The Buccaneers' engagés led a life very little better than those white slaves whom the glittering promises of the planters had decoyed from France. The existence of the former was, however, rendered more bearable by their variety of adventure, by better food, and by daily recreation. If all day in the hot sun he had to toil carrying bales of skins from his master's hut towards the shore, we must remember that American seamen still work contentedly at the same labour in California for a sailor's ordinary wages. Mutual danger produced necessarily, except in the most brutal, a kind of fellowship between the master and the servant of the boucan. Up at daybreak, the engagé sweltered all day through the bush, groaning beneath his burden of loathsome hides, but the good meal came before sunset, and then the pipes were lit, and the brandy went round, and the song was sung, and the tale was told, while the hunters shot at a mark, or made wagers upon the respective skill of their matelots or their engagés.
We hear from Charlevoix, that young prodigals of good family had been known to prefer the canvas tent to the tapestried wall, and to have grasped the hunter's musket with the hand that might have wielded the general's baton or the marshal's staff.
The Buccaneer's life was not one of mere revelry and ease; no luxurious caves or safe strongholds served at once for their treasure house, their palace, and their fortress. They were wandering outlaws; hated both by the Spaniards and the Indians, they ate with a loaded gun within their reach. The jaguar lurked beside them, the coppersnake glared at them from his lair. If their foot stumbled, they were gored by the ox or ripped up by the boar; if they fled they became a prey to the cayman of the pool; they were swept away as they forded swollen rivers; they were swallowed up by that dreadful foretype of the Judgment, the earthquake. The shark and the sea monster swam by their canoe, the carrion crow that fed to-day upon the carcase they had left, too often fed to-morrow on the slain hunter. The wildest transitions of safety and danger, plenty and famine, peace and war, health and sickness, surrounded their daily life. To-day on the savannah dark with the wild herds, to-morrow compelled to feast on the flesh of a murdered comerade; to-day surrounded by revelling friends, to-morrow left alone to die.
The present system of hide curing practised in California seems almost identical with that employed by the Buccaneers. The following extract from Dana's "Three Years before the Mast" will convey a correct impression of what constituted the greater portion of an engagé's labour. He describes the shore piled with hides, just out of reach of the tide; each skin doubled lengthwise in the middle, and nearly as stiff as a board, and the whole bundles carried down on men's heads from the place of curing to the stacks. "When the hide is taken from the bullock, holes are cut round it, near the edge, and it is staked out to dry, to prevent shrinking. They are then to be cured, and are carried down to the shore at low tide and made fast in small piles, where they lie for forty-eight hours, when they are taken out, rolled up in wheelbarrows, and thrown into vats full of strong brine, where they remain for forty-eight hours. The sea water only cleans and softens them, the brine pickles them. They are then removed from the vats, lie on a platform twenty-four hours, and are then staked out, still wet and soft; the men go over them with knives, cutting off all remaining pieces of meat or fat, the ears, and any part that would either prevent the packing or keeping. A man can clean about twenty-five a-day, keeping at his work. This cleaning must be done before noon, or they get too dry. When the sun has been upon them for a few hours they are gone over with scrapers to remove the fat that the sun brings out; the stakes are then pulled up and the hides carefully doubled, with the hair outside, and left to dry. About the middle of the afternoon, they are turned upon the other side, and at sunset piled up and turned over. The next day they are spread out and opened again, and at night, if fully dry, are thrown up on a long horizontal pole, five at a time, and beaten with flails to get out the dust; thus, being salted, scraped, cleaned, dried, and beaten, they are stowed away in the warehouses."
The Buccaneer's life was not spent in quaffing sangaree or basking under orange blossoms—not in smoking beside mountains of flowers, where the humming-birds fluttered like butterflies, and the lizards flashed across the sunbeams, shedding jewelled and enchanted light. No Indian in the mine, no Arab pearl-diver, no worn, pale children at an English factory, no galley-slave dying at the oar, led such a life as a Buccaneer engagé if bound to a cruel master. Imagine a delicate youth, of good but poor family, decoyed from a Norman country town by the loud-sounding promises of a St. Domingo agent, specious as a recruiting sergeant, voluble as the projector of bubble companies, greedy, plausible, and lying. He comes out to the El Dorado of his dreams, and is at once taken to the hut of some rude Buccaneer. The first night is a revel, and his sleep is golden and full of visions. The spell is broken at daybreak. He has to carry a load of skins, weighing some twenty-six pounds, three or four leagues, through brakes of prickly pear and clumps of canes. The pathless way cannot be traversed at greater speed than about two hours to a quarter of a league. The sun grows vertical, and he is feverish and sick at heart. Three years of this purgatory are varied by blows and curses. The masters too often loaded their servants with blows if they dared to faint through weakness, hunger, thirst, or fatigue. Some hunters had the forbearance to rest on a Sunday, induced rather by languor than by piety; but on these days the engagé had to rise as usual at daybreak, to go out and kill a wild boar for the day's feast. This was disembowelled and roasted whole, being placed on a spit supported on two forked stakes, so that the flames might completely surround the carcase.
Most Buccaneers, even if they rested on Sunday, required their apprentices to carry the hides down as usual to the place of shipment, fearing that the Spaniards might choose that very day to burn the huts and destroy the skins. An engagé once complained to his master, and reminded him that it was not right to work on a Sunday, God himself having said to the Jews, "Six days shalt thou labour and do all thou hast to do, for the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." "And I tell you," said the scowling Buccaneer, striking the earth with the butt-end of his gun and roaring out a dreadful curse, "I tell you, six days shalt thou kill bulls and skin them, and the seventh day thou shalt carry them down to the beach," beating the daring remonstrant as he spoke. There was no remedy for these sufferers but patience. Time or death alone brought relief. Three years soon run out. The mind grows hardened under suffering as flesh does under the lash. Nature, where she cannot heal a wound, teaches us where to find unfailing balms. Some grew reckless to blows, or learned to ingratiate themselves with their masters by their increasing daring or sturdy industry. An apprentice whose bullet never flew false, or who could run down the wild ox on the plain, acquired a fame greater than that of his master. They knew that in time they themselves would be Buccaneers, and could inflict the very cruelties from which they now suffered. There were instances where acts of service to the island, or feats of unusual bravery, raised an engagé of a single year to the full rank of hunter. An apprentice who could bring in more hides than even his master, must have been too valuable an acquisition to have been lost by a moment of spleen. That horrible cases of cruelty did occur, there can be no doubt. There were no courts of justice in the forest, no stronger arm or wiser head to which to appeal. But there are always remedies for despair. The loaded gun was at hand, the knife in the belt, and the poison berries grew by the hut. There was the unsubdued passion still at liberty in the heart—there was the will to seize the weapon and the hand to use it. Providence is fruitful in her remedies of evils, and preserves a balance which no sovereignty can long disturb. No tyrant can shut up the volcano, or chain the earthquake. There were always the mountains or the Spaniards to take refuge amongst, though famine and death dwelt in the den of the wild beasts, and, if they fled to the Spaniards, they were often butchered as mere runaway slaves before they could explain, in an unknown language, that they were not spies. But still the very impossibility of preventing such escapes must have tended to temper the severity of the masters. A Flibustier, anxious for a crew, must have sometimes carried off discontented engagés both from the plantations and the ajoupas. The following story illustrates the social relations of the Buccaneer master and his servant.
A Buccaneer one day, seeing that his apprentice, newly arrived from France, could not keep up with him, turned round and struck him over the head with the lock of his musket. The youth fell, stunned, to the ground; and the hunter, thinking he was dead, stripped him of his arms, and left his body where it had fallen and weltering in the blood flowing from the wound. On his return to his hut, afraid to disclose the truth, he told his companions that the lad, who had always skulked work, had at last marooned (a Spanish word applied to runaway negroes). A few curses were heaped upon him, and no more was thought about his disappearance.
Soon after the master was out of sight the lad had recovered his senses, arisen, pale and weak, and attempted to return to the tents. Unaccustomed to the woods, he lost his way, got off the right track, and finally gave himself up as doomed to certain death. For some days he remained wandering round and round the same spot, without either recovering the path or being able to reach the shore. Hunger did not at first press him, for he ate the meat with which his master had loaded him, and ate it raw, not knowing the Indian manner of procuring fire, and his knives being taken from his belt. Ignorant of what fruits were safe to eat, where animals fit for food were to be found, and not knowing how to kill them unarmed, he prepared his mind for the dreadful and lingering torture of starvation. But he seems to have been of an ingenious and persevering disposition, and hope did not altogether forsake him. He had too a companion, for one of his master's dogs, which had grown fond of his playmate, had remained behind with his body, licking the hand that had so often fed him.
At first he spent whole days vainly searching for a path. Very often he climbed up a hill, from which he could see the great, blue, level sea, stretching out boundless to the horizon, and this renewed his hope. He looked up, and knew that God's sky was above him, and felt that he might be still saved. At night he was startled by the screams of the monkeys, the bellowing of the wild cattle in the distant savannah, or the unearthly cry of some solitary and unknown bird. Superstition filled him with fears, and he felt deserted by man, but tormented by the things of evil. The tracks of the wild cattle led him far astray. Long ere this his faithful dog, driven by hunger, had procured food for both. Sometimes beneath the spreading boughs of the river-loving yaco-tree, they would surprise a basking sow, surrounded by a wandering brood of voracious sucklings. The dog would cling to the sow, while the boy aided him in the pursuit of the errant progeny. When they had killed their prey, they would lie down and share their meal together. The boy learned to like the raw meat, and the dog had acquired his appetite long before. Experience soon taught them where to capture their prey in the quickest and surest manner. He caught the puppies of a wild dog, and trained them in the chase; and he even taught a young wild boar that he had caught alive to join in the capture of his own species. After having led this life for nearly a year, he one day suddenly came upon the long-lost path, which soon brought him to the sea-shore. His master's tents were gone, and, from various appearances, seemed to have been long struck.