The Pirates of Cozumel

by Brian Dunning
June 30, 2026

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If you have an interest in pirates and pirate history (and who doesn’t), I just might have the perfect vacation destination for you. And if you love the weather of the Caribbean, what better place to combine warm, relaxing beaches with history. And if you’re lucky, you might even see a great Spanish fortress, its walls battered by pirate cannonballs. This is, anyway, among the attractions that some tourist pamphlets tout about the island of Cozumel, where you can even book a sunset dinner aboard a cheesy replica of a Spanish Galleon named for the pirate Jean Lafitte. And it’s all left up to you to determine whether this is genuine history, or pure, unadulterated hype with zero historical basis invented to suck dólares estadounidenses from the pockets of rubes just like you & I. Today we’re going to find out.

Cozumel is a prime vacation destination, an island off the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It has only one town of any size on it, San Miguel, plus the inevitable coastal highway encircling the southern half of the island, transporting tourists to countless premium beach resorts. The island even has its share of ancient Maya ruins — which, by the way, we’ll be inspecting with our own expert guide on the upcoming Skeptoid Adventure this December.

And what you’re going to hear everywhere you turn is that the island was a notorious hideout for virtually every famous Caribbean pirate you’ve ever heard of. Here are a few snippets from tourist websites:

• From the Vamos Travel Blog: In the 17th century, pirates took advantage of Cozumel’s isolation, using it as a base. Most famous of the island’s pirates is the American, Jean Lafitte. [Note: Jean Lafitte was French, not American, and raided under a Letter of Marque from Cartagena.]
  
  
• From Cozumel Tours: Named for the famous pirate, Jean LaFitte, who once made Cozumel his home, this authentic Spanish Galleon pirate ship will take you on a night of food, drink, and fun! [Note: Lafitte and other pirates all used ships much smaller than galleons.]
  
  
• From Safe Tours Cozumel: It was an important territory for pirates, who hid their boats among casuarinas, pine trees native to the island.
  
  
• From Leon Tours: Cozumel remained uninhabited for the next two centuries, except for pirates, who used Cozumel as the basis for their operations. The more famous included Henry Morgan and Jean Laffite... Morgan found the island of Cozumel ideal, for its... remains of the Mayan sites provided excellent hiding places. [Note: Correct grammar is Maya, not Mayan.]

And if that’s not enough for you, a 1994 issue of the Baedecker’s Guide to Mexico claims that Long John Silver also used Cozumel as his base of operations! (Long John Silver wasn’t even a real person; he was a fictional character from the novel Treasure Island.)

But we could go on and on forever. Although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like tourism companies are in the business of collecting your money, not telling the truth.

The simple fact is that there were never any pirates on Cozumel. There was never a reason to go there, to be there, or to hide out there; consequently, we have no evidence that any pirates (famous or otherwise) made it their base or used it in any way. Nor should we expect it. Let’s go over a few of the reasons why.

• Cozumel was far from lucrative trade routes. Pirates tended to go where the booty was, and that meant the Spanish trade and treasure routes, i.e., what we typically call “the Spanish Main.” Think of the Caribbean as a circle, with all of its principal islands and ports along the top, bottom, and east side. Cozumel, on the other hand, is way out by itself on the west — close to nothing at all.
  
  
• Cozumel was well known, out in the open, and not defensible. It was a minor Spanish administrative base, populated mostly with Maya and their attendant missionaries, plus some Spanish soldiers. It was a stopover for some Spanish traffic going between Havana and Veracruz; consequently, any pirates hoping to hide out there or use it as a base would be discovered and captured immediately. Being flat with no harbors, the island offers no natural defenses at all. This resulted in a number of opportunistic pirate raids against the population in the 1700s, none of which were especially fruitful for the raiders.
  
  
• Pirate strongholds were just the opposite. Ports like Nassau, Tortuga, and Port Royal — all over on the eastern half of the Caribbean — were far from Spanish ports, and all offered natural defensive structures and fortresses. These were the real “pirate havens” where pirate fleets actually did make their homes; defensible and safe cubbies right in the thick of the wealth of the Spanish Main.
  
  
• A risky anchorage with no rewards. Cozumel is on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, which is the windward side, known for its rough water and — most particularly — the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef system, the largest and most dangerous in the Atlantic, and responsible for most of the shipwrecks around the island. But once arrived, pirates seeking refuge or a base of operations found none of the things they needed: no taverns full of new recruits, no carpenters or blacksmiths, no merchants to whom they could sell their plundered loot, no black markets, not even a house of ill repute. The real pirate havens to the east had all of these things aplenty.

So given all of the above, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that all the tourist claims about famous pirates using Cozumel as a base are both fabricated and highly illogical. But just to make sure, let’s have a very quick look at the known biographical information of both Henry Morgan and Jean Lafitte — and then we’ll see if we can figure out how the legend got started.

Henry Morgan’s entire career has been pretty thoroughly documented, not only by biographers, but from an extensive library of contemporary documentation they sourced it from. Local officials frequently gave detailed accounts of pirates and pirate raids, and from all of this that survives, we have more than enough evidence to show that Morgan was never on the eastern side of Yucatán at all, though he did participate in the 1663 sack of Campeche on the western side — nearly 400 km away.

Jean Lafitte’s alleged association with the island is even more nonsensical, and the true version is even more thoroughly documented. His false association with Cozumel is not only geographically wrong, it’s temporally wrong. Lafitte’s career was in the 1800s, about a century after the sunset of the golden age of pirates. His base of operations was in Louisiana from where he struck ships of just about any nation; but when the war of 1812 broke out, Lafitte’s fleet fought for the Americans against the British, and received a full pardon for all previous criminal acts. After the war Lafitte and his brother agreed to serve as Spanish spies, and set up their operations on Galveston Island off what is today Texas. This grew into a colony of about 2000 people, but after all kinds of conflicts involving slave trading and smuggling and storms and battles with the local natives and disputed privateering commissions, the US Navy kicked him out.

Lafitte moved to the coast of Cuba, protected by a cash-under-the-table arrangement with local officials, from where he attacked Spanish trading ships. He was killed in a battle with two Spanish ships off the coast of Honduras in 1823 — with no record ever having placed him on Cozumel. However, some accounts claim that during these last years, he may have set up a temporary base on the island of Isla Mujeres, just off the northeastern tip of Yucatán, and the nearest island of any size close to Cozumel. However, it’s not too likely, as Isla Mujeres suffered from all the same deficiencies as a pirate base as Cozumel did; and the evidence that it ever happened is largely anecdotal.

Author Ric Hajovsky has done probably the most thorough research on the true history of Cozumel and its mythical pirate history with his 2015 book The True History of the Caribbean Island of Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It turns out the myth has a pretty interesting origin. Substantial correspondence survives between regional governors and other officials, including church officials, documenting the activities of a few hundred Englishmen who had a settlement on Cozumel, documented as early as 1670. Forbidden by policy from engaging in business with Spanish, they made their way by cutting logwood and dyewood (wood used to make valuable fabric dye) on the Yucatán mainland — and shipped it to Europe where it commanded high prices. Because they paid no tax to the Spanish for this commerce, they were commonly referred to in correspondence as piratas. The word didn’t mean pirate in the common sense; it meant smuggler in that their product was technically contraband, like if you “pirated” some copyrighted material.

In 1720, a shipwrecked merchant captain wrote of his experience living with some of these logwood cutters in Belize. He described them as:

...Generally a rude drunken Crew, some of which have been Pirates... [I find] but little Comfort living among these Crew of ungovernable Wretches, where was little else to be heard but Blasphemy, Cursing and Swearing.

And there was some more fuel on the fire that fed the mythology.

It’s not given in his book, but on a Scubaboard online forum, Hajovsky states that the earliest reference to pirates on Cozumel he could find in English comes from an 1878 booklet written by an American who spent six months on the island — unfortunately he gives no source for it. But he includes the following quote:

Cozumel Island was for many years the rendezvous of pirates and outlaws... [It] must have been one of those blissful retreats which the sensation novel writers allude to when they indulge in historical romance about buccaneers of a century or two gone by.

The earliest case Hajovsky found of a famous pirate being mentioned by name on Cozumel was in 1950, in the Spanish language magazine Visiónes, which reported that Henry Morgan once used the island as his base of operation. And you can take it from there; nearly every pop-culture reference to Cozumel published since then now casually throws in a mention of the island’s colorful pirate history.

But back to Cozumel’s Maya ruins for a moment: the largest and best were essentially destroyed by the Spanish residents of San Miguel to reuse the stones for building materials, and today virtually nothing remains. However, inland on Cozumel, too far to conveniently carry the stones for reuse, the ruins remain in excellent condition. When the Skeptoid Adventurers are all on the island this December, the simple fact of logistics on a small island means that we’re going to have to run the gauntlet of tourist attractions in order to get out there to our Maya ruins. So, for sure we’ll have to do something like a contest for who can collect the most printed references to the Pirates of Cozumel. Check it out and please join us if you can.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning