And as for the lives of the buccaneers themselves—the account of how they wrenched Tortuga from Spain, of how they peopled Western Hispaniola with cattle-killing hunters and desperadoes, of how they roamed through the tropical rankness of the forests, with their half-wild dogs and their huge, unwieldy firelock guns, now hunted by the Spaniards like wild beasts, and now like wild beasts turning at bay to rend and tear with savage quickness—it would be, if anything, still more a pity to mar the telling as he tells it with his pithy conciseness. And then, after all, it is such old histories alone that can bring one in full touch with the empty shell of a life that is past and gone, and such a history is doubly, trebly full of interest when told by an actor who actually lived it in the scenes of which he writes. And so we leave honest John Esquemeling to tell his own history in his own way.
However, of the differentiation of the buccaneer pirate from the buccaneer proper something may, perhaps, be added to aid the reader in a clearer understanding of the manner in which they came to graduate from cattle-stealing to throat-cutting.
V.
The buccaneers took their name from a peculiar method of curing beef by drying it in the sun, which was termed buchanning. The beef so cured was, itself wild or half-wild cattle, stolen from the neighbouring Spaniards of the great Island of Hispaniola—the San Domingo of our day. The chief rendezvous of these nomadic hunters and curers of meat was upon a little hunch of an island known as Tortuga de Mar, so called from its supposed resemblance to the sea-turtle. Of the manner in which the French settled upon this island of the sea-turtle, of their bloody fights with the Spaniards, of the conquest of the island by the one, of its recapture by the other, of its recapture again by the French, the author tells at length. Suffice it to be said here that, in spite of all the power of Spain, the buccaneers finally made conquest of Tortuga, and that a French governor was sent to rule over them.
No better situation could have been found for the trade in which they were busied. Tortuga, lying as it does off the north-west shore of Hispaniola and at the outlet of the Old Bahama Channel (a broad stretch of navigable water extending between the Island of Cuba and the great Bahama Banks), was almost in the very centre of the main route of travel between the Western World and Europe, along which the commerce of the West Indies came and went, ebbed and flowed. It afforded, perhaps, one of the most convenient ports of the whole Western World in which home-returning vessels might provision and take in water. The captains and owners of the trading vessels asked no questions as to the means whereby cattle were procured. It sufficed them that the meat was well dried and well cured, and, having been stolen, was cheaper than that to be had at Porto Bello, Santa Catharina, and other Spanish ports. So buccaneering (in its proper sense) was quite a profitable business, and prospered accordingly; the step from stealing cattle to piracy was not so very great.
Among the buccaneers were to be found the offscourings of all the French and English West Indies—a mad, savage, unkempt phase of humanity, wilder than the wildest Western cow-boys—fierce, savage, lawless, ungoverned, ungovernable. The Spaniards were merely the means whereby money was to be gained—money to spend in the wild debaucheries, for which the world has afforded few better opportunities than were to be found in the Spanish West Indies. The old days of legalized piracy had never been forgotten, and by and by it began to be felt by the wild cattle-hunters that beef-curing was too slow and laborious a means of earning doubloons. It needed only the leadership of such a one as Pierre le Grand to awaken dormant piracy to a renewed vigour of life.
Our author only gives us meagre details concerning the result of that first bold expedition of the buccaneers under Pierre le Grande into the Carribbean Sea. He tells us but little of the capture of the great galleon by the pirate crew of the long-boat, and as to the gains made by the buccaneers upon the occasion he tells us only that “he (Pierre) set sail for France, carrying with him all the riches he found in that huge vessel, and that there he continued without ever returning to the parts of America again.” But though our author does not tell just what was the plunder taken upon this memorable occasion, it must have been very considerable indeed, and one can imagine how the success of the venture set agog all the buccaneers of Tortuga and Hispaniola. One can fancy what a ferment the rumour of the great capture occasioned; what a hurrying hither and thither; what a crowding of crews of desperadoes into long-boats and hoys! It was so infinitely much easier, so vastly quicker and so much more congenial a means of getting rich upon ill-gotten gains than the dangerous and monotonous business of hunting and stealing cattle in an enemy’s country. So, in a little while—a few years—the West Indian seas were alive with pirates—English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese.
Nearly always, though our author does not explicitly say so, the buccaneers appear to have sailed under some semi-official letters of marque, granted by the colonial governors. It was under such that the famous Captain Morgan sailed in his expedition against Porto Bello, Santa Catharina, and Panama. But such unauthorized letters of marque only made piracy all the more strenuous, unrelaxing, merciless giving as they did some sanction to the cruel and bloody warfare. French and English West Indian towns—such, for instance, as Port Royal, in Jamaica—grew fabulously rich with an unbelievable quickness. In ten or twelve years Spain had lost millions upon millions of dollars, which vast treasure was poured in a golden flood into those hot fever-holes of towns, where Jews and merchants and prostitutes battened on the burning lusts of the wild hunters whose blood was already set aflame with plunder and rapine. At last the risks of Spanish West Indian commerce became so great that no vessel dared venture out of port, excepting under escort of men-of-war. Even then they were not secure always of protection, for there are records that tell of the capture of rich prizes from the very midst of the surrounding plate fleet.
Cargoes of value from the Western provinces of Central and South America, instead of being sent to Spain across the Isthmus from Panama as heretofore, were carried more often by way of the Strait of Magellan, there being less danger in that long and toilsome voyage than in the pirate-infested Carribbean Sea in spite of its trade-winds and steady ocean currents. So it came that by and by the trade of freebooting no longer returned the great profits that had been one time realized by those who embarked in it. It seemed for awhile as though the business were likely to find its death in the very thing that had given it birth—the weakness of Spanish power, decaying to ruin.
It was in this time of its threatened decadence that Francis Lolonois gave a new impulse to the free trade—as it was sometimes called—of the times.