Author Craig Chapman on The Resurrected Pirate and the Hidden History of George Lowther

• Asia Tabb
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Airdate: Thursday, March 20, 2025

History is often written by those who survive, but what happens when a man long thought dead resurfaces after 16 years? Author and Historian Craig Chapman joined The Spark to discuss his latest book, The Resurrected Pirate, a book about the life and legacy of George Lowther, a pirate who supposedly killed himself in 1723, and became a Royal Navy Seaman.

“Lowther first appears as a mate on a royal African company slave ship on a voyage to the Gambia. While there, he instigates a mutiny with the help of an army captain who was stationed at the fort there in the Gambia, and they absconded with the ship.”

For the next two years, Lowther turned to piracy after being held liable for a capital crime. During those two years, he managed to terrorize the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, Azores until October 1723 on the coast of Venezuela. Majority of Lowther’s crew ended up killed when they were spotted by a South Sea Company Slave ship that noticed them as a pirate vessel.

“The crew ends up at St. Kitts that where they had been captured and they are mostly hanged, but before their trial the authorities in St. Kitts send a ship to Blanco Island to see if they could find Lowther. They don’t but they eventually find the pirate’s body on the beach and he has out of despair shot himself in the head and is dead.”

But Lowther was far from dead. 16 years later he emerged from obscurity to earn pardon from the King and commission in the Royal Navy during the War of Jenkin’s Ear.

“At that point, the British expedition is going off to Cuba. They want to capture Santiago to Cuba, and they like to keep out their services. So, Admiral Vernon gives him a commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Now, this is unique. We have pirates that go back and forth between being privateers and pirates. We have people who go from being in the Navy to becoming pirates. But this is the only case I know of a pirate getting an indicted pirate, by the way, getting a commission in the Royal Navy afterwards.”

Chapman previously wrote a book about the War of Jenkin’s Ear. In researching for that book, he discovered Lowther. Through his research, he found Lowther’s story intriguing.

“What was interesting and shocking to me was that nobody who does pirate histories was aware that Lowther had this subsequent career as a Royal Navy officer. And I can only ascribe that to the fact that apparently pirate historians and naval historians don’t communicate very well with each other because there really was no secret about his activity. Previous histories have been published mentioning this service during the War of Jenkins Air. Just nobody had really made a connection to the Pirating Days. Though it was too interesting a topic to pass up, so I dove into researching Lowther and his days as a pirate.”