e slave
schooner which captured the "Jew diamond dealer" of the Portuguese
ship. An odd confusion of facts caused the mistake. While Benito
Bonito was harrying the Spanish shipping of the Pacific and burying his
treasure on Cocos Island, there was on the Atlantic a bloodthirsty
pirate by the name of Benito de Soto. He was a Spaniard who sailed out
of Buenos Aires in the year 1827, bound to Africa to smuggle a cargo of
slaves. The crew was composed of French, Spanish, and Portuguese
desperadoes, and led by the mate and De Soto they marooned the captain
and ran away with the ship on a pirate voyage. They plundered and
burned and slaughtered without mercy, their most nefarious exploit
being the capture of the British merchant ship _Morning Star_, bound
from Ceylon to England in 1828, and carrying as passengers several army
officers and their wives and twenty-five invalided soldiers. After the
most fiendish conduct, De Soto and his crew, drove the survivors into
the hold of the _Morning Star_, and fastened the hatches, leaving the
vessel to founder, for they had taken care to bore numerous auger holes
in her bottom. By a miracle of good fortune, the prisoners forced the
hatches and were taken off next day by a passing vessel.

Benito de Soto met his end as the result of being wrecked in his own
ship off the Spanish coast. He was caught in Gibraltar and hanged by
the English Governor. An army officer who saw him turned off related
that he was a very proper figure of a pirate, "there was no driveling
fears upon him,--he walked firmly at the tail of the fatal cart, gazing
sometimes at his coffin, sometimes at the crucifix which he held in his
hand. This he frequently pressed to his lips, repeated the prayers
spoken in his ear by the attendant clergyman, and seemed regardless of
everything but the world to come. The gallows was erected beside the
water, and fronting neutral ground. He mounted the cart as firmly as
he had walked behind it, and held up his face to Heaven and the beating
rain, calm, resigned, but unshaken; and finding the halter too high for
his neck, he boldly stepped upon his coffin, and placed his head in the
noose. Then watching the first turn of the wheels, he murmured,
'farewell, all,' and leaned forward to facilitate his fall ... The
black boy was acquitted at Cadiz, but the men who had fled to the
Caracas, as well as those arrested after the wreck, were convicted,
executed, their limbs severed