The Greatest Sea Battle You've Never Heard Of

Saturday, April 23—St. George’s Day—is the 342nd anniversary of the Battle of Panama Bay, which pitted sixty-eight bedraggled English buccaneers in dugout canoes vs. 260 Spanish soldiers in three cannon-laden galleons the size of 747s.

Just a few days earlier there had been 366 buccaneers. They’d banding together in the Caribbean with the intent of being the first pirate company to raid the Pacific. But on their way to their first major target, Panama City, things went horribly wrong, as things so often do, and, on the morning of April 23, 1680, only sixty-eight of them arrived in the Bay of Panama, exhausted from rowing their canoes all night through a tropical storm that had waylaid the rest of their company.

There were far too few of them to raid the city, even if they were in peak condition. But before they could retreat, they found themselves on the verge of being run down by Spanish soldiers in warships. Somehow, the pirates got it into their heads that they could defeat the Spaniards.

The resulting battle was arguably the greatest in pirate history, if not all of maritime history, thanks in large part (not to give anything away) to the Englishmen’s extraordinary courage and resourcefulness—and insanity.

Incidentally, they are the heroes of the new nonfiction book from Little, Brown, Born to Be Hanged.