On February 15, 1804, Decatur in his felucca, and Somers commanding the brig, found themselves, toward evening, again in sight of the town, with its circle of forts crowned by the frowning castle. The great Philadelphia stood out in bold relief, closely surrounded by two frigates and more than twenty gunboats and galleys. From the castle and batteries 115 guns could be trained upon an attacking force, besides the fire of the vessels, yet the bold tars on the Intrepid did not quail.
The crew having been sent below, the pilot Catalona took the wheel, while Decatur stood beside him, disguised as a common sailor. It was now nine o’clock, and bright moonlight. Standing steadily in, they rounded to close by the Philadelphia, and, boldly hailing her deck-watch, asked the privilege of mooring to her chains for the night, explaining that they had lost their anchors in the late storm, and so forth, until at last consent was given.
Having dragged themselves close to the frigate, it was the work of only a moment to board her with a rush, overpower her surprised crew, and make sure of her destruction by means of the combustibles and powder they had brought with them. Before their task was done, however, they had been discovered, and it is almost a miracle that they were able to return to their felucca, and make their way out of the harbor, through a rain of harmless cannon-balls; yet they did so, and Decatur was justly honored for one of the most gallant exploits in naval annals.
A few weeks later Preble’s squadron shelled the pirate city and fortresses into ruin, forced Tripoli as well as Algiers and Tunis to respect them and thenceforth the American flag, and gave these arrogant rulers the new sensation of paying instead of receiving money for bad deeds. It put an end to the corsairs.
Turkish and Barbary pirates were not the only ones in the world, however. Although the old Norwegian vikings and rough Norman barons did not go under that name, they were scarcely anything else, in fact, as the neighboring peoples could testify, though this was far back before modern history began. But when the Spaniards and the French began to colonize the West Indies, and to dig mines in South and Central America, not only were the Barbary corsairs given a fresh incentive, but a new set of pirates sprang up, the most daring that the world has ever seen.
As the archipelago east of Greece had sheltered the hordes of the Turkish sea-robbers, so the many islands, crooked channels, reefs unknown to all but the local pilots, small harbors, and abundant food of the Antilles, made the West Indies the safest place in the world for pirates to pursue their work. To these new and wild regions, in the sixteenth century, had flocked desperados and adventurers from all over the world. When the wars with their chances of plunder died out after the campaigns led by Cortés, Pizarro, Balboa, and the rest of the Spanish conquistadores, many ruffians seized upon vessels by force, or stole them, and turned into robbers of the sea. At first, as a rule, they had farms and families on some island, and went freebooting only a portion of the year. The island of Hayti, or Santo Domingo, was then settled by farmers, hunters, and cattlemen, the last-named of whom, mainly French, passed most of their time in the interior of the island, capturing, herding, or killing half-wild cattle and hogs. But the monopolies which Spain imposed upon the colonists interfered with the market for their produce and induced an illicit trade, which led to frequent encounters with the Spanish navy. As the constant wars between Spain and France and England increased the difficulties of trade, large numbers of the colonists joined the freebooters, who then became extremely numerous and formidable, losing their old name and becoming known by that of the cattlemen—buccaneers, from the French word boucanier.
First Santo Domingo, then Tortugas, and finally Jamaica were headquarters of the buccaneers, who were made up of men of all nations, united by a desire to prey upon Spain as a common enemy. They were thousands in number, possessed large fleets of ships and boats, were well armed, and finally formed a regular organization with a chief and under-officers. The most noted of these chiefs, perhaps, was Henry Morgan, a Welshman, who was at one time captured and taken home to England for trial. To his own surprise, instead of being executed, he was knighted by Charles II, who had not been at all grieved at seeing Spanish commerce harassed; and Morgan was returned to Jamaica as commissioner of admiralty, where at one time he acted as deputy governor, using his opportunity to make it unpleasant for those of the buccaneers with whom he had formerly had disagreements as to the distribution of prizes.
The earlier buccaneers found ample plunder in the Spanish fleets. They patrolled the sea in the track of vessels bound to and from Europe, and seized them, allowing or compelling the crews to become pirates, or else to be killed or carried into slavery. This work, however, employed only a portion of the buccaneers; and early in the seventeenth century, as the commerce of Spain declined, it became too uncertain a means of wealth to suit them. But the rich Spanish settlements still remained; and often, therefore, they equipped a great fleet, enlisted men under certain strict rules as to sharing the spoils, and sailed away to pillage some coast. There was hardly an island in the West Indies from which, in this way, they did not extort immense sums of money under threat of destruction of the people. The mainland also suffered from the marauders. Great cities, like Cartagena in Venezuela, Panama on the Isthmus, Mérida in Yucatan, and Havana in Cuba, were attacked by armies of buccaneers numbering thousands of men. Sometimes their fortifications held good, and the enemy was beaten back; but sooner or later all these cities, and others, smaller, were captured, robbed of everything valuable that they contained, and burned or partly burned.
For years the buccaneers were the terror of the Caribbean region, and after the famous sacking of Panama, under Morgan, in 1671, their power spread across the Isthmus and scourged the southern seas. We have no way of knowing the amount of the treasure which they captured from the merchant vessels and from the coast of Peru; for the moment they got home from an expedition they wasted all their booty in wild carousing, so that the spoils earned by months of exposure, and wounds, and danger of death, would be spent in a single week.
At last even England and France, after secretly favoring the buccaneers, became roused to the necessity of controlling them, and it was with this object in view that a certain Captain William Kidd was fitted out at private expense toward the end of the seventeenth century, and armed with King William’s commission for seizing pirates and making reprisals, England being at war with France. Just why it was, nobody has explained, but Captain Kidd spent his time in loitering around the coast of Africa, where no pirates were to be found, until he grew quite disheartened, and, fearing to be dismissed by his employers and to be “mark’d out for an unlucky man,” he started a little pirate business for himself, in which he gained more of a certain kind of fame than any of the rest; for popular tradition supposes him to have hoarded his booty and buried it. “Captain Kidd’s treasure” has been sought for until the whole eastern coast of the United States is honeycombed with diggings for it; but probably he had eaten and drunk it up before 1701, when he was captured and executed in England. About this time, however, and without his valuable aid, the combined naval forces of all the nations interested in the commerce of the New World broke the power of the buccaneers, and their depredations ceased. Their story is one of the wildest, most romantic, and most terrible in the history of the world.