Leonard Le-Bec

Leonard Le-Bec (c. 1693 - 1747) is an often unremembered French sailor and pirate who is best known for his capture and defence of a small island off the south coast of Cornwall. After his death, legend tells, many English sailors and fishermen took the "oath of silence" swearing never to reveal the whereabouts of his bones. This legend is still remembered in some Cornish villages where, on St Leonards Day, villagers and tourists take part in treasure hunts to seek the long forgotten bones.

Stories concerning Leonard Le-Bec

Legends and stories concerning Leonard are often varied and inconsistent. The events of his life and death often becoming tangled with folk law, history and fiction alike. Some unauthenticated but yet interesting examples include:

Reports from aboard the Hinchinbroke, a French frigate that was captured by British forces in 1779, of an apparition of a French pirate. Some have since postured that it may have been the ghost of Leonard Le-Bec. It is claimed that a French man appeared at night on board the ship and spoke to two sailors who were on watch. He boasted that he had managed what no other French man would ever achieve, "the capture of British soil, an invasion". Ironically the ship was at that time under the command of post-captain Horatio Nelson, who much later effectively ended Napoleon Bonaparte's ambitions of invasion of England at the Battle of Trafalgar.

In Steven Booth's 1979 study of piracy in the English Channel entitled 'Stories of the Channel Pirates', he has printed excerpts from south coast naval logs found in the researcher's library at the Cornish Nautical Trust offices. It speaks of an engagement between a small group of geographers working in a small launch charting depth and obstruction maps for the Cornish coast in 1775. The group were in a navy launch and the boat was manned by four Royal Navy greenhorns and a lieutenant. They became engaged by a small sloop skippered by a tall blonde man with a French crew. He came alongside and struck up a conversation about the quickest route to the Thames Estuary as he was late for a French invasion planning to overthrow parliament. He claimed that he was supposed to be ahead of the armada waving to the passers-by on the bridges above the insurgence. He pulled away quickly as the officers responded with aggression and left singing the words of 'God Save the King' to the tune of 'La Marseillaise'. The lieutenant filed the engagement as an encounter with a drunken merchant captain, however the sloop's mate noted the possibility of them having come into contact with Leonard Le-Bec, a figure shrouded in mystery and intrigue and believed by some British sailors to prey on pleasure sailing in the channel. The comic, witty disregard for authority and physical description do match some early records concerning Le-Bec, however as with most information on his activities, there are just as many contradicting reports.