The 5th annual Pirate Gathering at Francis Field this weekend promises to be a fun filled family oriented event, with proceeds going to underprivileged kids. Not so centuries ago, when pirate fun was marauding ships and proceeds went to pirate treasure chests.

   They had different names - pirates, corsairs, buccaneers, freebooters, privateers. They date as far back as civilization itself - rogues intent on separating people from their valuables, ideally in isolated locations to avoid capture. They were there to harass desert caravans, travelers in the dense forests of medieval Europe, and now shipping in the vast oceans of the world.

   The discovery of the Americas in 1492 brought new opportunities for wealth to the crowns of Europe, and to pirates - creating legends of the pirate's life romanticized today, but terrorizing at the time.

   The legendary pirates we know today sailed about the Caribbean and North American settlements from the mid-1500s to the early 1700s. It was here Spanish ships, laden with new world treasures, were carried northward by the currents of the Gulf Stream up along the Florida coast, then east across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain.

   Pirates were born overnight in this new world. St. Augustine Historian Eugene Lyon, in his The Enterprise of Florida, describes trouble in the French Huguenot colony, Fort Caroline, a year before Pedro Menendez' voyage to drive out the French and found St. Augustine.

   "An increasing shortage of supplies and a desire for adventure provoked some of the garrison to mutiny. Eleven mutineers fled the fort first, taking a small shallop and setting course for the Caribbean. Three weeks later, on December 18, 1564, seventy men from the garrison held (French Commander) Rene de Laudonnière prisoner long enough to extort from him a document authorizing their jour­ney. They then departed on a voyage of adventure among the Antil­les in two small sailing craft."

   The French mutineers' antics in the Caribbean actually alerted the Spanish to the hitherto unknown French colony that threatened Spain's control of the Florida region.

   Sir Francis Drake, an English admiral, was famous for being the first Englishman to sail around the world, and his fleet defeated the Spanish Armada. But before that victory, he sailed as a privateer, secretly commissioned by his queen to attack Spanish territories in the Caribbean. He was a privateer, not an English admiral, when he attacked St. Augustine in 1586, looting and burning the town.

   Excerpts from The Pirates in St. Augustine Bedtime Stories. Click  for further information on this fascinating historic series.