If a greater number of female emigrants had been like Mary Read, pirate as she was, the story of Hayti would have been modified. She had the character which Nature loves to civilize.
Mary Read was the illegitimate daughter of an Englishwoman, who brought her up as a boy, after revealing to her the secret of her origin, apparently wishing to protect her against the mischances which befell herself. She was first a footman, then a sailor on board a man-of-war; afterwards she served with great bravery in Flanders in a regiment of infantry. Then she entered a cavalry regiment, where she fell deeply in love with a comrade, and her woman's nature awoke. Obeying the uncontrollable instinct, she modestly revealed her sex to him, and was married with great éclat, after he had sought in vain, repelled by her high conduct, to make her less than wife. He died soon after, and the Peace of Ryswick compelled her to assume her male attire again and seek employment. She went before the mast in a vessel bound for the West Indies, which was taken by English pirates, with whom she afterwards enjoyed the benefit of a royal proclamation pardoning all pirates who submitted within a limited period. Their money gave out, and they enlisted under a privateer captain to cruise against the Spaniards; but the men, finding a favorable opportunity, took the vessel from the officers, and commenced their old trade. Mary was as brave as any in boarding Spanish craft, pistol in hand, to clear the decks; no peril made her falter, but she was disarmed again by love in the person of a fine young pirate of superior mind and grace. She made a friend of him, revealed her sex, and married him. Her husband had a falling-out with a comrade, and a duel impended. Torn with love and dread, she managed to pick a quarrel with his antagonist, appointed a meeting an hour before the one which her husband expected, and was lucky enough to postpone the latter indefinitely. At her trial in Jamaica, she would have escaped through the compassion of the court, if some one had not deposed that she often deliberately defended piracy with the argument that pirates were fortunately amenable to capital punishment, and this was a restraint to cowards, without which a thousand rascals who passed for honest people, but who did nothing but pillage widows and orphans and defraud their neighbors, would rush into a more honorable profession, the ocean would be covered with this canaille, and the ruin of commerce would involve that of piracy. She died in prison of a fever.
Ann Bonny was born in Cork. She was of a truculent disposition, and the murdering part of piracy was much to her taste. When her husband was led out to execution, the special favor was granted of an interview with her; but her only benediction was,—"I'm sorry to find ye in this state; if ye had fought like a man, ye would not be seein' yerself hung like a dog."
But what could angels themselves have done to make Captain Teach presentable in the best society? Blackbeard was his sobriquet, for he had one flowing over his chest which patriarchs might be forgiven for coveting. The hair of his head was tastefully done up with ribbons, and inframed his truculent face. When he went into a fight, three pairs of pistols hung from a scarf, and two slow-matches, alight and projecting under his hat, glowed above his cruel eyes. Certainly, the light of battle was not in his case a metaphor.
On board his vessel, one day, Captain Teach, just combing upon strong-water, summoned his crew. "Go to, now, let us make a hell," he cried, "and get a little seasoned. We'll find who can stand it longest." Thereupon they all went down into the hold, which he had carefully battened down; then he lighted sundry pots of sulphur, and showed superior qualifications for the future by smoking them all out.
On the day of his last combat, when advised to confide to his wife where his money was hid, he refused, saying that only he and the Devil knew where it was, and the survivor was to have it.
Whenever these English pirates found a clergyman, they acted as if pillaging had been only a last resort, owing to the scarcity of that commodity in those seas. Captain Roberts took a vessel which had on board a body of English troops with their chaplain, destined for garrison-duty. His crew went into ecstasies of delight, as if they had separated themselves from mankind and incurred atrocious suspicions from their desire to seek for religious persons in all places. They wanted nothing but a chaplain; they had never wanted anything else; he must join them; he would have nothing to do but to pray and make the punch. As he steadily refused, they reluctantly parted with him; but, smitten with his firmness, they retained of his effects nothing but three prayer-books and a corkscrew.
These were but common villains. The genuine Flibustier mingled national hatred with his avarice, and harried the Spanish coasts with a sense of being the avenger of old affronts, at least the divine instrument of his country's honest instincts, whose duty it was to smite and spoil, as if the Armada were yet upon the seas as the Inquisition was upon the land. Frenchmen and Englishmen, Huguenot and Dutch Calvinists, Willis, Warner, Montbar the Exterminator, Levasseur, Lolonois, Henry Morgan, Coxon and Sharp, Bartholomew the Portuguese, Rock the Dutchman, were representative men. They gave a villanous expression, and an edge which avarice whetted, to the religious patriotism of their countrymen. The sombre and deadly prejudices which lay half torpid in their cage at home escaped from restraint in these men, and suddenly acted out their proper nature on the highways of the world.
We have no space to record particular deeds and cruelties. The stories of the exploits of the Flibustiers show that their outlaw-life had developed all the powerful traits which make pioneering or the profession of arms so illustrious. Audacity, cunning, great endurance, tenacity of purpose, all the character of the organizing nations whence they sprang, appeared in them so stained by murder and bestiality of every kind, that the impression made by their career is revolting, and gets no mitigation from their better qualities. They were generous to each other, and scrupulously just; but it was for the sake of strengthening their hands against mankind. They fought against the enemies of their respective nations with all the fiendishness of popular hate that has broken loose from popular restraints and civilizing checks and has become a beast. Commerce was nothing to them but a convenience for plunder; a voyaging ship was an oasis in the mid-waste on which they swarmed for an orgy of avarice and gluttony; the cities of the Spanish Main were hives of wealth and women to be overturned and rifled, and their mother-country a retreat where the sanctimonious old age of a few survivors of these successful crimes could display their money and their piety, and perhaps a titled panel on their coach. Henry Morgan was knighted, and made a good end in the Tower of London as a political prisoner. Pierre le Grand, the first Flibustier who took a ship, retired to France with wealth and consideration. Captain Avery, who had an immense fame, was the subject of a drama entitled "The Happy Pirate," which inoculated many a prentice-lad with cutlasses and rollicking ferocity. Others became the agents of easy cabinets who always winked at buccaneering, because it so often saved them the expense of war. What gift or place would a slave-holding cabinet, or a Southern Confederacy, have thought too dear to bestow upon Captain Walker, whose criminal acts were feeding the concealed roots of the Great Conspiracy, if his murder and arson had become illustrious by success?
The Flibustiers were composed of many nations. The Buccaneers were mostly French. Their head-quarters, or principal boucans, upon San Domingo, were on the peninsula of Samana, at Port Margot, Savanna Brulée near Gonaives, and the landing-place of Mirebalais. The Spaniards gained at first several advantages over them by cutting off the couples which were engaged in chasing the wild cattle. This compelled the Buccaneers to associate in larger bands, and to add Spaniards to their list of game. The word massacre on the maps of the island marks places where sanguinary surprises were effected by either party; but the Spaniards lost more blood than their wily antagonists, and were compelled to abandon all their settlements on the northern and northeastern coasts and to fall back upon San Domingo and their other towns. The Flibustiers blockaded their rivers, intercepted the vessels of slave-traders of all nations, made prizes of the cargoes, and sold them to the French of the rising western colony, to the English at Jamaica, or among the other islands, wherever a contraband speculation could be made. This completed the ruin of Spanish San Domingo; for the Government, crippled by land- and sea-fights with English, French, and Dutch, was unable to protect its colonies. It is very strange to notice this sudden weakness of the nation which was lately so domineering; the causes which produced it have been stated elsewhere[13] with great research and power.