Description

Roberto Cofresí y Ramírez de Arellano, better known as El Pirata Cofresí, was a Puerto Rican pirate. He was born into a noble family, but the political and economic difficulties faced by the island as a colony of the Spanish Empire during the regional independence wars against the metropole meant that his household was poor. Cofresí worked at sea from an early age which familiarized him with the region's geography, but it provided only a modest salary, and he eventually decided to abandon the sailor's life and became a pirate. He had previous links to land-based criminal activities, but the reason for Cofresí's change of vocation is unknown; historians speculate that he may have worked as a privateer aboard El Scipión, a ship owned by one of his cousins.