Capture of the sloop Ranger
1723 Royal Navy anti-piracy action
The capture of the sloop Ranger occurred on June 10, 1723 near Block Island in the Atlantic Ocean. Two pirate ships under the command of Englishmen Edward Low and Charles Harris attacked HMS Greyhound, a post ship of the Royal Navy which they mistook for a civilian whaler. The resulting engagement lasted for several hours and ended with Harris' sloop Ranger being captured by Greyhound while Low's schooner Fancy escaped. All surviving crew of Ranger were captured and brought to Newport, Rhode Island, where they were placed on trial, sentenced to death and executed.
Background
Edward Low was an eighteenth-century English pirate known for his extreme cruelty. He personally killed over fifty men and committed several atrocities such as forcing prisoners he captured to eat human flesh. By the summer of 1723, Low commanded the eighty-ton schooner named Fancy and was the most feared pirate in the Atlantic Ocean. Fancy was armed with ten guns and had a crew of forty-four, many of whom were conscripted. Accompanying Fancy was the sloop Ranger under fellow Englishman Charles Harris. Ranger was a former French sloop that was captured by Low near Grenada in 1723.
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This entry incorporates text from “Capture of the sloop Ranger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.