Combat· Aegean Anti-Piracy Campaign
USS Warren at pirate town of Miconi (Mykonos)
A punitive shore operation against a pirate base.
Marines and seamen from the USS Warren landed at Mykonos in the Cyclades, which had been serving as a haven and market for the pirates, and burned property there in reprisal. The raid was bloodless but deliberately harsh, meant to deny the freebooters a refuge and to make plain the cost of harboring them. Burning a town's pirate-associated buildings was the kind of severe measure to which American forces resorted when the raiders could not be caught at sea, the same logic that had sent landing parties ashore against the pirate camps of Cuba a few years earlier. The action shows how far the squadron was prepared to go to protect commerce, taking the fight onto the islands themselves. Mykonos, today a famous resort, was in 1827 one of the lawless anchorages of a sea convulsed by revolution.
Record no. 293