35. A Duel Leads to a Career in Piracy
When Michel de Grammont was born into a French noble family in 1650, few would have expected that the aristocratic baby would end his days as an infamous pirate. Yet that was to be the destiny of de Grammont, who terrorized the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico for a decade and a half.
That radical transformation began when a fourteen-year-old de Grammont was angered by a French army officer who was courting his sister, and challenged him to a duel. Despite his youth, he won the duel and killed the officer. That got de Grammont into trouble, and he was forced to flee France. He ended up in Hispaniola, and became a privateer – a pirate operating with a “Letter of Marque” from a government, authorizing him to prey upon enemy shipping in time of war.