An English sailor became the target of the first worldwide manhunt following an audacious act of piracy.
From 1688 to 1697, William III’s England and Louis XIV’s France were locked in the Nine Years’ War. Louis took the dispute to England’s colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and even India, but the French fleet was not the only peril upon the high seas.
King Louis XIV of France raised rebellion in Ireland to put his own man on the English throne.
Throughout the 1680s, King Louis XIV of France nibbled away at countries along the French border from Holland to the Alps, while his ally Turkey harassed them from the other side. Only William, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, offered any real resistance, but his navy was too small do anything about it until 1688, when an extraordinary stroke of luck came his way.