Compared with the Spaniards, they were usually in a small minority. But in their case, as in so many similar ones, it was not numbers, but their skill and courage, that gave them possession of rich galleons and placed the well-guarded plate-fleets at their mercy. At times the Buccaneers had only simple canoes—mere dugouts—but these, according to Esquemeling, were so fleet that they might well be called “Neptune’s post-horses.” In these they went out to sea for a distance of eighty leagues and attacked heavily-armed men of war, and, before the Spanish crew had time to realize what the daring sea rovers were after, their vessel was in the possession of their irresistible foe.[11]
They were strangers to fear, and no undertaking was too arduous, if the booty promised was sufficiently great. Danger and difficulty seemed only to whet their appetite for gold and fan their passions to a blaze. Their endurance of hunger and thirst and fatigue was as remarkable as their hardihood was phenomenal. They were loyal to one another and divided the spoils they secured in strict accordance with the agreement they had entered into beforehand. “Locks and bolts were prohibited, as such things were regarded as impeaching the honor of their vocation.”
They were religious after their own fashion. Thus it was forbidden to hunt or cure meat on Sunday. Before going on a cruise, they went to church to ask a blessing on their undertaking, and, after a successful raid, they returned to the house of God to sing a hymn of thanksgiving. We are told of a French captain who shot a filibuster for irreverence in church during divine service, and we also read of Captain Hawkins once throwing dice overboard when he found them being used on the Lord’s day.[12]
How all this reminds one of the conduct of that pitiless old slaver, John Hawkins, who frequently enjoined on his crew to “serve God daily,” and who, after escaping a heavy gale on his way from Africa to the West Indies, whither he was bound with a shipload of kidnapped negroes, sanctimoniously writes, “The Almighty God, who never suffereth His elect to perish, sent us the ordinary breeze.”
Although the Buccaneers frequently came into possession of immense sums of money, they would forthwith proceed to squander it in all kinds of dissipation and debauchery. “Such of these pyrates,” writes Esquemeling, “will spend two or three thousand pieces of eight in a night, not leaving themselves a good shirt to wear in the morning.”
At first, the Buccaneers confined themselves to depredations on sea, but their unexpected successes on water soon emboldened them to attack the largest and richest towns on the Spanish Main. When these were once in their power, they exacted from their inhabitants a heavy tribute, and if it was not paid without delay, the hapless people, regardless of age or sex, were subjected to the most cruel and unheard-of tortures. Puerto Principe, Maracaibo, Porto Bello, Panama and other places were captured in turn, and some of them, when sufficient ransom was not obtained, were burned to the ground. And so great and so hideous were the atrocities committed in some of these places that even Esquemeling has not the heart to do more than allude to them. They equaled, if they did not surpass, anything recorded of the pirates of Barbary or Malabar, and showed what fiends incarnate men can become when carried away by insatiate greed or the spirit of rapine and carnage.
The two Buccaneer leaders who most distinguished themselves for their diabolical ferocity and viciousness were L’Olonnois and Morgan. “L’Olonnois,” says Burney, “was possessed with an ambition to make himself renowned for being terrible. At one time, it is said, he put the whole crew of a Spanish ship, ninety men, to death, performing himself the office of executioner, by beheading them. He caused the crews of four others vessels to be thrown into the sea; and more than once, in his frenzies, he tore out the hearts of his victims and devoured them.”[13]
This “infernal wretch,” as Esquemeling calls him, “full of horrid, execrable and enormous deeds, and debtor to so much innocent blood, died by cruel and butcherly hands,” for the Indians of Darien, having taken him prisoner, “tore him in pieces alive, throwing his body, limb by limb, into the fire, and his ashes into the air, that no trace or memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.”[14]
Of Henry Morgan, who sacked Maracaibo and pillaged and burnt Panama, the same authority declares he “may deservedly be called the second L’Olonnois, not being unlike or inferior to him, either in achievements against the Spaniards or robberies of many innocent people.”[15]
He did not, however, share the fate of L’Olonnois. Having found favor with King Charles II, he was knighted and made deputy governor of Jamaica, when he turned against his former associates, many of whom he hanged, while he delivered others up to their enemies, the Spaniards.