Pirate Bootie Sacked - E4 32.081384° -81.089784°

Pirate bootie sacked

32.081384° -81.089784°

Hey, everyone!

Another fine day for a podcast.

And it is a fine day… because today we’re going to talk about pirates.

And I’m not talkin’ the AAAARRRGGG, me hearty kind of pirates.

Okay, you ask, where did it happen?

So, you wanna know where they hung out? Listen up!

Well, it happened in Savannah, Georgia, when Savannahians had had enough of the things that pirates do… and they ended up in a donnybrook.

Ah… and your next question is….. Did the Americans lose the fight, or did French pirates get their booties swashed and buckled by some ticked-off Southern boys?

Stick around, and I’ll give you my take on it.

I’m JD Byous. Welcome to History by GPS, where you travel through history and culture, GPS location by GPS location.

So follow us on your favorite map app.

You can find transcripts of the show and the coordinates of where these events happened at our website HistoryByGPS.com. That way, you can follow the story as it goes along.

If you have ever visited Savannah, Georgia, and walked along the tee-shirt and trinket-laden thoroughfare called River Street… the way many, if not most, folks who visit the city do… then you have stepped across some very historic ground that few people know about.

In this episode, we travel to an incident where during a week in mid-November 1811, the entire city of Savannah, Georgia, was… enraged and in chaos.

That was when American sailors and the citizens of the town grabbed any weapon they could find and marched down to the waterfront to kick some French pirate bootie… and I don’t mean the gold doubloon kind of bootie.

The location is where Savannah’s Drayton Street ramp runs under the old Cotton Exchange Building and intersects with the city’s famous River Street.

Grab your pencil and paper… or… if you’re driving in your car… never mind. Just listen.

Okay… the decimal coordinates are…

32.081384° by -81.089784°

Remember, if you can’t write this down, don’t worry. You can find the information on the website,

As I mentioned, the events we are looking at today happened in November 1811. It’s when French pirates decided to hide and wait for the group of locals who were coming to haul them off to jail.

But, to explain, these were not the first pirates that sailed in and around southeast Georgia; this incident was almost two centuries after the Golden Age of Piracy,… back in the 1600s… back when Black Beard and Captain Kid haunted the waters of the Atlantic, a dozen miles down river.

The generation who did navigate these waters on the Eastern Seaboard and of the Caribbean had always threatened the young colony after it was established in 1733. Piracy was always always a problem.

So much so that in the colony’s early days, the Lord Governor of Georgia pleaded with the king for protection from pirates and privateers who stalked the cargo ships coming to and going from Savannah…

What he asked was for a 40-foot square fort to be built on Cockspur Island. And the money was supplied. The stronghold was named for King George the second. It stood near the little lighthouse that divides the north and south channels of the river at Fort Pulaski National Monument at the mouth of the Savannah.

Now, back to 1811 and the Drayton Street Ramp… at that time wooden two-story buildings stood on each side of the roadway.