Captain Morgan was a real person.

Famous Figures

T he Captain Morgan rum brand is named after a real person: the legendary Welsh privateer and buccaneer Captain Henry Morgan, who terrorized Spanish ships in the 17th century. Morgan was born in Wales around 1635, but his famous swashbuckling adventures took place in the Caribbean, where he was sent to fight the Spanish. Privateers were kind of legal pirates: They worked as representatives of a government, raiding rival nations on their sponsoring nation's behalf, while keeping some of the fortune for themselves. Morgan was part of a group known as the "Brethren of the Coast" — real-life pirates of the Caribbean — and his exploits gained him both wealth and lasting fame.

Captain Morgan led many raids against Spanish colonies, most famously in 1671, when he took 1,000 men and captured Panama City. While his previous raids had been during wartime, the Panama City attack came after a peace treaty was signed between England and Spain, meaning Morgan was acting illegally as a pirate. He was returned to England to stand trial, but the English people, who had heard of his exploits, treated him more like a hero than a criminal, and he was even knighted by King Charles II. When he returned to Jamaica, he left the pirate world behind and became lieutenant-governor of the colony; upon his death at age 53, he was given a state funeral in Port Royal with ships firing guns in salute. Centuries later, in 1944, when the Seagram company set up a rum distillery in Jamaica, they named it after the larger-than-life local buccaneer.

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By the Numbers

Year Rafael Sabatini wrote Captain Blood based on Morgan's life

1922

Year Seagram's founded Captain Morgan rum

1944

Did you know?

There's another rum named after a British sea captain.

Most people have heard of Captain Morgan rum, but if you'd like to save a few dollars, you could try Admiral Nelson instead. The brand is named for another British sailor, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, who is considered one of the greatest naval leaders in Britain's history. (Writer Lord Byron even called him "Britannia's God of War.") When Nelson died at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic Wars, his body was preserved in a cask of spirits, and "Nelson's blood" became a nickname for both brandy and rum. So it's not surprising that when the Heaven Hill Distillery developed a rum brand, they named it after Admiral Nelson. Unlike the image on the bottle, however, the real Nelson had sandy gray hair, no eye patch, and only one arm after losing his right arm in battle.