ...
.
Residents saw the sloop but were not alarmed. The following day he stormed the town of
Lewes
Lewes () is the county town of East Sussex, England. It is the police and judicial centre for all of Sussex and is home to Sussex Police, East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service, Lewes Crown Court and HMP Lewes. The civil parish is the centre of ...
with fifty men,
plundering everything of value, including the residents’ clothes, leaving them "scarce anything in the place to cover or wear."
Canoot’s pirates also stole all the town’s livestock and forced the inhabitants to help load their sloop. He then anchored offshore until he left to chase a passing ship. This was not his first attack - “Many other crimes of similar nature were traced to Canoot and his pirate ship” - so local officials levied a tax to raise funds for coastal defense, though Canoot escaped.
See also
*
Louis Guittar
Louis Guittar (alternatively spelled Lewis Gittar, died 13 November 1700) was a French pirate active in the Caribbean, the West Indies, and New England during the late 1690s and 1700s.
History
Based in St. Malo in the late 1690s, Guittar comma ...
– Another French pirate active off New England.
References
17th-century pirates
Year of birth missing
Year of death missing
French pirates
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