All the circumstances here mentioned were favourable to the growth of piracy. At the same time the temptations were unusually strong. There was a vague widespread belief that America was a land abounding in treasure, and there were facts enough to explain such a belief. Immense quantities of gold and silver were carried across the Atlantic in Spanish ships, to say nothing of other articles of value. This treasure was used to support a war which threatened English liberty, and therefore English cruisers were right in seizing it wherever they could. But it only needed that such cruising should fall into the hands of knaves and ruffians, and that it should be kept up after Spain and England were really at peace, for this semi-mediæval warfare to develop into a gigantic carnival of robbery and murder. And so it happened.
Origin of buccaneering.
It was toward the end of the sixteenth century, in the course of the great Elizabethan war, that the West Indies witnessed the first appearance of the marauders known as “Brethren of the Coast.” They were of various nationalities, chiefly French, English, and Dutch. They all regarded Spain as the world’s great bully that must be teased. The Spaniards had won such a reputation for tyranny and cruelty that public opinion was not shocked when they were made to swallow a dose or two of their own medicine. After peace had been declared, any foreign adventurers coming to the West Indies were liable to be molested as intruders, and their ships sometimes had to fight in self-defence. Wherefore the more unscrupulous rovers, expecting ill-treatment, used not to wait for it, but when they saw a good chance for robbing Spaniards they promptly seized it. This they called, in the witty phrase of a French captain, se dédommager par avance, or recouping one’s self beforehand.
Illicit traffic.
It was not all the people of Spanish America, however, that frowned upon foreigners. Among those who came were sundry small traders of the illicit sort. Like all semi-barbarous governments, the court of Spain pursued a highly protectionist policy. The colonists were not allowed to receive European goods from any but Spanish ports, and thus the Spanish exporters were enabled to charge exorbitant prices. Many of the colonists therefore welcomed smugglers who brought European wares to exchange for cargoes of sugar or hides. To suppress this traffic, the authorities at San Domingo patrolled the coasts with small cruisers known as guardacostas, and when they caught the intruders they pitched them overboard, or strung them up to the yard-arm, without the smallest ceremony. In revenge the intruders combined into fleets and made descents upon the coasts, burning houses, plundering towns, and committing all manner of outrages. Thus there grew up in the West Indies a chronic state of hostilities quite independent of Europe. It came to be understood among the intruders that, whether their countries were at peace or war with one another, all persons coming to the West Indies were friends and allies against that universal enemy, the Spaniard. Thus these rovers took the name of “Brethren of the Coast.”
Buccaneers and “flibustiers.”
As the consequence of more than a century of frightful misrule the beautiful island of Hispaniola, or Hayti, had come to be in many parts deserted. Many good havens were unguarded, and everywhere there were immense herds of cattle and swine running wild. Some of the brethren, mostly Frenchmen, were thus led to settle in the island and do a thriving business in hides, tallow, smoked beef, and salted pork, which they bartered with their sailor brethren for things smuggled from Europe. They drove away the Spaniards who tried to disturb them, and amid perpetual fighting the island came to be more and more French. Presently, from 1625 to 1630, they took possession of the little islands of St. Christopher and Nevis, and built strong fortifications at Tortuga. About this time they began to be called “boucaniers” or “buccaneers.” To cure meat by smoking was called by the Indians “boucanning” it. La Rochefort says of the Caribs that they used to eat their prisoners well boucanned. In the days before cattle came to the New World, Americus Vespucius saw boucanned human shoulders and thighs hanging in Indian cabins as one would hang a flitch of bacon. The buccaneers were named for the excellent boucanned beef and pork which they sold. For their brethren on shipboard another name was at first used. The English word “freebooter” became in French mouths “flibustier,” in spelling which a silent s was inserted after the u by a false analogy, as so often happens. In recent times “flibustier” has come back into English as “filibuster,” a name originally given to such United States adventurers as William Walker, making raids upon Spanish-American coasts in the interests of slavery. In the first use of the epithets, if you lived on shore and smoked beef you were a boucanier; but if you lived on ship and smuggled or stole wherewithal to buy the beef you were a flibustier. Naturally, however, since so many of these restless brethren passed back and forth from the one occupation to the other, the names came to be applied indiscriminately, and whether you called a scamp by the one or the other made no difference.
The kind of people that became buccaneers.
Those “Brethren of the Coast” were recruited in every way that can be imagined. Cutthroats and rioters, spendthrifts and debtors, thieves and vagabonds, runaway apprentices, broken-down tradesmen, soldiers out of a job, escaped convicts, religious cranks, youths crossed in love, every sort of man that craved excitement or change of luck, came to swell the numbers of the buccaneers. Graceless sons of good families usually assumed some new name. Yet not all were ashamed of their lawless occupation. Some gloried in it, and deemed themselves pinks of propriety in matters pertaining to religion. One day, when a certain sailor was behaving with unseemly levity in church while a priest was saying mass, his captain suddenly stepped up and rebuked him for his want of reverence, and then blew his brains out. It is told of a Frenchman from Languedoc that his career was determined by reading a book on the cruelties of the Spaniards in America, probably “The Destruction of the Indies,” by Las Casas. This perusal inflamed him with such furious hatred of Spaniards that he conceived it to be his sacred mission to kill as many as he could. So he joined the buccaneers, and murdered with such exemplary diligence that he came to be known as Montbars the Exterminator. Another noted freebooter, Raveneau de Lussan, joined the fraternity “because he was in debt, and wished, as every honest man should do, to have wherewithal to satisfy his creditors.”[305]
Deeds of Olonnois.