One of the early exploits of the brethren was performed by Pierre of Dieppe, surnamed “the Great.” In a mere longboat, with a handful of men, he surprised and captured the Spanish vice-admiral’s ship, heavily freighted with treasure, set her people ashore in Hispaniola, and took his prize to France. This exploit is said to have given quite an impetus to buccaneering. In 1655 the buccaneers had grown so powerful that they gave important aid to Cromwell’s troops in conquering Jamaica. When any nation went to war with Spain, the buccaneers of that nationality would get from the government letters of marque, which made them privateers and entitled them to certain rights of belligerents. Their aid was so liable to be useful in time of need that the English and French governments connived at some of their performances. No civilized government could countenance their cruelties. One monster, called Olonnois, having captured a Spanish ship with a crew of ninety men, beheaded them all with a sabre in his own hands. Four cases are on record in which he threw the whole crew overboard, and it is said that he sometimes tore out and devoured the bleeding hearts of his victims, after the Indian fashion. In concert with another wretch, Michel le Basque (whose name tells his origin), at the head of 650 men, he captured the towns of Gibraltar and Maracaibo, in the Gulf of Venezuela, and carried off a booty of nearly half a million crowns, equivalent to more than two million modern dollars. Prisoners were tortured to disclose hidden treasure. But this precious Olonnois was soon afterward paid in his own coin: he fell into the hands of a party of hungry Indians, who cooked and ate him.
Henry Morgan.
Such incidents as these in Venezuela made many Spanish towns prefer to buy off the buccaneers, and thus a system of blackmail was established. It was for the buccaneer to decide for himself whether he deemed it more profitable to end all in one mad frolic of plunder and slaughter, or to accept a round sum and leave the town for the present unharmed. Operations on a grand scale began about 1664, under a leader named Mansvelt, who soon died and was succeeded by Henry Morgan, the most famous of the buccaneers and one of the vilest of the fraternity. This Welshman is said to have been of good family and well brought up. He made his way to Barbadoes as a redemptioner, and after serving out his term joined the pirates. He was a man of remarkable courage and resource. For cruelty no Apache could surpass him, and his perfidy equalled his cruelty. He paid so little heed to the maxims of honour among thieves that it is a wonder he should have retained his leadership through several expeditions.
One of Morgan’s early exploits was the capture of Puerto del Principe, in Cuba. Then with 500 men he attacked Porto Bello, on the Isthmus of Darien. Having taken a convent, he forced the nuns to carry scaling ladders and plant them against the walls of the citadel, perhaps in the hope that Spaniards would not fire upon Spanish women; but many of the poor nuns were killed. After the garrison had surrendered, Morgan set fire to the magazine and blew into fragments the fort with its defenders. The scenes that followed must have won Satan’s approval. With greed unsatisfied by the enormous booty, the monster devised horrible tortures for the discovery of secret hoards that doubtless existed only in his fancy. Many victims died under the infliction.
Alexander Exquemeling.
Soon afterward Morgan met in the Caribbean Sea a powerful French pirate ship and invited her to join him. On the French captain’s refusal, Morgan, with an air of supreme cordiality, invited him to come over to dinner with all his officers. No sooner had these guests arrived than they were seized and put in irons, while Morgan attacked their ship and captured it. Then came a strange retribution. Morgan put some of his own officers with 350 of his crew into the French ship; presently the officers got drunk, and through accident or carelessness the ship was blown up with all the English crew and the French prisoners. This story is told by a pious and literary Dutch buccaneer, the fraternity’s best historian, by name Alexander Exquemeling, sometimes corrupted into Oexmelin. His well-written narrative was first published at Amsterdam in 1678, entitled De Americansche Zee Roovers. It has been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe, and ranks among the most popular books of the last two centuries.[306] The pious Exquemeling, in recounting the explosion of the captured ship, sees in it a special divine judgment upon Morgan for treachery to guests, a kind of philosophizing which is duly ridiculed by Voltaire in his “Candide.”[307]
Maracaibo and Gibraltar.
The loss of 350 men and a ship better than any of his own was a serious blow to Morgan, but it did not prevent him from capturing those unhappy towns, Maracaibo and Gibraltar, where he shut up a crowd of prisoners in a church and left them to die of starvation. His own escape from capture, however, was a narrow one. Three Spanish galleons arrived at the entrance to the Gulf of Venezuela and strongly garrisoned a castle that stood there, so that it began to look as if the day of reckoning for Morgan had come. But he made one of his vessels into a fire-ship and succeeded in burning two of the galleons. Then it became easy for his little fleet to surround and capture the third, after which a masterly series of stratagems enabled him to slip past the castle, richer by a million dollars than when he entered the Gulf, and ready for fresh deeds of wickedness.
Treaty of America, 1670.
Sack of Panama.