Captain William Kidd and Others of the Buccaneers

by John S. C. Abbott

This important Spanish province extended entirely across the Isthmus of Panama, then called Darien, from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. It was bounded on the north by Honduras, and on the south by Costa Rica. By the current, the pirates had been swept nearly five hundred miles west of the point which they wished to make. To return, they must coast, for that distance, along the bleak, almost uninhabited northern shore of Honduras.

The Gulf stream, pouring into the Bay of Honduras, pressed strongly against them. The calm was followed by fresh winds. But these winds were strong and contrary. It was impossible to beat against both wind and current.

Another dreary month thus passed away, as they struggled against adversity. Their provisions were consumed. Their water-casks were empty. Famine compelled them to seek the land. Entering the mouth of a large river, which they called Xagua, and which afforded a harbor for their fleet, they cast anchor. The region was quite densely inhabited by Indians, inoffensive and friendly. They had for some years conducted trade with the Spaniards, which was profitable to both parties. The Indians received, in exchange for cocoa, articles from Europe, to them of priceless value.

There were many picturesque Indian villages, scattered along the banks of the river, beneath cocoa groves, and surrounded by orange plantations and fields of Indian corn. The natives had also learned the value of swine and poultry, and were well supplied with both. When they saw the fleet approaching they were not alarmed, but rejoiced, as they were eager both to sell and to buy. They sprang into their canoes, loading them with vegetables, fruit, and fowls, and with smiling faces paddled out to the ships.

How shall I describe the scenes which ensued? Burke, I think, says, “to speak of atrocious crime in mild language is treason to virtue.” These incarnate fiends shot down the poor Indians, men and women, in mere wantonness—for the fun of it. Boats filled with these armed demons then went ashore. They shot the men, as they could. They took many women captives. They stripped the Indians of everything, swine, poultry, fruit, corn, and then burned their villages.

The renowned French historian, Michelet, though an unbeliever in the Christian religion, says that when writing the account of the atrocities perpetrated by the ancient nobility of France upon the peasantry, he found himself praying to God that there might be some future punishment, where these tyrants, clothed in purple and sumptuously feeding, might receive the due award for their crimes.

The amount of food obtained, furnished but a few days’ supply for seven hundred hungry mouths. Lolonois decided to remain there at anchor until the weather should prove more favorable. In the mean time he sent his armed boats up the river and along the shores in both directions for indiscriminate plunder. The whole region was devastated. The terrified Indians fled in all directions, taking with them what they could. Notwithstanding the utmost diligence of the plunderers, they could each day bring in barely enough for the day’s supply.

When the pirates had got everything here upon which they could lay their hands, they weighed anchor and worked their way slowly along the coast several leagues, until they reached a harbor called Port Cavallo. This was a trading-post of the Spaniards. They had here two capacious store-houses, to hold the goods which they received from the natives, and the articles brought from Spain to give to them in return. Ships occasionally arrived with fresh supplies, and to transport the purchases to Spain.

There was at that time in the harbor a large Spanish ship, which mounted twenty-four guns and sixteen mortars. But this one ship could make no effectual resistance against the fleet of the pirates. It was immediately seized. Its cargo had been mostly unloaded and carried back into the country, to be exchanged, in barter, with the Indians. They stripped the store-houses, and plundered and destroyed all the adjacent dwellings. They captured many prisoners, and put them to dreadful torture to compel them to confess, often when they had nothing which they could disclose.

Lolonois hacked them to pieces with his sabre; tore out their tongues; dislocated their joints with the rack. He committed upon them, writes Esquemeling, “the most insolent and inhuman cruelties that ever heathens invented, putting them to the cruelest tortures they could imagine or devise. Oftentimes it happened that some of these miserable prisoners, being forced thereunto by the rack, would promise to discover the places where the fugitive Spaniards lay hidden; which, being not able afterward to perform, they were put to more enormous and cruel deaths than they who were killed before.”