THE LONDON GAZETTE, England, Feb. 28, 1686  

* Real Pirates of the Caribbean - buccaneers
* Laurens Cornelis Boudewijn de Graaf (Laurence)

The front page has a report datelined at Venice concerning the ending of the famous carnival there.
The back page has a report noting: "...There are letters from Spain which says they had news from the West Indies that the Pyrats, conducted by one Laurence, had plundered and burnt the town of Panama, and put all the inhabitants to ransom."
Complete as a single sheet issue, 6 1/2 by 11 1/2 inches, nice condition.

Background: The geopolitical significance of Laurens de Graaf’s devastating raids, and the sensationalized European reporting that followed, lies in how they exposed the crumbling defensive architecture of the Spanish Empire while signaling the peak of the buccaneering era. By successfully organizing massive, multi-national coalitions of pirates to breach heavily fortified Spanish strongholds like Campeche, de Graaf proved that Spain's vast New World wealth was utterly vulnerable to non-state actors, who frequently operated with the tacit approval or legal cover of rival crowns like France and England. Furthermore, the panic reflected in The London Gazette’s conflated report underscores how deeply intertwined colonial security was with European financial markets and public imagination; a single rumor of a burnt treasure port could disrupt transatlantic trade and force urgent diplomatic recalibrations in London, Paris, and Madrid. Ultimately, these unchecked, high-stakes depredations forced a crucial pivot in global politics: they demonstrated to European monarchs that pirate fleets had grown too powerful and chaotic to control, directly paving the way for late-17th-century international treaties where nations finally agreed to suppress outlaw buccaneers in favor of structured, state-regulated global commerce.