The lad, now grown accustomed to his wild life, resigned himself to his condition, feeling sure that, sooner or later, he should meet with a party of Buccaneers. His deliverance was not long delayed. After about twelve months' life in the bush, he fell in with a troop of skinners, to whom he related his story. They were at first distrustful and alarmed, as his master had told them that he had marooned, and had joined the Indians. His appearance soon convinced them that his story was true, and that he was neither a maroon nor a deserter, for he was clothed in the rags of his engagé's shirt and drawers, and had a strip of raw meat hanging from his girdle. Two tame boars and three dogs followed at his heels, and refused to leave him. He at once joined his deliverers, who freed him from all obligations to his master, and gave him arms, powder, and lead to hunt for himself, and he soon became one of the most renowned Buccaneers on that coast. It was a long time before he could eat roasted meat, which not only was distasteful, but made him ill. Long after, when flaying a wild boar, he was frequently unable to restrain himself from eating the flesh raw.
When an apprentice had served three years, his master was expected to give him as a reward a musket, a pound of powder, six pounds of lead, two shirts, two pairs of drawers, and a cap. The valets, as the French called them, then became comerades, and ceased to be mere engagés. They took their own matelots, and became, in their turn, Buccaneers. When they had obtained a sufficient quantity of hides, they either sent or took them to Tortuga, and brought from thence a young apprentice to treat him as they themselves had been treated.
The planters' engagés led a life more dreadful than that of their wilder brethren. They were decoyed from France under the same pretences that once filled our streets with the peasants' sons of Savoy, and the peasants' daughters from Frankfort, or that now lure children from the pleasant borders of Como, to pine away in a London den. The want of sufficient negroes led men to resort to all artifices to obtain assistance in cultivating the sugar-cane and the tobacco plant. In the French Antilles they were sold for three years, but often resold in the interim. Amongst the English they were bound for seven years, and being occasionally sold again at their own request, before the expiration of this term, they sometimes served fifteen or twenty years before they could obtain their freedom. At Jamaica, if a man could not pay even a small debt at a tavern, he was sold for six or eight months. The planters had agents in France, England, and other countries, who sent out these apprentices. They were worked much harder than the slaves, because their lives, after the expiration of the three years, were of no consequence to the masters. They were often the victims of a disease called "coma," the effect of hard usage and climate, and which ended in idiotcy. Père Labat remarks the quantity of idiots in the West Indies, many of whom were dangerous, although allowed to go at liberty. Many of these worse than slaves were of good birth, tender education, and weak constitutions, unable to endure even the debilitating climate, and much less hard labour. Esquemeling, himself originally an engagé, gives a most piteous description of their sufferings. Insufficient food and rest, he says, were the smallest of their sufferings. They were frequently beaten, and often fell dead at their masters' feet. The men thus treated died fast: some became dropsical, and others scorbutic. A man named Bettesea, a merchant of St. Christopher's, was said to have killed more than a hundred apprentices with blows and stripes. "This inhumanity," says Esquemeling, "I have often seen with great grief." The following anecdote of human suffering equals the cruelty of the Virginian slave owner who threw one slave into the vat of boiling molasses, and baked another in an oven:—
"A certain planter (of St. Domingo) exercised such cruelty towards one of his servants as caused him to run away. Having absconded for some days in the woods, he was at last taken, and brought back to the wicked Pharaoh. No sooner had he got him but he commanded him to be tied to a tree; here he gave him so many lashes on his naked back as made his body run with an entire stream of blood; then, to make the smart of his wounds the greater, he anointed him with lemon-juice, mixed with salt and pepper. In this miserable posture he left him tied to the tree for twenty-four hours, which being past, he began his punishment again, lashing him as before, so cruelly, that the miserable creature gave up the ghost, with these dying words, 'I beseech the Almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth, that He permit the wicked spirit to make thee feel as many torments before thy death as thou hast caused me to feel before mine.'
"A strange thing, and worthy of astonishment and admiration: scarce three or four days were past, after this horrible fact, when the Almighty Judge, who had heard the cries of that tormented wretch, suffered the evil one suddenly to possess this barbarous and inhuman homicide, so that those cruel hands which had punished to death the innocent servant were the tormentors of his own body, for he beat himself and tore his flesh after a miserable manner, till he lost the very shape of a man, not ceasing to howl and cry without any rest by day or night. Thus he continued raving till he died."
It was by the endurance of such sufferings as these that the early Buccaneers were hardened into fanatical monsters like Montbars and Lolonnois.
In the early part of his book, Esquemeling gives us his own history. A Dutchman by birth, he arrived at Tortuga in 1680, when the French West India Company, unable to turn the island into a depôt, as they had intended, were selling off their merchandise and their plantations. Esquemeling, as a bound engagé of the company, was sold to the lieutenant-governor of the island, who treated him with great severity, and refused to take less than three hundred pieces of eight for his freedom. Falling sick through vexation and despair, he was sold to a chirurgeon, for seventy pieces of eight, who proved kind to him, and finally gave him his liberty for 100 pieces of eight, to be paid after his first Flibustier trip.
Œxmelin was probably sold almost at the same time as Esquemeling, and was bought by the commandant-general. Not allowed to pursue his own profession of a surgeon, he was employed in the most laborious and painful work, transplanting tobacco, or thinning the young plants, grating cassava, or pressing the juice from the banana. Overworked and under fed, associating with slaves, and regarded with hatred and suspicion, he scarcely received money enough to procure either food or clothing; his master refusing, even for the inducement of two crowns a-day, to allow him to practise as physician. A single year of toil at the plantations threw him into dangerous ill health; for weeks sheltered only under an outhouse, he was kept alive by the kindness of a black slave, who brought him daily an egg. Feeble as he was, the great thirst of a tropical fever compelled him often to rise and drag himself to a neighbouring tank, that he might drink, even though to drink were to die. Recovering from this fever, a wolfish hunger was the first sign of convalescence, but to appease this he had neither food, nor money to buy it. In this condition he devoured even unripe oranges, green, hard, and bitter, and resorted to other extremities which he is ashamed to confess. On one occasion as he was descending from the rock fort, where his master lived, into the town, he met a friend, the secretary of the governor, who made him come and dine with him, and gave him a parting present of a bottle of wine; his master, who had seen what had passed, by means of a telescope, from his place of vantage, when he returned, took away the wine, and threw him into a dungeon, accusing him of being a spy and a traitor. This prison was a cellar, hollowed out of the rock, full of filth and very dark. In this he swore Œxmelin should rot in spite of all the governors in the world. Here he was kept for three days, his feet in irons, fed only by a little bread and water that they passed to him through an aperture, without even opening the door. One day, as he lay naked on the stone, and in the dark, he felt a snake twine itself, cold and slimy, round his body, tightening the folds till they grew painful, and then sliding off to its hole. On the fourth day they opened the door and tried to discover if he had told the governor anything of his master's cruelties; they then set him to dig a plot of ground near the Fort. Finding himself left unguarded, he resolved to go and complain to the governor, having first consulted a good old Capuchin, who took compassion on his pale and famished aspect. The governor instantly took pity on the wretched runaway, fed and clothed him, and on his recovery to health placed him with a celebrated surgeon of the place, who paid his value to his master; the governor being unwilling to take him into his own service, for fear he should be accused to the home authorities of taking away slaves from the planters.
The engagés were called to their work at daybreak by a shrill whistle (as the negroes are now by the hoarse conch shell); and the foreman, allowing any who liked to smoke, led them to their work. This consisted in felling trees and in picking or lopping tobacco; the driver stood by them as they dug or picked, and struck those who slackened or rested, as a captain would do to his galley slaves. Whether sick or well they were equally obliged to work. They were frequently employed in picking mahot, a sort of bark used to tie up bales. If they died of fatigue they were quietly buried, and there an end. Early in the morning one of the band had to feed the pigs with potato leaves, and prepare his comerades' dinner. They boiled their meat, putting peas and chopped potatoes into the water. The cook worked with the gang, but returned a little sooner to prepare his messmates' dinner, while they were stripping the tobacco stalk. On feast-days and Sundays they had some indulgences. Œxmelin relates an instance of a sick slave being employed to turn a grindstone on which his master was sharpening his axe; being too weak to do it well, the butcher turned round and clove him down between the shoulders. The slave fell down, bleeding profusely, and died within two hours; yet this master was one of a body of planters deemed very indulgent in comparison to those of some other islands. One planter of St. Christopher, named Belle Tête, who came from Dieppe, prided himself on having killed 200 engagés who would not work, all of whom, he declared, died of sheer laziness. When they were in the last extremities he was in the habit of rubbing their mouths with the yolk of an egg, in order that he might conscientiously swear he had pressed them to take food till the very last. Upon a priest one day remonstrating with him on his brutality, he replied, with perfect effrontery, that he had once been a bound engagé, and had never been treated better; that he had come all the way to that shore to get money, and provided he could get it and see his children roll in a coach, he did not care himself if the devil carried him off.
The following anecdote shows what strange modifications of crime this species of slavery might occasionally produce. There was a rich inhabitant of Guadaloupe, whose father became so poor that he was obliged to sell himself as an engagé, and by a singular coincidence sold himself to a merchant who happened to be his son's agent. The poor fellow, finding himself his son's servant, thought himself well off, but soon found that he was treated as brutally as the rest. The son, finding the father was old and discontented, and therefore unable to do much work, and afraid to beat him for the sake of the scandal, sold him soon after to another planter, who treated him better, gave him more to eat, and eventually restored him to liberty. Of the ten thousand Scotch and Irish whom Cromwell sent to the West Indies, many became engagés, and finally Buccaneers. Many of the old Puritan soldiers, who had served in the same wars, were enrolled in the same ranks.