Diego el Mulato

He fled Spanish enslavement at Nombre de Dios, Panama in 1572, and was captured by or possibly joined the English privateer Francis Drake in 1572, becoming a member of his crew.

[2] On 15 May 1584 four privateer ships, two frigates and three pinnaces commanded by William Parker of Plymouth and Jérémie Raymond of Cherbourg intercepted the dispatch vessel of Francisco Rodriguez near Trujillo, Honduras.

A young slave named Diego el Mulato from the Spanish ship offered to help the privateers, and two days later guided a landing party that successfully took the town.

[6] A force of ten or eleven ships and two sloops under the Dutch pirate Cornelis Jol and Diego el Mulato Martín attacked Campeche on 11 August 1633.

Gage said of him: This mulatto, for some wrongs which had been offered unto him from some commanding Spaniards in Havana, ventured himself desperately in a boat out to sea, where were some Holland ships waiting for a prize.

With God's help getting unto them, he yielded himself to their mercy, which he esteemed far better than that of his own countrymen, promising to serve them faithfully against his own nation, which had most injuriously and wrongfully abused, yea, and whipped him in Havana...[8]The Spanish officials in Havana received a letter from Diego Martín in 1638 in which he said he greatly wanted to serve as a "valiant soldier of the king, our lord."

In 1642 he sacked Bacalar and Campeche on the Yucatán coast, where he "undressed [altar] images, chopped them to pieces with axes, and dressed up in mockery.

[14] José Antonio Cisneros wrote a verse drama in three acts called Diego el Mulato that premiered on 2 June 1846 in the Teatro San Carlos in Mérida, Yucatán.