I decided to spend some time at the local archives housed in the Tralee (County Kerry) Public Library to do some research on piracy in the local area. I read somewhere that Lord Denny, whom Denny Street in Tralee is named after, kept the town alive by dealing with pirates and that the town of Portmagee in County Kerry is named after a pirate. Given all the nooks and crannies that the Kerry coastline has, it is not unreasonable that this county in Ireland should have seen some pirate activity.
I told the lady what I was researching and her response was, “Pirates, that’s an unusual request.” Nonetheless the good lady sat me down in front of a computer and showed me how to use the newspaper archives. The archives looked like microfiche that had been scanned into a pdf file.
The earliest articles dated from 1738- 1890 and they were from the Belfast Newsletter. The archive also had articles from the Finn’s Leinster Journal that dated from 1771-1828 and the Freeman’s Journal whose articles were from 1763-1924. There were plenty of obituary style paragraphs on how unnamed pirates seized a ship. There were articles on Chinese pirates, Barbary pirates, Cuban pirates…
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It wasn’t until the October 31, 2012 edition of The Kerryman that I found a mention of a Dutch pirate, Claes Campane, who was well known in Dingle, a town west of Tralee. This tidbit came from an article describing a talk given by an underwater archaeologist, Connie Kelleher. According to Ms. Kelleher there were 500-1,000 pirates in the Dingle area and that might have been due to a loophole in the law that existed until 1613 that pirates couldn’t be executed.
I know you Kerry pirates are out there, so I’m going to keep looking.
