Coxswain to Captain Hood, he was promoted in 1763 to be a midshipman in H.M.S.
Zealous, cruising in the Mediterranean. Putting into Algiers, Thwaites was sent ashore by the captain to buy some sheep, but did not return to the boat and, it being supposed he had been assassinated, the ship sailed without him. The fact was that young Thwaites, who spoke Turkish and Greek, had accepted an invitation to enter the Ottoman service. Embracing the Mohammedan religion, Thwaites was put in command of a forty-four gun frigate.
His first engagement was with the flagship of the Tunisian Admiral, which he took and carried to Algiers. He soon brought in another prize, and so pleased the Dey that he presented him with a scimitar, the hilt of which was set with diamonds.
Thwaites, having soiled his hands with blood, now became the pirate indeed, taking vessels of any nation, and drowning all his prisoners by tying a double-headed shot round their necks and throwing them overboard.
He stopped at no atrocity—even children were killed, and one prisoner, an English lieutenant and an old shipmate of his, called Roberts, he murdered without a second thought. When Thwaites happened to be near Gibraltar, he would go ashore and through his agents, Messrs. Ross and Co., transmit large sums of money to his wife and children in England. But Thwaites had another home at Algiers fitted with every luxury, including three Armenian girls.
For several years this successful pirate plundered ships of all nations until such pressure was brought to bear on the Dey of Algiers that Thwaites thought it best to collect what valuables he could carry away and disappear.
Landing at Gibraltar in 1796, dressed in European clothes, he procured a passage to New York in an American frigate, the
Constitution. Arriving in the United States, he purchased an estate not far from New York and built himself a handsome mansion, but a year later retribution came from an unlooked-for quarter, for he was bitten by a rattlesnake and died in the most horrible agonies both of mind and body.
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