Against such purblind policies the ablest administrators and the most enterprising planters and merchants struggled to little avail. It was a splendid achievement for the engineer Antonelli in 1586 to tap the Almendares River, west of Havana, with a system of canals and aqueducts, and thus bring an abundant supply of fresh water into Havana. In so doing he not merely provided the capital with one of the prime necessities of life, but he also made Havana the centre of the sugar industry. For it was along these artificial watercourses that the first sugar mills were erected and operated. But this availed little while there was persistent discrimination against Cuba to a degree that kept the island without a tithe of the labor which was needed for the development of its resources. We cannot, of course, approve the slave trade, or argue that it should have been followed to a greater extent than it was. But if it was to exist at all, and Spain was willing and indeed determined that it should, justice and economic reason required that it should exist as freely in Cuba as in the neighboring colonies.
CHAPTER XXIII
The character of the European nations whose navigators and explorers had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and had opened to the bewildered gaze of the Old World a vista of unlimited possibilities in the New, underwent a great change during the seventeenth century. Acclaimed as national achievements, adding new lustre to national glory, these discoveries at first only stimulated patriotism and became an incentive to national effort. But as Spain and Portugal which had given to the world those men with the large vision and the undaunted courage, awakened to the importance of their exploits and began to see them from the angles of political and economic advantages, the desire to restrict those advantages to their own use became so powerful, that consideration for the interests of other nations was ignored. The spirit of imperialistic expansion was roused and demanded no less than a monopoly of the traffic and trade of the world.
With this end in view the two countries adopted a protectionist policy and imposed restrictions upon mariners and merchants of other nations that in time became intolerable. The government of Spain forbade its colonists in Spanish America to receive European merchandise from any but Spanish ports, which in turn enabled Spanish exporters to demand unreasonable prices. This was resented by many colonists, and they were willing to deal with smugglers who sold this merchandise at a lower price or exchanged it for the produce of the colonies, especially for hides and sugar. The governors of Santo Domingo were among the first in the colonies to take steps against this trade. They fitted out small vessels, which they called Guardacostas, coastguards, and had them patrol all along the coast. If they succeeded in capturing the smugglers, they proceeded against them with little ceremony. They were either thrown overboard or hanged.
This summary process having stirred in the smugglers the spirit of vindictiveness, they organized for concerted action, determined to resist what they considered unwarranted severity and cruelty. They began to group into fleets, and openly invaded the coasts, burning, plundering, marauding and killing. They looked about for suitable places where to establish settlements of their own that could be used as bases of operation in the neighborhood. Hispaniola or Hayti, where the natives had been almost exterminated and which by misgovernment was nearly deserted, invited them. Herds of cattle and swine were running wild about the island and offered not only valuable provisions for themselves, but promised to become marketable commodities. Some French smugglers settled there, killed the cattle and swine, smoked the beef and salted the pork, and opened a remunerative trade with visiting sailors in these commodities as also in tallow and hides. The Indians of the island called smoked beef "boucan"; hence these traders were called boucaniers which was anglicized into buccaneers. In a similar way the English freebooter was by the French corrupted into flibustier and later came back to us as filibuster. At first the term boucanier was limited to the smugglers and traders in smoked beef living on land, while the flibustier was applied to the smuggler and trader living on board of a ship. But later these nice distinctions were ignored and the names applied indiscriminately to smugglers, freebooters and pirates.
Whatever term one chose to apply to them, these Brethren of the Coast and outlaws of the oceans became almost a recognized institution of the century when rival European powers were fighting for supremacy in the New World and were unanimously arrayed against Spain. There were among them recruits from almost all nations, classes and professions. There were bankrupt shopkeepers, discharged soldiers, runaway convicts, thieves and murderers, vagabonds and adventurers and many a black sheep of good family under an assumed name. A large proportion was attracted by the possibility of getting hold of some of the unlimited treasures of gold and silver which the New World was said to hold. For the reports that had been spread by the participants in the early expeditions, not always limited to natives of Spain and Portugal, were so fairy-like that the classic tale of the Argonauts paled into insignificance beside them. It is reported that a noted French freebooter who had joined the pirates as a runaway debtor, hoped in this way to secure enough to pay off his debts. An equally large number consisted of men who in that period of adventure were seized with an insatiable desire for roving about the world, free from all fetters of conventional life.
The attitude of England, France and Holland against Spain was so hostile, that whenever one of these powers was at war with Spain, these outlaws were granted the rights of belligerents. Mariner-warriors, prepared to defend themselves and to attack by force, they became a mercenary navy at the service of any power that happened to be at war with Spain. At bottom of this united effort, which at the end resulted in ruining the overseas commerce of Spain, was the opposition against its restrictions of the navigation and commerce of other countries. Bancroft who is referred to by Pedro J. Guiteras in his "Historia de la isla de Cuba" says in the first volume of his "History of the United States" (p. 163)
"The moral sense of mariners revolted at the extravagance; since forfeiture, imprisonment, and the threat of eternal woe were to follow the attempt at the fair exchanges of trade; since the freebooter and the pirate could not suffer more than menaced against the merchant who should disregard the maritime monopoly, the seas became infested by reckless buccaneers, the natural offspring of colonial restrictions. Rich Spanish settlements in America were pillaged; fleets attacked and captured; predatory invasions were even made on land to intercept the loads of gold, as they came from the mines, by men who might have acquired honor and wealth in commerce, if commerce had been permitted."
John Fiske, too, in the second volume of his "Historical Essays," dwells upon the causes of the enormous development of piracy in the seventeenth century. Speaking of the struggle of the Netherlands and England against the greatest military power of the world, he said that the former had to rely largely and the latter almost exclusively, upon naval operations, and continued:
"Dutch ships on the Indian Ocean and English ships off the American coasts effectually cut the Spaniard's sinews of war. Now in that age ocean navigation was still in its infancy, and the work of creating great and permanent navies was only beginning. Government was glad to have individuals join in the work of building and equipping ships of war, and it was accordingly natural that individuals should expect to reimburse themselves for the heavy risk and expense by taking a share in the spoils of victory. In this way privateering came into existence and it played a much more extensive part in maritime warfare than it now does. The navy was but incompletely nationalized. Into expeditions that were strictly military in purpose there entered some of the elements of a commercial speculation, and as we read them with our modern ideas we detect the smack of buccaneering."