“There was a common tie that banded them together, the call of the wild and the hate of Spain. They formed no colony, nor settlement, but simply joined themselves together in a kind of jungle brotherhood. They found a leader as a pack of wolves finds theirs, not by choosing one to lead but by following the one who led.” P. 250, London, 1908. [↑]
[10] For awhile the term Buccaneer was applied to the English, who had nothing to do with the bucan, as well as to the French adventurers. Subsequently the French sea-rovers became known as flibustiers, the French sailors’ pronunciation of the word freebooter, while the English corsairs appropriated the name Buccaneers. As their occupations were the same—making war on the Spaniard—the two terms came eventually to be regarded as synonymous. All the freebooters, whether English, French, or Dutch, as an indication of their being banded against a common enemy, the Spaniards, assumed the name Brethren of the Coast. The members of this brotherhood must not be confounded with such cutthroats as Kidd, Bonnet, Avery and Thatch, who was known as Blackbeard and, for a while, terrorized the Atlantic Coast from the West Indies to New England. [↑]
[11] Thus, the French Flibustier, Pierre le Grand, with only a small boat and a crew of but twenty-eight men, surprised and captured the ship of the vice-admiral of the Spanish galleons as she was homeward bound with a rich cargo. [↑]
[12] When John Watling, the successor of the deposed Captain Edmund Cook, began his captaincy, he ordered all his crew to keep holy the Sabbath day. “With Edmund Cook down on the ballust in irons,” writes Masefield, and William Cook talking of salvation in the galley, and old John Watling expounding the Gospel in the cabin, the galleon, ‘The most Holy Trinity,’ must have seemed a foretaste of the New Jerusalem. The fiddler ceased such prophane strophes as ‘Abel Brown,’ ‘The Red-haired Man’s Wife,’ and ‘Valentinian.’ He tuned his devout strings to songs of Zion. Nay, the very boatswain could not pipe the cutter up but to a phrase of the Psalms.” (On the Spanish Main, p. 263, London, 1906.) [↑]
[13] History of the Buccaneers of America, Chap. V. [↑]
[14] Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 115. [↑]
[16] Referring to this matter, George W. Thornsburg writes:—
“Anomalous beings, hunters by land and sea, scaring whole fleets with a few canoes, sacking cities with a few grenadiers, devastating every coast from California to Cape Horn, they needed only a common principle of union to have founded an aggressive republic as wealthy as Venice and as warlike as Carthage. One great mind and the New World had been their own.”—The Monarchs of the Main, or Adventures of the Buccaneers, preface, p. 10, London, 1855. [↑]
[17] Thus Esquemeling tells us that Morgan’s fleet, before his raid on Maracaibo, was, by order of the governor of Jamaica, strengthened by the addition of an English vessel of thirty-six guns. This was done to give the ruthless Buccaneer “greater courage to attempt mighty things.” Op. cit., p. 147. [↑]