The history of the Buccaneers has hitherto remained unwritten. Three or four forgotten volumes contain literally all that is recorded of the wars and conquests of these extraordinary men. Of these volumes two are French, one Dutch, and one in English. The majority of our readers, therefore, it is probable, know nothing more of the freebooters but their name, confound them with the mere pirates of two centuries later, and derive their knowledge of their manners from those dozen lines of the Abbé Reynal, that have been transferred from historian to historian, and from writer to writer, for the last two centuries.
The chief records of Buccaneer adventurers are drawn literally from only three books. The first of these is Œxmelin's Histoire des Aventuriers. 12mo. Paris, 1688. Œxmelin was a Frenchman, who went out to St. Domingo as a planter's apprentice or engagé, and eventually became surgeon in the Buccaneer fleet—knew Lolonnois, and accompanied Sir Henry Morgan to Panama.
The second is Esquemeling's Zee Roovers. Amsterdam. 4to. 1684.—A book constantly mistaken by booksellers and in catalogues for Œxmelin. Esquemeling was a Dutch engagé at St. Domingo, and his book is an English translation from the Dutch. The writer appears of humbler birth than Œxmelin, but served also at Panama.
The third is Ringrose's History of the Cruises of Sharpe, &c. This man, who served with Dampier, seems to have been an ignorant sailor, and a mere log-keeper.
The fourth is Ravenau de Lussan's Narrative. De Lussan was a young French officer of fortune, who served in some of Ringrose's cruises. This is a book written by a vivacious and keen observer, but is less complete than Œxmelin's, but equally full of anecdote, and very amusing.
For secondary authorities we come to the French Jesuit historians of the West Indian Islands, diffuse Rochefort, the gossiping bon vivant Labat; Tertre, dry and prejudiced; Charlevoix, careful, condensed, and entertaining; and Raynal, polished, classical, second-hand, and declamatory.
The English secondaries are, Dampier, with his companions, Wafer and Cowley. Several old pamphlets contain quaint versions of Morgan's conquest of Panama; and in 1817, Burney, in his "History of Discoveries in the South Sea," devotes many chapters to a dry but very imperfect abridgment of Buccaneer adventure, omitting carefully everything that gives either life or colour. Captain Southey, in his "History of the West Indies," supplies many odd scraps of old voyages, and presents many scattered figures, but attempts no picture.
Nor has modern fiction, however short of material, discovered these new and virgin mines. Mrs. Hall has a novel, it is true, called The Buccaneer, the scene of which is, however, laid in England; and Angus B. Reach has skimmed the same subject, but has evidently not even read half the three existing authorities. Dana, the American poet, has a poem called the Buccaneer, but this is merely a collection of lines on the sea. Sir Walter Scott's Bertram, although he had been a Buccaneer, is a mere ruffian, who would do for any age, and Scott himself places Morgan's conquest of Panama in the reign of Charles I., when it actually took place in that of Charles II., fifty years later.
Defoe himself, little conscious of the rich region he was treading, sketched a Buccaneer sailor when he re-christened Alexander Selkirk Robinson Crusoe, and condensed all the spirit of Dampier into a book still read as eagerly by the man as by the boy.