was John Gómez, who would tell the tale to subsequent generations. Plausibility Historical context Though his story has been retold in many forms since its first appearance around 1900, there is no evidence that the pirate José Gaspar existed. The period in which he was supposedly active was well after the "Golden Age of Piracy" (c. 1650 - 1725), when real historical figures such as Bartholomew Roberts, Blackbeard, and William Kidd operated in and around the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic basin. European nations began to make a concerted effort to suppress piracy in the early 1700s, and by 1730, every major pirate of the "golden age" era had been killed. While scattered seaborne attacks by privateers and others were still an occasional issue when Gaspar supposedly arrived at Charlotte Harbor in the 1780s, the navies of Britain, France, Spain, and the newly independent United States were actively patrolling nearby waters, making it improbable that a pirate could successfully harass shipping for decades at the enormous scale claimed in the various stories about Gasparilla. In addition, few pirates of any age based their operations along Florida's west coast. The vast majority of loot taken by real-life pirates consisted not of gold doubloons but of easily liquidated trade goods, and there were no nearby towns where stolen cargo could be sold. Archival evidence Several historians and other interested parties have attempted to find documentation of Gaspar's existence without success. Research in Spanish archives has turned up no mention of his early life, his presence in the Spanish royal court, or his career in the Spanish navy. Despite claims that he was the most feared pirate in the Gulf of Mexico for several decades, searches of contemporary American newspapers have found no mention of the name "Gaspar" or "Gasparilla" or of a pirate ship called Floriblanca, and searches of U.S. Navy archives have found no mention of Gaspar in ships' logs or in official court records of the hundreds of piracy trials held during the era. While the USS Enterprise was assigned to the West Indies Squadron tasked with suppressing piracy in the Caribbean, it is documented to have been in Cuba in December 1821, not in Charlotte Harbor, where Gaspar's last battle is said to have taken place. Local place names There is no evidence to support the claim that several local place names in southwest Florida originated with Gaspar, as many