So far as England acquiesced in, or connived at what the Spaniards always denounced as downright piracy, it was doubtless ever with the view of weakening the menacing power of the dominant Spanish empire. She was also actuated by “an aggressive determination to break down the barriers with which Spanish policy sought to enclose the New World and to shut out the way to the Indies.” In this determination England had the sympathy of France and often its active coöperation. For a similar reason Dutch sea rovers swarmed over the Caribbean Sea. All were aware of the magnitude of the struggle in which they were engaged, and realized that their existence as nations depended on their crippling their common enemy by striking at the sources of his power in the Western Hemisphere.
Much might be said of the reckless audacity, brilliant achievements and skillful seamanship of these privateers or pirates—whatever one chooses to call them—that read more like fable or romance than sober chronicles of authentic fact, but space does not permit. Besides, we are more interested in another class of sea rovers of a later date, whose names and exploits are inseparably connected with the West Indies and the great South Sea. I refer to the Buccaneers, or, as they called themselves, the Brethren of the Coast.
Our knowledge of these extraordinary adventurers is derived mainly from themselves. Of English Buccaneers the most interesting narratives have been left us by Sharp, Cowley, Ringrose and Dampier. The Frenchman, Ravenau de Lussan, has also left us a record of value. The most popular work, however, and the one that gives us the truest insight into the manners and customs of the Brethren of the Coast, and recounts with the greatest detail their deeds of daring and cruelty, is that given to the world by the Dutchman Esquemeling. It was entitled De Americaensche Zee Rovers and was, on its appearance, immediately translated into the principal languages of Europe. The fact that Esquemeling was with the Buccaneers for five years, and was with them, too, on many of their most important expeditions, gave him unusual opportunities for collecting facts at first hand and studying the methods of procedure of his reckless and often brutal associates.
By the Spaniards, the Brethren of the Coast have always been regarded as pirates—for the same reason as Raleigh, Drake and Hawkins and their associates were regarded as pirates—because they conducted their lawless operations when England and Spain were at peace. But there was the same difference between Buccaneers and ordinary pirates as there was between the corsairs just mentioned and ordinary pirates. The latter attacked vessels of every nation, while the Buccaneers, like Drake and his compatriots, confined themselves to preying on Spanish shipping and sacking Spanish towns and strongholds.
Some became Buccaneers because they had a grievance, real or imaginary, against the Spaniards, others because they chafed under the monopolizing policy of the Spanish government, and wished to secure a part of the ever-increasing trade with the New World, while others still joined the ranks of the Brethren because they relished the life of excitement and adventure it held forth, or because they found it the easiest means of gaining a livelihood.
Esquemeling was among the last of these classes. After being twice sold as a slave, he finally obtained his liberty when, to use his own words, “Though like Adam when he was first created, that is, naked and destitute of all human necessaries, not knowing how to get my living, I determined to enter into the Order of the Pyrates or Robbers at Sea.”[8]
The cradle of the extraordinary “Order of Pyrates,” of which Esquemeling was to be the most distinguished chronicler, was Tortuga, a small, rocky island off the northwest corner of Haiti. It was visited by Columbus during his first voyage, and, from the number of turtles found there, was called Tortuga—the Spanish for turtle—the name it still retains. But small as it was, it was destined to become “the common refuge of all sorts of wickedness, and the seminary, as it were of pyrates and thieves.”[9]
The name Buccaneer is derived from “bucan,” a Carib word signifying a wooden gridiron on which meat is smoked. Originally, the term Buccaneer was applied to the French settlers of Española, whose chief occupation was to hunt wild cattle and hogs, which roamed over the island in large numbers, and cure their flesh by bucaning it, that is smoking it on a bucan.[10] When they were driven from their business of bucaning by the Spaniards, they took refuge in Tortuga, where they were soon joined by many English adventurers. Here they combined to make war on Spain in her American colonies, and for more than a half century they carried terror and destruction to every part of the Caribbean archipelago.
But, notwithstanding their change of occupation, their old name of Buccaneer clung to them, and, as such, they are still known in history. Like the bold Vikings of the North, who were so long the scourge of western and southern Europe, the Buccaneers were the scourge of Spanish America from Tortuga to Panama and from California to Patagonia. They warred against but one enemy—the one that had harassed and driven them from their peaceful avocation of bucaning, or had persecuted and oppressed their brethren in the peaceful pursuit of commerce, when the lands of their birth, or the countries to which they owed allegiance, were unable or unwilling to protect them.
Like the archpirate Drake, as the Spaniards called him, “They swept the sea of every passing victualler, and added the captured cargoes to the stores of game and fish it was their delight to catch. At intervals along the coast and amongst the wilderness of islands, magazines were hidden, and into these were poured the stores that had been destined for the great plate-fleets. The shark-like pinnaces would suddenly appear in the midst of the trade-route no one knew whence, and laden with food, as suddenly disappear no one knew whither.”