Captain William Kidd and Others of the Buccaneers

by John S. C. Abbott

Partial Solution of a Mystery.—Montbar’s Birth.—His Education and Delusions.—Anecdote of the Dramatic Performance.—Montbar Runs Away from Home.—Enters the Navy.—His Ferocious Exploits.—Joins the Buccaneers.—Desperate Battles on the Land and on the Sea.—His Final Disappearance.

In reading the narrative of the cruelties practised by the pirates upon the Spaniards, the mind is often oppressed with the thought that a God of infinite love and power should have allowed such scenes to have been enacted. There is nothing conceivable, in intense and protracted torture, which was not inflicted upon men, women, and children. There is no satisfactory explanation of this great mystery of earth. Still there are considerations which may perhaps point in the direction of a solution.

The pirates seem to have been permitted to revenge upon the Spaniards the awful sufferings which they had inflicted upon the Indians. The Spanish armies of Cortez and Pizarro ravaged the homes of the innocent native inhabitants of those countries with ferocity and cruelty which Satan and his legions could not possibly have surpassed. The Spaniards had thrown the Indian into the flames of the most awful misery. And then God allowed the pirate to throw the Spaniard into the same flames.

There was a celebrated pirate by the name of Montbar, who seemed to have been inspired with fanatical frenzy approaching maniacal fury against the whole Spanish nation. He was the child of one of the most opulent and respected families in Languedoc, in France. He had received all the advantages of education which wealth could afford. In the process of this education he had read the account of the atrocities practised by the Spaniards in their conquest of the islands and the continents of the New World.

The blood of this ardent young man seemed to boil in his veins, while pondering these fiend-like crimes. As a child he brooded over these tortures until he became almost insane. Soon he devoted himself to all martial exercises, that he might avenge the wrongs of the Indians. This generous but cruel determination grew rapidly into monomania. The animal forces of a mind of unusual energy were all concentrated in this direction. Revenge for the wrongs practised upon the Cubans, the Peruvians, the Mexicans occupied his thoughts by day and his dreams by night. This became the all-absorbing passion of his soul.

Even when a child, practising with his cross-bow, he said, “I wish to shoot well, only that I may know how to kill the Spaniards.” George W. Thornbury, in his sketch of this singular man, alluding to the Spanish enormities in the New World, writes:

“Fanaticism, avarice, and ambition had ruled like a trinity of devils, over the beautiful regions desolated and plague-smitten by the Spaniards. Whole nations had become extinct. The name of Christ was polluted into the mere cipher of an armed and aggressive commerce. These books had impressed the gloomy boy with a deep, absorbing, fanatical hatred of the conquerors, and a fierce pity for the conquered.

“He believed himself marked out by God, as the Gideon sent to their relief. Dreams of riches and gratified ambition spurred him unconsciously to the task. He thought and dreamed of nothing but the murdered Indians. He inquired eagerly from travellers for news from America, and testified prodigious and ungovernable joy when he heard that the Spaniards had been defeated by the Caribs and the Bravos.

“He indeed knew by heart every deed of atrocity that history recorded of his enemies, and would dilate upon each one, with a rude and impatient eloquence. The following story he was frequently accustomed to relate, and to gloat over with a look that indicated a mind capable of even greater cruelty, if once led away by a fanatic spirit of retaliation.

“‘A Spaniard’ the story ran, ‘was once upon a time appointed governor of an Indian province, which was inhabited by a fierce and warlike race of savages. He proved a cruel governor, unforgiving in his resentments, and insatiable in his avarice. The Indians, unable any longer to endure either his barbarities or his exactions, seized him, and showing him gold, told him that they had at last been able, by great good luck, to find enough to satisfy his demands. They then held him firm, and melting the ore, poured it down his throat, till he expired in torments under their hands.’”