“Keep that until we start,” Gil said, impatiently, as his cousin paused to take a long breath. “Just now we want to get our traps aboard, instead of reading some musty tale.”
“Wait a moment, and find out what it means. We’ve got plenty of time,” Nelse said, and then he continued:
“Back in the opening decades of the seventeenth century adventurous criminals from throughout the Antilles began to collect on the islet, and in a few years Tortuga became the recognized headquarters of the Spanish Main. From it as from a fever germ went out a fire of blood, piracy, and lawlessness which spread over the waters of the Western World.
“Tortuga was settled in the first years of this century by Spanish pioneers from the island known as Hispanola, or ‘Little Spain.’ It was given the fanciful name of Tortuga de Mar, ‘The Sea Tortoise,’ from its resemblance in shape to that amphibian. The settlers were a worthy and simple folk, for the most part fishermen, who, for a few months in the twelve, varied life by hunting the wild cattle which fed in the wooded coast lands.
“Scarcely had they become well established on the Tortoise, when, one morning in May, 1632, they were mystified at the sight of a pinnace load of strange seamen landing on the key which faces the mouth of their harbor. Fifteen restless spirits from the French colony of St. Christopher had, with the adventurous recklessness which marked that day and those waters, set out for the best location which fortune and a west wind should put in their way. They were allowed to put up sapodilla shelters at the harbor mouth, and also to shoot their French bullets into wild bulls on the opposite coast.
“In a few weeks it became evident that the rascally strangers could slaughter and boucan more beeves in a day than the entire Spanish community could in three. Boucanning, by the way, was a peculiar process of curing flesh by jerking, salting, and drying in the sunshine, the term being derived from an aboriginal word applied by the cannibal Caribbes to the curing of human flesh. Such was the skill of the intruders in converting the bulls into a superior, merchantable product by means of the boucan that the Spanish derisively applied the native word to them.
“As Tortuga lay directly in the path of European vessels bound for Mexican ports, the fifteen Frenchmen immediately built up a thriving business in boucanned beef. Doubloons, pieces-of-eight, and moidores became to them as shells or seabeans to the Spanish fishermen. Word went back apace to St. Christopher, throwing that island into such an uproar that the craze to go a-boucanning carried its most unruly seamen to the Tortoise.
“Frenchmen came down upon the islet like a swarm of mosquitoes, and overran it before the simple Spanish folks could recover from their astonishment. Ominous growlings were heard among the original settlers, but for such trivial matters as round Spanish oaths the intruders cared never a whit. Just before dawn, December 1, 1633, the Spanish islanders met at the plaza of their little town, and descended headlong upon the intruders at the boucanning beaches. Then began a massacre, during which the intruders were cut down wherever found.
“Immediately after this the boucanning foreigners formed themselves into a band composed of a collection of couples. Each two hunters made common property of all possessions of either. They bound themselves by every oath to an imperishable brotherhood. Each swore to avenge with death any insult offered to the other. The two hunted and lived together by day, slept together by night, and were as one flesh; and always as the band ranged the coast valleys, grew the purpose of avenging the Tortuga massacre.
“A few months later the Frenchmen took the islanders by surprise. A carnival of butchery ensued. When it was completed the village was burned. The most lawless of the murderers was one Pierre Le Gros, a sailor of oxlike frame and weight, hailing originally from Dieppe, who, with twenty-seven fellow spirits, stole a small sloop from a Tortugan skipper, and started on a nautical foray on whatsoever Spanish merchantmen fate might cast in his course.