THE BUCCANEERS IN THE
WEST INDIES IN THE
XVII CENTURY

BY

C.H. HARING

WITH TEN MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1910

PREFACE

The principal facts about the exploits of the English
and French buccaneers of the seventeenth century
in the West Indies are sufficiently well known to
modern readers. The French Jesuit historians of the
Antilles have left us many interesting details of their
mode of life, and Exquemelin’s history of the freebooters
has been reprinted numerous times both in France and
in England. Based upon these old, contemporary narratives,
modern accounts are issued from the press with
astonishing regularity, some of them purporting to be
serious history, others appearing in the more popular and
entertaining guise of romances. All, however, are alike
in confining themselves for their information to what may
almost be called the traditional sources—Exquemelin, the
Jesuits, and perhaps a few narratives like those of Dampier
and Wafer. To write another history of these privateers
or pirates, for they have, unfortunately, more than once
deserved that name, may seem a rather fruitless undertaking.
It is justified only by the fact that there exist
numerous other documents bearing upon the subject,
documents which till now have been entirely neglected.
Exquemelin has been reprinted, the story of the
buccaneers has been re-told, yet no writer, whether
editor or historian, has attempted to estimate the trustworthiness
of the old tales by comparing them with these
other sources, or to show the connection between the
buccaneers and the history of the English colonies in the
West Indies. The object of this volume, therefore, is
not only to give a narrative, according to the most
authentic, available sources, of the more brilliant exploits
of these sea-rovers, but, what is of greater interest and
importance, to trace the policy pursued toward them
by the English and French Governments.

The “Buccaneers in the West Indies” was presented
as a thesis to the Board of Modern History of Oxford
University in May 1909 to fulfil the requirements for
the degree of Bachelor of Letters. It was written under
the supervision of C.H. Firth, Regius Professor of Modern
History in Oxford, and to him the writer owes a lasting
debt of gratitude for his unfailing aid and sympathy
during the course of preparation.

C.H.H.

Oxford, 1910

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. Introductory
CHAPTER II. The Beginnings of the Buccaneers
CHAPTER III. The Conquest of Jamaica
CHAPTER IV. Tortuga—1655-1664
CHAPTER V. Porto Bello and Panama
CHAPTER VI. The Government Suppresses the Buccaneers
CHAPTER VII. The Buccaneers Turn Pirate

APPENDIX I. English Buccaneers
APPENDIX II. List of Filibusters
SOURCES AND BIBLIGRAPHY
INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of the West Indies
Spanish Periagua, From Exquemelin’s Histoire des Aventuriers Trevoux, 1744
A Correct Map of Jamaica, From the Royal Magazine, 1760.
Map of San Domingo, From Charlevoix’ Histoire de S. Domingue.
Plan of the Bay and Town of Portobelo, From Prevost d’Exiles’ Voyages.
The Isthmus of Darien, From Exquelmelin’s Bucaniers, 1684-5.
Plan of Vera-Cruz, From Charlevoix’ Histoire de S. Domingue, 1730.
Plan of the Town and Roadstead of Cartegena
and of the Forts, From Baron de Pontis‘ Relation de ce qui c’est fait la prise de Carthagene, Bruxelles, 1698.

THE BUCCANEERS IN THE
WEST INDIES IN THE
XVII CENTURY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

I.—THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

At the time of the discovery of America the Spaniards,
as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has remarked, were perhaps
less fitted than any other nation of western Europe
for the task of American colonization. Whatever may
have been the political rôle thrust upon them in the sixteenth
century by the Hapsburg marriages, whatever
certain historians may say of the grandeur and nobility of
the Spanish national character, Spain was then neither
rich nor populous, nor industrious. For centuries she had
been called upon to wage a continuous warfare with the
Moors, and during this time had not only found little
leisure to cultivate the arts of peace, but had acquired a
disdain for manual work which helped to mould her
colonial administration and influenced all her subsequent
history. And when the termination of the last of these
wars left her mistress of a united Spain, and the exploitation
of her own resources seemed to require all the energies
she could muster, an entire new hemisphere was suddenly
{2}
thrown open to her, and given into her hands by a papal
decree to possess and populate. Already weakened by
the exile of the most sober and industrious of her population,
the Jews; drawn into a foreign policy for which she
had neither the means nor the inclination; instituting at
home an economic policy which was almost epileptic in
its consequences, she found her strength dissipated, and
gradually sank into a condition of economic and political
impotence.

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor in the service
of the Castilian Crown, wishing to find a western route by
sea to India and especially to Zipangu (Japan), the magic
land described by the Venetian traveller, Marco Polo,
landed on 12th October 1492, on “Guanahani,” one of the
Bahama Islands. From “Guanahani” he passed on to
other islands of the same group, and thence to Hispaniola,
Tortuga and Cuba. Returning to Spain in March 1493,
he sailed again in September of the same year with
seventeen vessels and 1500 persons, and this time keeping
farther to the south, sighted Porto Rico and some of the
Lesser Antilles, founded a colony on Hispaniola, and
discovered Jamaica in 1494. On a third voyage in 1498
he discovered Trinidad, and coasted along the shores of
South America from the Orinoco River to the island of
Margarita. After a fourth and last voyage in 1502-04,
Columbus died at Valladolid in 1506, in the firm belief
that he had discovered a part of the Continent of Asia.

The entire circle of the Antilles having thus been
revealed before the end of the fifteenth century, the
Spaniards pushed forward to the continent. While
Hojida, Vespucci, Pinzon and de Solis were exploring the
eastern coast from La Plata to Yucatan, Ponce de Leon in
1512 discovered Florida, and in 1513 Vasco Nunez de
{3}
Balboa descried the Pacific Ocean from the heights of
Darien, revealing for the first time the existence of a new
continent. In 1520 Magellan entered the Pacific through
the strait which bears his name, and a year later was
killed in one of the Philippine Islands. Within the next
twenty years Cortez had conquered the realm of Montezuma,
and Pizarro the empire of Peru; and thus within
the space of two generations all of the West Indies, North
America to California and the Carolinas, all of South
America except Brazil, which the error of Cabral gave to
the Portuguese, and in the east the Philippine Islands and
New Guinea passed under the sway of the Crown of
Castile.

Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493 had consulted with
several persons of eminent learning to find out whether it
was necessary to obtain the investiture of the Pope for
their newly-discovered possessions, and all were of opinion
that this formality was unnecessary.¹ Nevertheless, on
3rd May 1493, a bull was granted by Pope Alexander VI.,
which divided the sovereignty of those parts of the world
not possessed by any Christian prince between Spain and
Portugal by a meridian line 100 leagues west of the
Azores or of Cape Verde. Later Spanish writers made
much of this papal gift; yet, as Georges Scelle points
out,² it is possible that this bull was not so much a deed of
conveyance, investing the Spaniards with the proprietorship
of America, as it was an act of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
according them, on the strength of their acquired
right and proven Catholicism, a monopoly as it were in the
propagation of the faith. At that time, even Catholic
{4}
princes were no longer accustomed to seek the Pope’s
sanction when making a new conquest, and certainly in
the domain of public law the Pope was not considered to
have temporal jurisdiction over the entire world. He did,
however, intervene in temporal matters when they directly
influenced spiritual affairs, and of this the propagation of
the faith was an instance. As the compromise between
Spain and Portugal was very indecisive, owing to the
difference in longitude of the Azores and Cape Verde, a
second Act was signed on 7th June 1494, which placed the
line of demarcation 270 leagues farther to the west.

The colonization of the Spanish Indies, on its social
and administrative side, presents a curious contrast. On
the one hand we see the Spanish Crown, with high ideals of
order and justice, of religious and political unity, extending
to its ultramarine possessions its faith, its language,
its laws and its administration; providing for the welfare
of the aborigines with paternal solicitude; endeavouring
to restrain and temper the passions of the conquerors;
building churches and founding schools and monasteries;
in a word, trying to make its colonies an integral part of
the Spanish monarchy, “une société vieille dans une
contrée neuve.” Some Spanish writers, it is true, have
exaggerated the virtues of their old colonial system; yet
that system had excellences which we cannot afford to
despise. If the Spanish kings had not choked their
government with procrastination and routine; if they had
only taken their task a bit less seriously and had not tried
to apply too strictly to an empty continent the paternal
administration of an older country; we might have been
privileged to witness the development and operation of as
complete and benign a system of colonial government as
has been devised in modern times. The public initiative
{5}
of the Spanish government, and the care with which it
selected its colonists, compare very favourably with the
opportunism of the English and the French, who colonized
by chance private activity and sent the worst elements of
their population, criminals and vagabonds, to people their
new settlements across the sea. However much we may
deprecate the treatment of the Indians by the conquistadores,
we must not forget that the greater part of the
population of Spanish America to-day is still Indian, and
that no other colonizing people have succeeded like the
Spaniards in assimilating and civilizing the natives. The
code of laws which the Spaniards gradually evolved for
the rule of their transmarine provinces, was, in spite of
defects which are visible only to the larger experience of
the present day, one of the wisest, most humane and best co-ordinated
of any to this day published for any colony.
Although the Spaniards had to deal with a large population
of barbarous natives, the word “conquest” was suppressed
in legislation as ill-sounding, “because the peace is
to be sealed,” they said, “not with the sound of arms, but
with charity and good-will.”³

The actual results, however, of the social policy of the
Spanish kings fell far below the ideals they had set for
themselves. The monarchic spirit of the crown was so
strong that it crushed every healthy, expansive tendency
in the new countries. It burdened the colonies with a
numerous, privileged nobility, who congregated mostly in
the larger towns and set to the rest of the colonists a
pernicious example of idleness and luxury. In its zeal
for the propagation of the Faith, the Crown constituted
{6}
a powerfully endowed Church, which, while it did splendid
service in converting and civilizing the natives, engrossed
much of the land in the form of mainmort, and filled the
new world with thousands of idle, unproductive, and often
licentious friars. With an innate distrust and fear of
individual initiative, it gave virtual omnipotence to royal
officials and excluded all creoles from public employment.
In this fashion was transferred to America the crushing
political and ecclesiastical absolutism of the mother
country. Self-reliance and independence of thought or
action on the part of the creoles was discouraged,
divisions and factions among them were encouraged and
educational opportunities restricted, and the American-born
Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy,
indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions
and petty local jealousies. To make matters worse,
many of the Spaniards who crossed the seas to the
American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade
or cultivate the soil, so much as to extract from the
natives a tribute of gold and silver. The Indians, instead
of being protected and civilized, were only too often
reduced to serfdom and confined to a laborious routine
for which they had neither the aptitude nor the strength;
while the government at home was too distant to
interfere effectively in their behalf. Driven by cruel
taskmasters they died by thousands from exhaustion
and despair, and in some places entirely disappeared.

The Crown of Castile, moreover, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries sought to extend Spanish commerce
and monopolize all the treasure of the Indies by means
of a rigid and complicated commercial system. Yet in
the end it saw the trade of the New World pass into
the hands of its rivals, its own marine reduced to a
{7}
shadow of its former strength, its crews and its vessels
supplied by merchants from foreign lands, and its riches
diverted at their very source.

This Spanish commercial system was based upon
two distinct principles. One was the principle of
colonial exclusivism, according to which all the trade of
the colonies was to be reserved to the mother country.
Spain on her side undertook to furnish the colonies with
all they required, shipped upon Spanish vessels; the
colonies in return were to produce nothing but raw
materials and articles which did not compete with the
home products with which they were to be exchanged.
The second principle was the mercantile doctrine which,
considering as wealth itself the precious metals which
are but its symbol, laid down that money ought, by
every means possible, to be imported and hoarded, never
exported.⁴ This latter theory, the fallacy of which has
long been established, resulted in the endeavour of the
Spanish Hapsburgs to conserve the wealth of the country,
not by the encouragement of industry, but by the increase
and complexity of imposts. The former doctrine, adopted
by a non-producing country which was in no position to
fulfil its part in the colonial compact, led to the most
disastrous consequences.

While the Spanish Crown was aiming to concentrate
and monopolize its colonial commerce, the prosperity of
Spain itself was slowly sapped by reason of these mistaken
economic theories. Owing to the lack of workmen,
the increase of imposts, and the prejudice against
the mechanic arts, industry was being ruined; while
the increased depopulation of the realm, the mainmort
of ecclesiastical lands, the majorats of the nobility and
{8}
the privileges of the Mesta, brought agriculture rapidly
into decay. The Spaniards, consequently, could not
export the products of their manufacture to the
colonies, when they did not have enough to supply their
own needs. To make up for this deficiency their
merchants were driven to have recourse to foreigners,
to whom they lent their names in order to elude a law
which forbade commerce between the colonies and traders
of other nations. In return for the manufactured articles
of the English, Dutch and French, and of the great commercial
cities like Genoa and Hamburg, they were obliged
to give their own raw materials and the products of the
Indies—wool, silks, wines and dried fruits, cochineal, dye-woods,
indigo and leather, and finally, indeed, ingots of
gold and silver. The trade in Spain thus in time became
a mere passive machine. Already in 1545 it had been
found impossible to furnish in less than six years the
goods demanded by the merchants of Spanish America.
At the end of the seventeenth century, foreigners were
supplying five-sixths of the manufactures consumed
in Spain itself, and engrossed nine-tenths of that
American trade which the Spaniards had sought so
carefully to monopolize.⁵

In the colonies the most striking feature of Spanish
economic policy was its wastefulness. After the conquest
of the New World, it was to the interest of the Spaniards
to gradually wean the native Indians from barbarism by
teaching them the arts and sciences of Europe, to encourage
such industries as were favoured by the soil, and
to furnish the growing colonies with those articles which
they could not produce themselves, and of which they
stood in need. Only thus could they justify their monopoly
of the markets of Spanish America. The same test,
{10}
indeed, may be applied to every other nation which
adopted the exclusivist system. Queen Isabella wished
to carry out this policy, introduced into the newly-discovered
islands wheat, the olive and the vine, and acclimatized
many of the European domestic animals.⁶ Her
efforts, unfortunately, were not seconded by her successors,
nor by the Spaniards who went to the Indies. In time
the government itself, as well as the colonist, came to be
concerned, not so much with the agricultural products of
the Indies, but with the return of the precious metals.
Natives were made to work the mines, while many regions
adapted to agriculture, Guiana, Caracas and Buenos
Ayres, were neglected, and the peopling of the colonies
by Europeans was slow. The emperor, Charles V., did
little to stem this tendency, but drifted along with the
tide. Immigration was restricted to keep the colonies
free from the contamination of heresy and of foreigners.
The Spanish population was concentrated in cities, and
the country divided into great estates granted by the
crown to the families of the conquistadores or to favourites
at court. The immense areas of Peru, Buenos Ayres and
Mexico were submitted to the most unjust and arbitrary
regulations, with no object but to stifle growing industry
and put them in absolute dependence upon the metropolis.
It was forbidden to exercise the trades of dyer, fuller,
weaver, shoemaker or hatter, and the natives were compelled
to buy of the Spaniards even the stuffs they wore
on their backs. Another ordinance prohibited the cultivation
of the vine and the olive except in Peru and Chili,
and even these provinces might not send their oil and
wine to Panama, Gautemala or any other place which
could be supplied from Spain.⁷ To maintain the commercial
{11}
monopoly, legitimate ports of entry in Spanish
America were made few and far apart—for Mexico, Vera
Cruz, for New Granada, the town of Cartagena. The
islands and most of the other provinces were supplied by
uncertain “vaisseaux de registre,” while Peru and Chili,
finding all direct commerce by the Pacific or South Sea
interdicted, were obliged to resort to the fever-ridden town
of Porto Bello, where the mortality was enormous and the
prices increased tenfold.

In Spain, likewise, the colonial commerce was restricted
to one port—Seville. For in the estimation of
the crown it was much more important to avoid being
defrauded of its dues on import and export, than to
permit the natural development of trade by those towns
best fitted to acquire it. Another reason, prior in point
of time perhaps, why Seville was chosen as the port
for American trade, was that the Indies were regarded
as the exclusive appanage of the crown of Castile, and
of that realm Seville was then the chief mercantile city.
It was not a suitable port, however, to be distinguished
by so high a privilege. Only ships of less than 200 tons
were able to cross the bar of San Lucar, and goods therefore
had to be transhipped—a disability which was soon
felt when traffic and vessels became heavier.⁸ The fact,
nevertheless, that the official organization called the Casa
dé Contratacion was seated in Seville, together with the
influence of the vested interests of the merchants whose
prosperity depended upon the retention of that city
as the one port for Indian commerce, were sufficient
to bear down all opposition. The maritime towns
of Galicia and Asturia, inhabited by better seamen
{12}
and stronger races, often protested, and sometimes
succeeded in obtaining a small share of the lucrative
trade.⁹ But Seville retained its primacy until 1717,
in which year the Contratacion was transferred to
Cadiz.

The administration of the complex rules governing the
commerce between Spain and her colonies was entrusted
to two institutions located at Seville,—the Casa de Contratacion,
mentioned above, and the Consulado. The Casa de
Contratacion, founded by royal decree as early as 1503,
was both a judicial tribunal and a house of commerce.
Nothing might be sent to the Indies without its consent;
nothing might be brought back and landed, either on the
account of merchants or of the King himself, without its
authorization. It received all the revenues accruing from
the Indies, not only the imposts on commerce, but also all
the taxes remitted by colonial officers. As a consultative
body it had the right to propose directly to the King
anything which it deemed necessary to the development
and organization of American commerce; and as a tribunal
it possessed an absolute competence over all crimes under
the common law, and over all infractions of the ordinances
governing the trade of the Indies, to the exclusion of
{13}
every ordinary court. Its jurisdiction began at the
moment the passengers and crews embarked and the
goods were put on board, and ended only when the return
voyage and disembarkation had been completed.¹⁰ The
civil jurisdiction of the Casa was much more restricted
and disputes purely commercial in character between the
merchants were reserved to the Consulado, which was a
tribunal of commerce chosen entirely by the merchants
themselves. Appeals in certain cases might be carried to
the Council of the Indies.¹¹

The first means adopted by the northern maritime
nations to appropriate to themselves a share of the riches
of the New World was open, semi-piratical attack upon
the Spanish argosies returning from those distant
El Dorados. The success of the Norman and Breton
corsairs, for it was the French, not the English, who
started the game, gradually forced upon the Spaniards,
as a means of protection, the establishment of great
merchant fleets sailing periodically at long intervals and
accompanied by powerful convoys. During the first half
of the sixteenth century any ship which had fulfilled the
conditions required for engaging in American commerce
was allowed to depart alone and at any time of the year.
From about 1526, however, merchant vessels were ordered
to sail together, and by a cedula of July 1561, the system
of fleets was made permanent and obligatory. This decree
prohibited any ship from sailing alone to America from
Cadiz or San Lucar on pain of forfeiture of ship and
{14}
cargo.¹² Two fleets were organized each year, one for
Terra Firma going to Cartagena and Porto Bello, the other
designed for the port of San Juan d’Ulloa (Vera Cruz) in
New Spain. The latter, called the Flota, was commanded
by an “almirante,” and sailed for Mexico in the early
summer so as to avoid the hurricane season and the
“northers” of the Mexican Gulf. The former was usually
called the galeones (anglice “galleons”), was commanded
by a “general,” and sailed from Spain earlier in the year,
between January and March. If it departed in March, it
usually wintered at Havana and returned with the Flota
in the following spring. Sometimes the two fleets sailed
together and separated at Guadaloupe, Deseada or another
of the Leeward Islands.¹³

The galleons generally consisted of from five to eight
war-vessels carrying from forty to fifty guns, together with
several smaller, faster boats called “pataches,” and a fleet
of merchantmen varying in number in different years. In
the time of Philip II. often as many as forty ships supplied
Cartagena and Porto Bello, but in succeeding reigns,
although the population of the Indies was rapidly increasing,
American commerce fell off so sadly that eight or ten
were sufficient for all the trade of South and Central
America. The general of the galleons, on his departure,
received from the Council of the Indies three sealed
packets. The first, opened at the Canaries, contained the
name of the island in the West Indies at which the fleet was
first to call. The second was unsealed after the galleons
{15}
arrived at Cartagena, and contained instructions for the
fleet to return in the same year or to winter in America.
In the third, left unopened until the fleet had emerged
from the Bahama Channel on the homeward voyage,
were orders for the route to the Azores and the islands
they should touch in passing, usually Corvo and Flores or
Santa Maria.¹⁴

The course of the galleons from San Lucar was south-west
to Teneriffe on the African coast, and thence to
the Grand Canary to call for provisions—considered in
all a run of eight days. From the Canaries one of the
pataches sailed on alone to Cartagena and Porto Bello,
carrying letters and packets from the Court and announcing
the coming of the fleet. If the two fleets sailed
together, they steered south-west from the Canaries to
about the latitude of Deseada, 15′ 30″, and then catching
the Trade winds continued due west, rarely changing a
sail until Deseada or one of the other West Indian islands
was sighted. From Deseada the galleons steered an easy
course to Cape de la Vela, and thence to Cartagena.
When the galleons sailed from Spain alone, however,
they entered the Caribbean Sea by the channel between
Tobago and Trinidad, afterwards named the Galleons’
Passage. Opposite Margarita a second patache left the
fleet to visit the island and collect the royal revenues,
although after the exhaustion of the pearl fisheries the
island lost most of its importance. As the fleet advanced
into regions where more security was felt, merchant ships
too, which were intended to unload and trade on the
coasts they were passing, detached themselves during the
night and made for Caracas, Santa Marta or Maracaibo
{16}
to get silver, cochineal, leather and cocoa. The Margarita
patache, meanwhile, had sailed on to Cumana and Caracas
to receive there the king’s treasure, mostly paid in cocoa,
the real currency of the country, and thence proceeded to
Cartagena to rejoin the galleons.¹⁵

The fleet reached Cartagena ordinarily about two
months after its departure from Cadiz. On its arrival, the
general forwarded the news to Porto Bello, together with
the packets destined for the viceroy at Lima. From
Porto Bello a courier hastened across the isthmus to
the President of Panama, who spread the advice amongst
the merchants in his jurisdiction, and, at the same time,
sent a dispatch boat to Payta, in Peru. The general of
the galleons, meanwhile, was also sending a courier overland
to Lima, and another to Santa Fe, the capital of the
interior province of New Granada, whence runners carried
to Popagan, Antioquia, Mariguita, and adjacent provinces,
the news of his arrival.¹⁶ The galleons were instructed to
remain at Cartagena only a month, but bribes from the
merchants generally made it their interest to linger for
fifty or sixty days. To Cartagena came the gold and
emeralds of New Granada, the pearls of Margarita and
Rancherias, and the indigo, tobacco, cocoa and other
products of the Venezuelan coast. The merchants of
Gautemala, likewise, shipped their commodities to Cartagena
by way of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan river,
for they feared to send goods across the Gulf of Honduras
to Havana, because of the French and English buccaneers
hanging about Cape San Antonio.¹⁷

Meanwhile the viceroy at Lima, on receipt of his
letters, ordered the Armada of the South Sea to prepare
to sail, and sent word south to Chili and throughout the
province of Peru from Las Charcas to Quito, to forward
the King’s revenues for shipment to Panama. Within
less than a fortnight all was in readiness. The Armada,
carrying a considerable treasure, sailed from Callao and,
touching at Payta, was joined by the Navio del Oro
(golden ship), which carried the gold from the province of
Quito and adjacent districts. While the galleons were
approaching Porto Bello the South Sea fleet arrived
before Panama, and the merchants of Chili and Peru
began to transfer their merchandise on mules across the
high back of the isthmus.¹⁸

Then began the famous fair of Porto Bello.¹⁹ The
{18}
town, whose permanent population was very small and
composed mostly of negroes and mulattos, was suddenly
called upon to accommodate an enormous crowd of merchants,
soldiers and seamen. Food and shelter were to
be had only at extraordinary prices. When Thomas
Gage was in Porto Bello in 1637 he was compelled to
pay 120 crowns for a very small, meanly-furnished room
for a fortnight. Merchants gave as much as 1000 crowns
for a moderate-sized shop in which to sell their commodities.
Owing to overcrowding, bad sanitation, and
an extremely unhealthy climate, the place became an
open grave, ready to swallow all who resorted there. In
1637, during the fifteen days that the galleons remained
at Porto Bello, 500 men died of sickness. Meanwhile,
day by day, the mule-trains from Panama were winding
their way into the town. Gage in one day counted 200
mules laden with wedges of silver, which were unloaded
in the market-place and permitted to lie about like
heaps of stones in the streets, without causing any
fear or suspicion of being lost.²⁰ While the treasure
of the King of Spain was being transferred to the
galleons in the harbour, the merchants were making
their trade. There was little liberty, however, in commercial
transactions, for the prices were fixed and
published beforehand, and when negotiations began exchange
was purely mechanical. The fair, which was
supposed to be open for forty days, was, in later times,
generally completed in ten or twelve. At the beginning
of the eighteenth century the volume of business transacted
{19}
was estimated to amount to thirty or forty million
pounds sterling.²¹

In view of the prevailing east wind in these regions,
and the maze of reefs, cays and shoals extending far out
to sea from the Mosquito Coast, the galleons, in making
their course from Porto Bello to Havana, first sailed back
to Cartagena upon the eastward coast eddy, so as to
get well to windward of Nicaragua before attempting
the passage through the Yucatan Channel.²² The fleet
anchored at Cartagena a second time for ten or twelve
days, where it was rejoined by the patache of Margarita²³
and by the merchant ships which had been sent to trade
in Terra-Firma. From Cartagena, too, the general sent
dispatches to Spain and to Havana, giving the condition
of the vessels, the state of trade, the day when he
expected to sail, and the probable time of arrival.²⁴ For
when the galleons were in the Indies all ports were
closed by the Spaniards, for fear that precious information
of the whereabouts of the fleet and of the value of its
cargo might inconveniently leak out to their rivals.
From Cartagena the course was north-west past Jamaica
and the Caymans to the Isle of Pines, and thence round
Capes Corrientes and San Antonio to Havana. The
fleet generally required about eight days for the journey,
and arrived at Havana late in the summer. Here the
galleons refitted and revictualled, received tobacco, sugar,
and other Cuban exports, and if not ordered to return with
the Flota, sailed for Spain no later than the middle of
September. The course for Spain was from Cuba through
{20}
the Bahama Channel, north-east between the Virginian
Capes and the Bermudas to about 38°, in order to recover
the strong northerly winds, and then east to the Azores.
In winter the galleons sometimes ran south of the Bermudas,
and then slowly worked up to the higher latitude;
but in this case they often either lost some ships on the
Bermuda shoals, or to avoid these slipped too far south,
were forced back into the West Indies and missed their
voyage altogether.²⁵ At the Azores the general, falling
in with his first intelligence from Spain, learned where on
the coast of Europe or Africa he was to sight land; and
finally, in the latter part of October or the beginning of
November, he dropped anchor at San Lucar or in Cadiz
harbour.

The Flota or Mexican fleet, consisting in the seventeenth
century of two galleons of 800 or 900 tons and
from fifteen to twenty merchantmen, usually left Cadiz
between June and July and wintered in America; but
if it was to return with the galleons from Havana in
September it sailed for the Indies as early as April. The
course from Spain to the Indies was the same as for the
fleet of Terra-Firma. From Deseada or Guadeloupe, however,
the Flota steered north-west, passing Santa Cruz and
Porto Rico on the north, and sighting the little isles of
Mona and Saona, as far as the Bay of Neyba in Hispaniola,
where the ships took on fresh wood and water.²⁶ Putting
to sea again, and circling round Beata and Alta Vela, the
fleet sighted in turn Cape Tiburon, Cape de Cruz, the Isle
of Pines, and Capes Corrientes and San Antonio at the
{21}
west end of Cuba. Meanwhile merchant ships had dropped
away one by one, sailing to San Juan de Porto Rico, San
Domingo, St. Jago de Cuba and even to Truxillo and
Cavallos in Honduras, to carry orders from Spain to the
governors, receive cargoes of leather, cocoa, etc., and rejoin
the Flota at Havana. From Cape San Antonio to Vera
Cruz there was an outside or winter route and an inside or
summer route. The former lay north-west between the
Alacranes and the Negrillos to the Mexican coast about
sixteen leagues north of Vera Cruz, and then down before
the wind into the desired haven. The summer track was
much closer to the shore of Campeache, the fleet threading
its way among the cays and shoals, and approaching Vera
Cruz by a channel on the south-east.

If the Flota sailed from Spain in July it generally
arrived at Vera Cruz in the first fifteen days of September,
and the ships were at once laid up until March, when the
crews reassembled to careen and refit them. If the fleet
was to return in the same year, however, the exports of
New Spain and adjacent provinces, the goods from China
and the Philippines carried across Mexico from the Pacific
port of Acapulco, and the ten or twelve millions of treasure
for the king, were at once put on board and the ships
departed to join the galleons at Havana. Otherwise the
fleet sailed from Vera Cruz in April, and as it lay dead to
the leeward of Cuba, used the northerly winds to about
25°, then steered south-east and reached Havana in
eighteen or twenty days. By the beginning of June it
was ready to sail for Spain, where it arrived at the end
of July, by the same course as that followed by the
galleons.²⁷

We are accustomed to think of Spanish commerce
{22}
with the Indies as being made solely by great fleets which
sailed yearly from Seville or Cadiz to Mexico and the
Isthmus of Darien. There were, however, always exceptions
to this rule. When, as sometimes happened, the
Flota did not sail, two ships of 600 or 700 tons were sent
by the King of Spain to Vera Cruz to carry the quicksilver
necessary for the mines. The metal was divided
between New Spain and Peru by the viceroy at Mexico,
who sent via Gautemala the portion intended for the
south. These ships, called “azogues,” carried from 2000
to 2500 quintals²⁸ of silver, and sometimes convoyed six
or seven merchant vessels. From time to time an isolated
ship was also allowed to sail from Spain to Caracas with
licence from the Council of the Indies and the Contratacion,
paying the king a duty of five ducats on the ton.
It was called the “register of Caracas,” took the same
route as the galleons, and returned with one of the fleets
from Havana. Similar vessels traded at Maracaibo, in
Porto Rico and at San Domingo, at Havana and Matanzas
in Cuba and at Truxillo and Campeache.²⁹ There was
always, moreover, a special traffic with Buenos Ayres.
This port was opened to a limited trade in negroes in
1595. In 1602 permission was given to the inhabitants
of La Plata to export for six years the products of
their lands to other Spanish possessions, in exchange
for goods of which they had need; and when in 1616
the colonists demanded an indefinite renewal of this
privilege, the sop thrown to them was the bare right
of trade to the amount of 100 tons every three years.
Later in the century the Council of the Indies extended
{23}
the period to five years, so as not to prejudice the trade
of the galleons.³⁰

It was this commerce, which we have noticed at such
length, that the buccaneers of the West Indies in the
seventeenth century came to regard as their legitimate
prey. These “corsarios Luteranos,” as the Spaniards
sometimes called them, scouring the coast of the Main
from Venezuela to Cartagena, hovering about the broad
channel between Cuba and Yucatan, or prowling in the
Florida Straits, became the nightmare of Spanish seamen.
Like a pack of terriers they hung upon the skirts of the
great unwieldy fleets, ready to snap up any unfortunate
vessel which a tempest or other accident had separated
from its fellows. When Thomas Gage was sailing in the
galleons from Porto Bello to Cartagena in 1637, four
buccaneers hovering near them carried away two merchant-ships
under cover of darkness. As the same fleet was
departing from Havana, just outside the harbour two
strange vessels appeared in their midst, and getting to
the windward of them singled out a Spanish ship which
had strayed a short distance from the rest, suddenly
gave her a broadside and made her yield. The vessel
was laden with sugar and other goods to the value of
80,000 crowns. The Spanish vice-admiral and two other
galleons gave chase, but without success, for the wind
was against them. The whole action lasted only half
an hour.³¹

The Spanish ships of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were notoriously clumsy and unseaworthy.
With short keel and towering poop and forecastle they
were an easy prey for the long, low, close-sailing sloops
{24}
and barques of the buccaneers. But this was not their
only weakness. Although the king expressly prohibited
the loading of merchandise on the galleons except on
the king’s account, this rule was often broken for the
private profit of the captain, the sailors, and even of the
general. The men-of-war, indeed, were sometimes so
embarrassed with goods and passengers that it was
scarcely possible to defend them when attacked. The
galleon which bore the general’s flag had often as many
as 700 souls, crew, marines and passengers, on board, and
the same number were crowded upon those carrying the
vice-admiral and the pilot. Ship-masters frequently hired
guns, anchors, cables, and stores to make up the required
equipment, and men to fill up the muster-rolls, against the
time when the “visitadors” came on board to make their
official inspection, getting rid of the stores and men
immediately afterward. Merchant ships were armed with
such feeble crews, owing to the excessive crowding, that
it was all they could do to withstand the least spell
of bad weather, let alone outmanœuvre a swift-sailing
buccaneer.³²

By Spanish law strangers were forbidden to resort to,
or reside in, the Indies without express permission of the
king. By law, moreover, they might not trade with the
Indies from Spain, either on their own account or through
the intermediary of a Spaniard, and they were forbidden
even to associate with those engaged in such a trade.
Colonists were stringently enjoined from having anything
to do with them. In 1569 an order was issued for the
seizure of all goods sent to the colonies on the account of
foreigners, and a royal cedula of 1614 decreed the penalty
of death and confiscation upon any who connived at the
{25}
participation of foreigners in Spanish colonial commerce.³³
It was impossible, however, to maintain so complete an
exclusion when the products of Spain fell far short of
supplying the needs of the colonists. Foreign merchants
were bound to have a hand in this traffic, and the Spanish
government tried to recompense itself by imposing on the
out-going cargoes tyrannical exactions called “indults.”
The results were fatal. Foreigners often eluded these
impositions by interloping in the West Indies and in the
South Sea.³⁴ And as the Contratacion, by fixing each
year the nature and quantity of the goods to be shipped
to the colonies, raised the price of merchandise at will and
reaped enormous profits, the colonists welcomed this
contraband trade as an opportunity of enriching themselves
and adding to the comforts and luxuries of living.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century as
many as 200 ships sailed each year from Portugal with
rich cargoes of silks, cloths and woollens intended for
Spanish America.³⁵ The Portuguese bought these articles
of the Flemish, English, and French, loaded them at
Lisbon and Oporto, ran their vessels to Brazil and up the
La Plata as far as navigation permitted, and then transported
the goods overland through Paraguay and Tucuman
to Potosi and even to Lima. The Spanish merchants of
Peru kept factors in Brazil as well as in Spain, and as
{26}
Portuguese imposts were not so excessive as those levied
at Cadiz and Seville, the Portuguese could undersell their
Spanish rivals. The frequent possession of Assientos by
the Portuguese and Dutch in the first half of the seventeenth
century also facilitated this contraband, for when
carrying negroes from Africa to Hispaniola, Cuba and the
towns on the Main, they profited by their opportunities to
sell merchandise also, and generally without the least
obstacle.

Other nations in the seventeenth century were not slow
to follow the same course; and two circumstances contributed
to make that course easy. One was the great
length of coast line on both the Atlantic and Pacific slopes
over which a surveillance had to be exercised, making it
difficult to catch the interlopers. The other was the venal
connivance of the governors of the ports, who often
tolerated and even encouraged the traffic on the plea that
the colonists demanded it.³⁶ The subterfuges adopted by
the interlopers were very simple. When a vessel wished
to enter a Spanish port to trade, the captain, pretending
that provisions had run low, or that the ship suffered from
a leak or a broken mast, sent a polite note to the governor
accompanied by a considerable gift. He generally
obtained permission to enter, unload, and put the ship into
{27}
a seaworthy condition. All the formalities were minutely
observed. The unloaded goods were shut up in a storehouse,
and the doors sealed. But there was always found
another door unsealed, and by this they abstracted the
goods during the night, and substituted coin or bars of
gold and silver. When the vessel was repaired to the
captain’s satisfaction, it was reloaded and sailed away.

There was also, especially on the shores of the
Caribbean Sea, a less elaborate commerce called “sloop-trade,”
for it was usually managed by sloops which hovered
near some secluded spot on the coast, often at the mouth
of a river, and informed the inhabitants of their presence
in the neighbourhood by firing a shot from a cannon.
Sometimes a large ship filled with merchandise was
stationed in a bay close at hand, and by means of these
smaller craft made its trade with the colonists. The latter,
generally in disguise, came off in canoes by night. The
interlopers, however, were always on guard against such
dangerous visitors, and never admitted more than a few at
a time; for when the Spaniards found themselves stronger
than the crew, and a favourable opportunity presented
itself, they rarely failed to attempt the vessel.

Thus the Spaniards of the seventeenth century, by
persisting, both at home and in their colonies, in an
economic policy which was fatally inconsistent with
their powers and resources, saw their commerce gradually
extinguished by the ships of the foreign interloper, and
their tropical possessions fall a prey to marauding bands
of half-piratical buccaneers. Although struggling under
tremendous initial disabilities in Europe, they had
attempted, upon the slender pleas of prior discovery
and papal investiture, to reserve half the world to
themselves. Without a marine, without maritime traditions,
{28}
they sought to hold a colonial empire greater
than any the world had yet seen, and comparable only
with the empire of Great Britain three centuries later.
By discouraging industry in Spain, and yet enforcing in
the colonies an absolute commercial dependence on the
home-country, by combining in their rule of distant
America a solicitous paternalism with a restriction of
initiative altogether disastrous in its consequences, the
Spaniards succeeded in reducing their colonies to political
impotence. And when, to make their grip the more firm,
they evolved, as a method of outwitting the foreigner of his
spoils, the system of great fleets and single ports of call,
they found the very means they had contrived for their
own safety to be the instrument of commercial disaster.

II.—THE FREEBOOTERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

It was the French chronologist, Scaliger, who in the
sixteenth century asserted, “nulli melius piraticam
exercent quam Angli”; and although he had no need
to cross the Channel to find men proficient in this
primitive calling, the remark applies to the England of
his time with a force which we to-day scarcely realise.
Certainly the inveterate hostility with which the Englishman
learned to regard the Spaniard in the latter half of
the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries
found its most remarkable expression in the exploits of
the Elizabethan “sea-dogs” and of the buccaneers of
a later period. The religious differences and political
jealousies which grew out of the turmoil of the
Reformation, and the moral anarchy incident to the
dissolution of ancient religious institutions, were the
{29}
motive causes for an outburst of piratical activity
comparable only with the professional piracy of the
Barbary States.

Even as far back as the thirteenth century, indeed,
lawless sea-rovers, mostly Bretons and Flemings, had
infested the English Channel and the seas about Great
Britain. In the sixteenth this mode of livelihood
became the refuge for numerous young Englishmen,
Catholic and Protestant, who, fleeing from the persecutions
of Edward VI. and of Mary, sought refuge in
French ports or in the recesses of the Irish coast, and
became the leaders of wild roving bands living chiefly
upon plunder. Among them during these persecutions
were found many men belonging to the best families
in England, and although with the accession of Elizabeth
most of the leaders returned to the service of the State,
the pirate crews remained at their old trade. The
contagion spread, especially in the western counties,
and great numbers of fishermen who found their old
employment profitless were recruited into this new
calling.³⁷ At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign we find
these Anglo-Irish pirates venturing farther south,
plundering treasure galleons off the coast of Spain, and
cutting vessels out of the very ports of the Spanish king.
Such outrages of course provoked reprisals, and the
pirates, if caught, were sent to the galleys, rotted in the
dungeons of the Inquisition, or, least of all, were burnt
in the plaza at Valladolid. These cruelties only added
fuel to a deadly hatred which was kindling between the
two nations, a hatred which it took one hundred and
fifty years to quench.

The most venturesome of these sea-rovers, however,
{30}
were soon attracted to a larger and more distant sphere
of activity. Spain, as we have seen, was then endeavouring
to reserve to herself in the western hemisphere an
entire new world; and this at a time when the great
northern maritime powers, France, England and Holland,
were in the full tide of economic development, restless
with new thoughts, hopes and ambitions, and keenly
jealous of new commercial and industrial outlets. The
famous Bull of Alexander VI. had provoked Francis I.
to express a desire “to see the clause in Adam’s will
which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to
divide the New World between them,” and very early the
French corsairs had been encouraged to test the pretensions
of the Spaniards by the time-honoured proofs of
fire and steel. The English nation, however, in the first
half of the sixteenth century, had not disputed with Spain
her exclusive trade and dominion in those regions. The
hardy mariners of the north were still indifferent to the
wonders of a new continent awaiting their exploitation,
and it was left to the Spaniards to unfold before the eyes
of Europe the vast riches of America, and to found
empires on the plateaus of Mexico and beyond the Andes.
During the reign of Philip II. all this was changed.
English privateers began to extend their operations
westward, and to sap the very sources of Spanish wealth
and power, while the wars which absorbed the attention
of the Spaniards in Europe, from the revolt of the Low
Countries to the Treaty of Westphalia, left the field clear
for these ubiquitous sea-rovers. The maritime powers,
although obliged by the theory of colonial exclusion to
pretend to acquiesce in the Spaniard’s claim to tropical
America, secretly protected and supported their mariners
who coursed those western seas. France and England
{31}
were now jealous and fearful of Spanish predominance
in Europe, and kept eyes obstinately fixed on the inexhaustible
streams of gold and silver by means of which
Spain was enabled to pay her armies and man her fleets.
Queen Elizabeth, while she publicly excused or disavowed
to Philip II. the outrages committed by Hawkins and
Drake, blaming the turbulence of the times and promising
to do her utmost to suppress the disorders, was secretly
one of the principal shareholders in their enterprises.

The policy of the marauders was simple. The treasure
which oiled the machinery of Spanish policy came from
the Indies where it was accumulated; hence there were
only two means of obtaining possession of it:—bold raids
on the ill-protected American continent, and the capture
of vessels en route.³⁸ The counter policy of the Spaniards
was also two-fold:—on the one hand, the establishment
of commerce by means of annual fleets protected by a
powerful convoy; on the other, the removal of the centres
of population from the coasts to the interior of the
country far from danger of attack.³⁹ The Spaniards in
America, however, proved to be no match for the bold,
intrepid mariners who disputed their supremacy. The
descendants of the Conquistadores had deteriorated sadly
from the type of their forbears. Softened by tropical
heats and a crude, uncultured luxury, they seem to have
lost initiative and power of resistance. The disastrous
{32}
commercial system of monopoly and centralization forced
them to vegetate; while the policy of confining political
office to native-born Spaniards denied any outlet to
creole talent and energy. Moreover, the productive power
and administrative abilities of the native-born Spaniards
themselves were gradually being paralyzed and reduced
to impotence under the crushing obligation of preserving
and defending so unwieldy an empire and of managing
such disproportionate riches, a task for which they had
neither the aptitude nor the means.⁴⁰ Privateering in the
West Indies may indeed be regarded as a challenge to
the Spaniards of America, sunk in lethargy and living
upon the credit of past glory and achievement, a challenge
to prove their right to retain their dominion and extend
their civilization and culture over half the world.⁴¹

There were other motives which lay behind these
piratical aggressions of the French and English in Spanish
America. The Spaniards, ever since the days of the
Dominican monk and bishop, Las Casas, had been reprobated
as the heartless oppressors and murderers of
the native Indians. The original owners of the soil had
been dispossessed and reduced to slavery. In the West
Indies, the great islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were
rendered desolate for want of inhabitants. Two great
empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery,
their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a
{33}
living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain.
Such was the Protestant Englishman’s conception, in the
sixteenth century, of the results of Spanish colonial policy.
To avenge the blood of these innocent victims, and teach
the true religion to the survivors, was to glorify the Church
militant and strike a blow at Antichrist. Spain, moreover,
in the eyes of the Puritans, was the lieutenant of
Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried
and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could
lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her
ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British
Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone.
Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm
and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling
the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely
to be repaid with plunder.

A pamphlet written by Dalby Thomas in 1690 expresses
with tolerable accuracy the attitude of the average
Englishman toward Spain during the previous century.
He says:—”We will make a short reflection on the
unaccountable negligence, or rather stupidity, of this
nation, during the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII.,
Edward VI. and Queen Mary, who could contentedly sit
still and see the Spanish rifle, plunder and bring home
undisturbed, all the wealth of that golden world; and to
suffer them with forts and castles to shut up the doors and
entrances unto all the rich provinces of America, having
not the least title or pretence of right beyond any other
nation; except that of being by accident the first discoverer
of some parts of it; where the unprecedented
cruelties, exorbitances and barbarities, their own histories
witness, they practised on a poor, naked and innocent
people, which inhabited the islands, as well as upon those
{34}
truly civilized and mighty empires of Peru and Mexico,
called to all mankind for succour and relief against their
outrageous avarice and horrid massacres…. (We) slept
on until the ambitious Spaniard, by that inexhaustible
spring of treasure, had corrupted most of the courts and
senates of Europe, and had set on fire, by civil broils and
discords, all our neighbour nations, or had subdued them
to his yoke; contriving too to make us wear his chains
and bear a share in the triumph of universal monarchy,
not only projected but near accomplished, when Queen
Elizabeth came to the crown … and to the divided
interests of Philip II. and Queen Elizabeth, in personal
more than National concerns, we do owe that start of hers
in letting loose upon him, and encouraging those daring
adventurers, Drake, Hawkins, Rawleigh, the Lord Clifford
and many other braves that age produced, who, by their
privateering and bold undertaking (like those the
buccaneers practise) now opened the way to our discoveries,
and succeeding settlements in America.”⁴²

On the 19th of November 1527, some Spaniards in a
caravel loading cassava at the Isle of Mona, between
Hispaniola and Porto Rico, sighted a strange vessel of
about 250 tons well-armed with cannon, and believing it
to be a ship from Spain sent a boat to make inquiries.
The new-comers at the same time were seen to launch a
pinnace carrying some twenty-five men, all armed with
corselets and bows. As the two boats approached the
Spaniards inquired the nationality of the strangers and
were told that they were English. The story given by
the English master was that his ship and another had
{35}
been fitted out by the King of England and had sailed
from London to discover the land of the Great Khan;
that they had been separated in a great storm; that this
ship afterwards ran into a sea of ice, and unable to get
through, turned south, touched at Bacallaos (Newfoundland),
where the pilot was killed by Indians, and sailing
400 leagues along the coast of “terra nueva” had found
her way to this island of Porto Rico. The Englishmen
offered to show their commission written in Latin and
Romance, which the Spanish captain could not read; and
after sojourning at the island for two days, they inquired
for the route to Hispaniola and sailed away. On the
evening of 25th November this same vessel appeared
before the port of San Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola,
where the master with ten or twelve sailors went ashore
in a boat to ask leave to enter and trade. This they
obtained, for the alguazil mayor and two pilots were sent
back with them to bring the ship into port. But early
next morning, when they approached the shore, the
Spanish alcaide, Francisco de Tapia, commanded a gun
to be fired at the ship from the castle; whereupon the
English, seeing the reception accorded them, sailed back
to Porto Rico, there obtained some provisions in exchange
for pewter and cloth, and departed for Europe, “where it
is believed that they never arrived, for nothing is known
of them.” The alcaide, says Herrera, was imprisoned by
the oidores, because he did not, instead of driving the
ship away, allow her to enter the port, whence she could
not have departed without the permission of the city and
the fort.⁴³

This is the earliest record we possess of the appearance
of an English ship in the waters of Spanish America.
Others, however, soon followed. In 1530 William
Hawkins, father of the famous John Hawkins, ventured
in “a tall and goodly ship … called the ‘Polo of
Plymouth,'” down to the coast of Guinea, trafficked with
the natives for gold-dust and ivory, and then crossed the
ocean to Brazil, “where he behaved himself so wisely with
those savage people” that one of the kings of the country
took ship with him to England and was presented to
Henry VIII. at Whitehall.⁴⁴ The real occasion, however,
for the appearance of foreign ships in Spanish-American
waters was the new occupation of carrying negroes from
the African coast to the Spanish colonies to be sold as
slaves. The rapid depopulation of the Indies, and the
really serious concern of the Spanish crown for the
preservation of the indigenes, had compelled the Spanish
government to permit the introduction of negro slaves
from an early period. At first restricted to Christian
slaves carried from Spain, after 1510 licences to take over
a certain number, subject of course to governmental
imposts, were given to private individuals; and in
August 1518, owing to the incessant clamour of the
colonists for more negroes, Laurent de Gouvenot,
Governor of Bresa and one of the foreign favourites of
{37}
Charles V., obtained the first regular contract to carry
4000 slaves directly from Africa to the West Indies.⁴⁵
With slight modifications the contract system became
permanent, and with it, as a natural consequence, came
contraband trade. Cargoes of negroes were frequently
“run” from Africa by Spaniards and Portuguese, and as
early as 1506 an order was issued to expel all contraband
slaves from Hispaniola.⁴⁶ The supply never equalled the
demand, however, and this explains why John Hawkins
found it so profitable to carry ship-loads of blacks
across from the Guinea coast, and why Spanish colonists
could not resist the temptation to buy them, notwithstanding
the stringent laws against trading with
foreigners.

The first voyage of John Hawkins was made in 1562-63.
In conjunction with Thomas Hampton he fitted out
three vessels and sailed for Sierra Leone. There he
collected, “partly by the sword and partly by other
means,” some 300 negroes, and with this valuable human
freight crossed the Atlantic to San Domingo in
Hispaniola. Uncertain as to his reception, Hawkins on
his arrival pretended that he had been driven in by foul
weather, and was in need of provisions, but without ready
money to pay for them. He therefore requested permission
to sell “certain slaves he had with him.” The
opportunity was eagerly welcomed by the planters, and
the governor, not thinking it necessary to construe his
orders from home too stringently, allowed two-thirds of
the cargo to be sold. As neither Hawkins nor the Spanish
colonists anticipated any serious displeasure on the part
of Philip II., the remaining 100 slaves were left as a
{38}
deposit with the Council of the island. Hawkins invested
the proceeds in a return cargo of hides, half of which he
sent in Spanish vessels to Spain under the care of his
partner, while he returned with the rest to England.
The Spanish Government, however, was not going to
sanction for a moment the intrusion of the English into
the Indies. On Hampton’s arrival at Cadiz his cargo was
confiscated and he himself narrowly escaped the Inquisition.
The slaves left in San Domingo were forfeited, and
Hawkins, although he “cursed, threatened and implored,”
could not obtain a farthing for his lost hides and negroes.
The only result of his demands was the dispatch of a
peremptory order to the West Indies that no English
vessel should be allowed under any pretext to trade
there.⁴⁷

The second of the great Elizabethan sea-captains to
beard the Spanish lion was Hawkins’ friend and pupil,
Francis Drake. In 1567 he accompanied Hawkins on
his third expedition. With six ships, one of which was
lent by the Queen herself, they sailed from Plymouth in
October, picked up about 450 slaves on the Guinea coast,
sighted Dominica in the West Indies in March, and
coasted along the mainland of South America past
Margarita and Cape de la Vela, carrying on a “tolerable
good trade.” Rio de la Hacha they stormed with 200
men, losing only two in the encounter; but they were
scattered by a tempest near Cartagena and driven into
the Gulf of Mexico, where, on 16th September, they
entered the narrow port of S. Juan d’Ulloa or Vera Cruz.
The next day the fleet of New Spain, consisting of
thirteen large ships, appeared outside, and after an
exchange of pledges of peace and amity with the English
{39}
intruders, entered on the 20th. On the morning of the
24th, however, a fierce encounter was begun, and Hawkins
and Drake, stubbornly defending themselves against
tremendous odds, were glad to escape with two shattered
vessels and the loss of £100,000 treasure. After a voyage
of terrible suffering, Drake, in the “Judith,” succeeded in
reaching England on 20th January 1569, and Hawkins
followed five days later.⁴⁸ Within a few years, however,
Drake was away again, this time alone and with the sole,
unblushing purpose of robbing the Dons. With only two
ships and seventy-three men he prowled about the waters
of the West Indies for almost a year, capturing and
rifling Spanish vessels, plundering towns on the Main
and intercepting convoys of treasure across the Isthmus
of Darien. In 1577 he sailed on the voyage which
carried him round the world, a feat for which he was
knighted, promoted to the rank of admiral, and visited by
the Queen on board his ship, the “Golden Hind.” While
Drake was being feted in London as the hero of the hour,
Philip of Spain from his cell in the Escorial must have
execrated these English sea-rovers whose visits brought
ruin to his colonies and menaced the safety of his treasure
galleons.

In the autumn of 1585 Drake was again in command
of a formidable armament intended against the West
Indies. Supported by 2000 troops under General Carleill,
and by Martin Frobisher and Francis Knollys in the fleet,
he took and plundered San Domingo, and after occupying
Cartagena for six weeks ransomed the city for 110,000
ducats. This fearless old Elizabethan sailed from
Plymouth on his last voyage in August 1595. Though
under the joint command of Drake and Hawkins, the
{40}
expedition seemed doomed to disaster throughout its
course. One vessel, the “Francis,” fell into the hands of
the Spaniards. While the fleet was passing through the
Virgin Isles, Hawkins fell ill and died. A desperate
attack was made on S. Juan de Porto Rico, but the
English, after losing forty or fifty men, were compelled to
retire. Drake then proceeded to the Main, where in
turn he captured and plundered Rancherias, Rio de la
Hacha, Santa Marta and Nombre de Dios. With 750
soldiers he made a bold attempt to cross the isthmus
to the city of Panama, but turned back after the loss
of eighty or ninety of his followers. A few days later,
on 15th January 1596, he too fell ill, died on the
28th, and was buried in a leaden coffin off the coast of
Darien.⁴⁹

Hawkins and Drake, however, were by no means the
only English privateers of that century in American
waters. Names like Oxenham, Grenville, Raleigh and
Clifford, and others of lesser fame, such as Winter, Knollys
and Barker, helped to swell the roll of these Elizabethan
sea-rovers. To many a gallant sailor the Caribbean Sea
was a happy hunting-ground where he might indulge at
his pleasure any propensities to lawless adventure. If in
1588 he had helped to scatter the Invincible Armada, he
now pillaged treasure ships on the coasts of the Spanish
Main; if he had been with Drake to flout his Catholic
Majesty at Cadiz, he now closed with the Spaniards
within their distant cities beyond the seas. Thus he lined
his own pockets with Spanish doubloons, and incidentally
curbed Philip’s power of invading England. Nor must we
think these mariners the same as the lawless buccaneers
of a later period. The men of this generation were of a
{41}
sterner and more fanatical mould, men who for their
wildest acts often claimed the sanction of religious convictions.
Whether they carried off the heathen from
Africa, or plundered the fleets of Romish Spain, they
were but entering upon “the heritage of the saints.”
Judged by the standards of our own century they were
pirates and freebooters, but in the eyes of their fellow-countrymen
their attacks upon the Spaniards seemed fair
and honourable.

The last of the great privateering voyages for which
Drake had set the example was the armament which
Lord George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, sent against
Porto Rico in 1598. The ill-starred expeditions of Raleigh
to Guiana in 1595 and again in 1617 belong rather to
the history of exploration and colonization. Clifford,
“courtier, gambler and buccaneer,” having run through a
great part of his very considerable fortune, had seized the
opportunity offered him by the plunder of the Spanish
colonies to re-coup himself; and during a period of twelve
years, from 1586 to 1598, almost every year fitted out, and
often himself commanded, an expedition against the
Spaniards. In his last and most ambitious effort, in 1598,
he equipped twenty vessels entirely at his own cost, sailed
from Plymouth in March, and on 6th June laid siege to the
city of San Juan, which he proposed to clear of Spaniards
and establish as an English stronghold. Although the
place was captured, the expedition proved a fiasco. A
violent sickness broke out among the troops, and as
Clifford had already sailed away with some of the ships
to Flores to lie in wait for the treasure fleet, Sir Thomas
Berkeley, who was left in command in Porto Rico,
abandoned the island and returned to rejoin the Earl.⁵⁰

The English in the sixteenth century, however, had no
monopoly of this piratical game. The French did something
in their own way, and the Dutch were not far
behind. Indeed, the French may claim to have set the
example for the Elizabethan freebooters, for in the first
half of the sixteenth century privateers flocked to the
Spanish Indies from Dieppe, Brest and the towns of the
Basque coast. The gleam of the golden lingots of Peru,
and the pale lights of the emeralds from the mountains of
New Granada, exercised a hypnotic influence not only on
ordinary seamen but on merchants and on seigneurs with
depleted fortunes. Names like Jean Terrier, Jacques Sore
and François le Clerc, the latter popularly called “Pie de
Palo,” or “wooden-leg,” by the Spaniards, were as detestable
in Spanish ears as those of the great English captains.
Even before 1500 French corsairs hovered about Cape St
Vincent and among the Azores and the Canaries; and
their prowess and audacity were so feared that Columbus,
on returning from his third voyage in 1498, declared that
he had sailed for the island of Madeira by a new route to
avoid meeting a French fleet which was awaiting him near
St Vincent.⁵¹ With the establishment of the system of
armed convoys, however, and the presence of Spanish
fleets on the coast of Europe, the corsairs suffered some
painful reverses which impelled them to transfer their
operations to American waters. Thereafter Spanish
records are full of references to attacks by Frenchmen on
Havana, St. Jago de Cuba, San Domingo and towns on
{43}
the mainland of South and Central America; full of
appeals, too, from the colonies to the neglectful authorities
in Spain, urging them to send artillery, cruisers and
munitions of war for their defence.⁵²

A letter dated 8th April 1537, written by Gonzalo de
Guzman to the Empress, furnishes us with some interesting
details of the exploits of an anonymous French corsair
in that year. In November 1536 this Frenchman had
seized in the port of Chagre, on the Isthmus of Darien, a
Spanish vessel laden with horses from San Domingo, had
cast the cargo into the sea, put the crew on shore and
sailed away with his prize. A month or two later he
appeared off the coast of Havana and dropped anchor in a
small bay a few leagues from the city. As there were
then five Spanish ships lying in the harbour, the inhabitants
compelled the captains to attempt the seizure of the
pirate, promising to pay for the ships if they were lost.
Three vessels of 200 tons each sailed out to the attack, and
for several days they fired at the French corsair, which,
being a patache of light draught, had run up the bay
beyond their reach. Finally one morning the Frenchmen
were seen pressing with both sail and oar to escape from
the port. A Spanish vessel cut her cables to follow in
pursuit, but encountering a heavy sea and contrary winds
was abandoned by her crew, who made for shore in boats.
The other two Spanish ships were deserted in similar
fashion, whereupon the French, observing this new turn of
affairs, re-entered the bay and easily recovered the three
drifting vessels. Two of the prizes they burnt, and
arming the third sailed away to cruise in the Florida
{44}
straits, in the route of ships returning from the West Indies
to Spain.⁵³

The corsairs, however, were not always so uniformly
successful. A band of eighty, who attempted to plunder
the town of St. Jago de Cuba, were repulsed with some
loss by a certain Diego Perez of Seville, captain of an
armed merchant ship then in the harbour, who later
petitioned for the grant of a coat-of-arms in recognition of
his services.⁵⁴ In October 1544 six French vessels attacked
the town of Santa Maria de los Remedios, near Cape de
la Vela, but failed to take it in face of the stubborn
resistance of the inhabitants. Yet the latter a few months
earlier had been unable to preserve their homes from
pillage, and had been obliged to flee to La Granjeria de
las Perlas on the Rio de la Hacha.⁵⁵ There is small
wonder, indeed, that the defenders were so rarely victorious.
The Spanish towns were ill-provided with forts and
guns, and often entirely without ammunition or any
regular soldiers. The distance between the settlements as
a rule was great, and the inhabitants, as soon as informed
of the presence of the enemy, knowing that they had no
means of resistance and little hope of succour, left their
homes to the mercy of the freebooters and fled to the hills
and woods with their families and most precious belongings.
Thus when, in October 1554, another band of three hundred
French privateers swooped down upon the unfortunate
town of St. Jago de Cuba, they were able to hold it for
thirty days, and plundered it to the value of 80,000 pieces
of eight.⁵⁶ The following year, however, witnessed an even
more remarkable action. In July 1555 the celebrated
{45}
captain, Jacques Sore, landed two hundred men from a
caravel a half-league from the city of Havana, and before
daybreak marched on the town and forced the surrender of
the castle. The Spanish governor had time to retire to the
country, where he gathered a small force of Spaniards and
negroes, and returned to surprise the French by night.
Fifteen or sixteen of the latter were killed, and Sore, who
himself was wounded, in a rage gave orders for the
massacre of all the prisoners. He burned the cathedral
and the hospital, pillaged the houses and razed most of the
city to the ground. After transferring all the artillery to
his vessel, he made several forays into the country, burned
a few plantations, and finally sailed away in the beginning
of August. No record remains of the amount of the
booty, but it must have been enormous. To fill the cup of
bitterness for the poor inhabitants, on 4th October there
appeared on the coast another French ship, which had
learned of Sore’s visit and of the helpless state of the
Spaniards. Several hundred men disembarked, sacked a
few plantations neglected by their predecessors, tore down
or burned the houses which the Spaniards had begun to
rebuild, and seized a caravel loaded with leather which
had recently entered the harbour.⁵⁷ It is true that during
these years there was almost constant war in Europe
between the Emperor and France; yet this does not
entirely explain the activity of the French privateers in
Spanish America, for we find them busy there in the
years when peace reigned at home. Once unleash the
sea-dogs and it was extremely difficult to bring them
again under restraint.

With the seventeenth century began a new era in the
history of the West Indies. If in the sixteenth the
{46}
English, French and Dutch came to tropical America as
piratical intruders into seas and countries which belonged
to others, in the following century they came as permanent
colonisers and settlers. The Spaniards, who had explored
the whole ring of the West Indian islands before 1500,
from the beginning neglected the lesser for the larger
Antilles—Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico and Jamaica—and
for those islands like Trinidad, which lie close to the
mainland. And when in 1519 Cortez sailed from Cuba
for the conquest of Mexico, and twelve years later Pizarro
entered Peru, the emigrants who left Spain to seek
their fortunes in the New World flocked to the vast
territories which the Conquistadores and their lieutenants
had subdued on the Continent. It was consequently to
the smaller islands which compose the Leeward and
Windward groups that the English, French and Dutch
first resorted as colonists. Small, and therefore “easy
to settle, easy to depopulate and to re-people, attractive
not only on account of their own wealth, but also as
a starting-point for the vast and rich continent off
which they lie,” these islands became the pawns in a
game of diplomacy and colonization which continued for
150 years.

In the seventeenth century, moreover, the Spanish
monarchy was declining rapidly both in power and
prestige, and its empire, though still formidable, no longer
overshadowed the other nations of Europe as in the days
of Charles V. and Philip II. France, with the Bourbons
on the throne, was entering upon an era of rapid expansion
at home and abroad, while the Dutch, by the truce of 1609,
virtually obtained the freedom for which they had struggled
so long. In England Queen Elizabeth had died in 1603,
and her Stuart successor exchanged her policy of dalliance,
{47}
of balance between France and Spain, for one of peace
and conciliation. The aristocratic free-booters who had
enriched themselves by harassing the Spanish Indies were
succeeded by a less romantic but more business-like
generation, which devoted itself to trade and planting.
Abortive attempts at colonization had been made in the
sixteenth century. The Dutch, who were trading in the
West Indies as early as 1542, by 1580 seem to have gained
some foothold in Guiana;⁵⁸ and the French Huguenots,
under the patronage of the Admiral de Coligny, made
three unsuccessful efforts to form settlements on the
American continent, one in Brazil in 1555, another near
Port Royal in South Carolina in 1562, and two years later
a third on the St. John’s River in Florida. The only
English effort in the sixteenth century was the vain
attempt of Sir Walter Raleigh between 1585 and 1590 to
plant a colony on Roanoke Island, on the coast of what
is now North Carolina. It was not till 1607 that the
first permanent English settlement in America was made
at Jamestown in Virginia. Between 1609 and 1619
numerous stations were established by English, Dutch and
French in Guiana between the mouth of the Orinoco and
that of the Amazon. In 1621 the Dutch West India
Company was incorporated, and a few years later proposals
for a similar company were broached in England. Among
the West Indian Islands, St. Kitts received its first English
settlers in 1623; and two years later the island was
formally divided with the French, thus becoming the
earliest nucleus of English and French colonization in
those regions. Barbadoes was colonized in 1624-25. In
1628 English settlers from St. Kitts spread to Nevis and
{48}
Barbuda, and within another four years to Antigua and
Montserrat; while as early as 1625 English and Dutch
took joint possession of Santa Cruz. The founders of the
French settlement on St. Kitts induced Richelieu to incorporate
a French West India Company with the title, “The
Company of the Isles of America,” and under its auspices
Guadeloupe, Martinique and other islands of the Windward
group were colonized in 1635 and succeeding
years. Meanwhile between 1632 and 1634 the Dutch
had established trading stations on St. Eustatius in the
north, and on Tobago and Curaçao in the south near
the Spanish mainland.

While these centres of trade and population were being
formed in the very heart of the Spanish seas, the privateers
were not altogether idle. To the treaty of Vervins between
France and Spain in 1598 had been added a secret restrictive
article whereby it was agreed that the peace
should not hold good south of the Tropic of Cancer and
west of the meridian of the Azores. Beyond these two
lines (called “les lignes de l’enclos des Amitiés”) French
and Spanish ships might attack each other and take fair
prize as in open war. The ministers of Henry IV. communicated
this restriction verbally to the merchants of
the ports, and soon private men-of-war from Dieppe,
Havre and St. Malo flocked to the western seas.⁵⁹ Ships
loaded with contraband goods no longer sailed for the
Indies unless armed ready to engage all comers, and
many ship-captains renounced trade altogether for the
more profitable and exciting occupation of privateering.
In the early years of the seventeenth century, moreover,
Dutch fleets harassed the coasts of Chile and Peru,⁶⁰ while
{49}
in Brazil⁶¹ and the West Indies a second “Pie de Palo,”
this time the Dutch admiral, Piet Heyn, was proving a
scourge to the Spaniards. Heyn was employed by the
Dutch West India Company, which from the year
1623 onwards, carried the Spanish war into the transmarine
possessions of Spain and Portugal. With a fleet
composed of twenty-six ships and 3300 men, of which
he was vice-admiral, he greatly distinguished himself at
the capture of Bahia, the seat of Portuguese power in
Brazil. Similar expeditions were sent out annually, and
brought back the rich spoils of the South American
colonies. Within two years the extraordinary number of
eighty ships, with 1500 cannon and over 9000 sailors and
soldiers, were despatched to American seas, and although
Bahia was soon retaken, the Dutch for a time occupied
Pernambuco, as well as San Juan de Porto Rico in the
West Indies.⁶² In 1628 Piet Heyn was in command of a
squadron designed to intercept the plate fleet which sailed
every year from Vera Cruz to Spain. With thirty-one
ships, 700 cannon and nearly 3000 men he cruised along
the northern coast of Cuba, and on 8th September fell in
with his quarry near Cape San Antonio. The Spaniards
made a running fight along the coast until they reached
the Matanzas River near Havana, into which they turned
with the object of running the great-bellied galleons
aground and escaping with what treasure they could.
The Dutch followed, however, and most of the rich cargo
was diverted into the coffers of the Dutch West India
Company. The gold, silver, indigo, sugar and logwood
were sold in the Netherlands for fifteen million guilders,
{50}
and the company was enabled to distribute to its shareholders
the unprecedented dividend of 50 per cent. It
was an exploit which two generations of English mariners
had attempted in vain, and the unfortunate Spanish general,
Don Juan de Benavides, on his return to Spain was
imprisoned for his defeat and later beheaded.⁶³

In 1639 we find the Spanish Council of War for the
Indies conferring with the King on measures to be taken
against English piratical ships in the Caribbean;⁶⁴ and in
1642 Captain William Jackson, provided with an ample
commission from the Earl of Warwick⁶⁵ and duplicates
under the Great Seal, made a raid in which he emulated
the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and his contemporaries.
Starting out with three ships and about 1100 men, mostly
picked up in St. Kitts and Barbadoes, he cruised along the
Main from Caracas to Honduras and plundered the
towns of Maracaibo and Truxillo. On 25th March 1643
he dropped anchor in what is now Kingston Harbour in
Jamaica, landed about 500 men, and after some sharp
fighting and the loss of forty of his followers, entered the
town of St. Jago de la Vega, which he ransomed for 200
beeves, 10,000 lbs. of cassava bread and 7000 pieces of
eight. Many of the English were so captivated by the
beauty and fertility of the island that twenty-three deserted
in one night to the Spaniards.⁶⁶

The first two Stuart Kings, like the great Queen
who preceded them, and in spite of the presence of a
{51}
powerful Spanish faction at the English Court, looked
upon the Indies with envious eyes, as a source of
perennial wealth to whichever nation could secure them.
James I., to be sure, was a man of peace, and soon
after his accession patched up a treaty with the Spaniards;
but he had no intention of giving up any English
claims, however shadowy they might be, to America.
Cornwallis, the new ambassador at Madrid, from a
vantage ground where he could easily see the financial
and administrative confusion into which Spain, in spite
of her colonial wealth, had fallen, was most dissatisfied
with the treaty. In a letter to Cranborne, dated 2nd
July 1605, he suggested that England never lost so
great an opportunity of winning honour and wealth as by
relinquishing the war with Spain, and that Philip and
his kingdom “were reduced to such a state as they
could not in all likelihood have endured for the space
of two years more.”⁶⁷ This opinion we find repeated
in his letters in the following years, with covert hints
that an attack upon the Indies might after all be the
most profitable and politic thing to do. When, in
October 1607, Zuniga, the Spanish ambassador in
London, complained to James of the establishment of
the new colony in Virginia, James replied that Virginia
was land discovered by the English and therefore not
within the jurisdiction of Philip; and a week later
Salisbury, while confiding to Zuniga that he thought
the English might not justly go to Virginia, still
refused to prohibit their going or command their return,
for it would be an acknowledgment, he said, that
the King of Spain was lord of all the Indies.⁶⁸ In 1609,
{52}
in the truce concluded between Spain and the Netherlands,
one of the stipulations provided that for nine
years the Dutch were to be free to trade in all places
in the East and West Indies except those in actual
possession of the Spaniards on the date of cessation of
hostilities; and thereafter the English and French
governments endeavoured with all the more persistence
to obtain a similar privilege. Attorney-General Heath,
in 1625, presented a memorial to the Crown on the
advantages derived by the Spaniards and Dutch in the
West Indies, maintaining that it was neither safe nor
profitable for them to be absolute lords of those regions;
and he suggested that his Majesty openly interpose or
permit it to be done underhand.⁶⁹ In September 1637
proposals were renewed in England for a West India
Company as the only method of obtaining a share in
the wealth of America. It was suggested that some
convenient port be seized as a safe retreat from which
to plunder Spanish trade on land and sea, and that
the officers of the company be empowered to conquer
and occupy any part of the West Indies, build ships,
levy soldiers and munitions of war, and make reprisals.⁷⁰
The temper of Englishmen at this time was again
illustrated in 1640 when the Spanish ambassador, Alonzo
de Cardenas, protested to Charles I. against certain
ships which the Earls of Warwick and Marlborough
were sending to the West Indies with the intention,
Cardenas declared, of committing hostilities against the
Spaniards. The Earl of Warwick, it seems, pretended
to have received great injuries from the latter and
threatened to recoup his losses at their expense. He
procured from the king a broad commission which gave
{53}
him the right to trade in the West Indies, and to
“offend” such as opposed him. Under shelter of this
commission the Earl of Marlborough was now going
to sea with three or four armed ships, and Cardenas
prayed the king to restrain him until he gave security
not to commit any acts of violence against the Spanish
nation. The petition was referred to a committee of
the Lords, who concluded that as the peace had never
been strictly observed by either nation in the Indies
they would not demand any security of the Earl.
“Whether the Spaniards will think this reasonable or
not,” concludes Secretary Windebank in his letter to Sir
Arthur Hopton, “is no great matter.”⁷¹

During this century and a half between 1500 and
1650, the Spaniards were by no means passive or indifferent
to the attacks made upon their authority and
prestige in the New World. The hostility of the
mariners from the north they repaid with interest, and
woe to the foreign interloper or privateer who fell into
their clutches. When Henry II. of France in 1557
issued an order that Spanish prisoners be condemned
to the galleys, the Spanish government retaliated by
commanding its sea-captains to mete out the same treatment
to their French captives, except that captains,
masters and officers taken in the navigation of the
Indies were to be hung or cast into the sea.⁷² In
December 1600 the governor of Cumana had suggested
to the King, as a means of keeping Dutch and English
ships from the salt mines of Araya, the ingenious scheme
of poisoning the salt. This advice, it seems, was not
followed, but a few years later, in 1605, a Spanish fleet
{54}
of fourteen galleons sent from Lisbon surprised and
burnt nineteen Dutch vessels found loading salt at
Araya, and murdered most of the prisoners.⁷³ In
December 1604 the Venetian ambassador in London
wrote of “news that the Spanish in the West Indies
captured two English vessels, cut off the hands, feet,
noses and ears of the crews and smeared them with
honey and tied them to trees to be tortured by flies
and other insects. The Spanish here plead,” he continued,
“that they were pirates, not merchants, and
that they did not know of the peace. But the barbarity
makes people here cry out.”⁷⁴ On 22nd June 1606,
Edmondes, the English Ambassador at Brussels, in a
letter to Cornwallis, speaks of a London ship which
was sent to trade in Virginia, and putting into a river in
Florida to obtain water, was surprised there by Spanish
vessels from Havana, the men ill-treated and the cargo
confiscated.⁷⁵ And it was but shortly after that Captain
Chaloner’s ship on its way to Virginia was seized by the
Spaniards in the West Indies, and the crew sent to languish
in the dungeons of Seville or condemned to the galleys.

By attacks upon some of the English settlements, too,
the Spaniards gave their threats a more effective form.
Frequent raids were made upon the English and Dutch
plantations in Guiana;⁷⁶ and on 8th-18th September 1629 a
Spanish fleet of over thirty sail, commanded by Don
Federico de Toledo, nearly annihilated the joint French
and English colony on St. Kitts. Nine English ships
were captured and the settlements burnt. The French
inhabitants temporarily evacuated the island and sailed
{55}
for Antigua; but of the English some 550 were carried
to Cartagena and Havana, whence they were shipped to
England, and all the rest fled to the mountains and
woods.⁷⁷ Within three months’ time, however, after the
departure of the Spaniards, the scattered settlers had
returned and re-established the colony. Providence Island
and its neighbour, Henrietta, being situated near the
Mosquito Coast, were peculiarly exposed to Spanish
attack;⁷⁸ while near the north shore of Hispaniola the
island of Tortuga, which was colonized by the same
English company, suffered repeatedly from the assaults
of its hostile neighbours. In July 1635 a Spanish fleet
from the Main assailed the island of Providence, but unable
to land among the rocks, was after five days beaten
off “considerably torn” by the shot from the fort.⁷⁹ On
the strength of these injuries received and of others anticipated,
the Providence Company obtained from the king
the liberty “to right themselves” by making reprisals, and
during the next six years kept numerous vessels preying
upon Spanish commerce in those waters. King Philip
was therefore all the more intent upon destroying the
plantation.⁸⁰ He bided his time, however, until the early
summer of 1641, when the general of the galleons, Don
Francisco Diaz Pimienta, with twelve sail and 2000 men,
fell upon the colony, razed the forts and carried off all the
English, about 770 in number, together with forty cannon and
half a million of plunder.⁸¹ It was just ten years later that a
{56}
force of 800 men from Porto Rico invaded Santa Cruz, whence
the Dutch had been expelled by the English in 1646, killed
the English governor and more than 100 settlers, seized
two ships in the harbour and burnt and pillaged most of
the plantations. The rest of the inhabitants escaped to
the woods, and after the departure of the Spaniards
deserted the colony for St. Kitts and other islands.⁸²

Footnote 1: (return)

Herrera: Decades II. 1, p. 4, cited in Scelle: la
Traite Négrière, I. p. 6. Note 2.

Footnote 2: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. pp. 6-9.

Footnote 3: (return)

“Por cuanto los pacificaciones no se han de hacer con ruido de armas,
sino con caridad y buen modo.”—Recop. de leyes … de las Indias, lib.
vii. tit. 1.

Footnote 4: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 35.

Footnote 5: (return)

Weiss: L’Espagne depuis Philippe II. jusqu’aux Bourbons., II. pp. 204
and 215. Not till 1722 was legislative sanction given to this practice.

M. Lemonnet wrote to Colbert in 1670 concerning this commerce:—”Quelque
perquisition qu’on ait faite dans ce dernier temps aux Indes pour
découvrir les biens des François, ils ont plustost souffert la prison que de
rien déclarer … toute les merchandises qu’on leur donne à porter aux
Indes sont chargées sous le nom d’Espagnols, que bien souvent n’en ont pas
connaissance, ne jugeant pas à propos de leur en parler, afin de tenir les
affaires plus secrètes et qu’il n’y ait que le commissionaire à le savoir, lequel
en rend compte à son retour des Indes, directement à celui qui en a donne la
cargaison en confiance sans avoir nul egard pour ceux au nom desquels le
chargement à été fait, et lorsque ces commissionaires reviennent des Indes
soit sur le flottes galions ou navires particuliers, ils apportent leur argent dans
leurs coffres, la pluspart entre pont et sans connoissement.” (Margry: Relations
et mémoires inédits pour servir à l’histoire de la France dans les pays
d’outremer, p. 185.)

The importance to the maritime powers of preserving and protecting this
clandestine trade is evident, especially as the Spanish government frequently
found it a convenient instrument for retaliating upon those nations against
which it harboured some grudge. All that was necessary was to sequester
the vessels and goods of merchants belonging to the nation at which it wished
to strike. This happened frequently in the course of the seventeenth century.
Thus Lerma in 1601 arrested the French merchants in Spain to revenge himself
on Henry IV. In 1624 Olivares seized 160 Dutch vessels. The goods
of Genoese merchants were sequestered by Philip IV. in 1644; and in 1684
French merchandize was again seized, and Mexican traders whose storehouses
contained such goods were fined 500,000 ecus, although the same storehouses
contained English and Dutch goods which were left unnoticed. The fine
was later restored upon Admiral d’Estrées’ threat to bombard Cadiz. The
solicitude of the French government for this trade is expressed in a letter of
Colbert to the Marquis de Villars, ambassador at Madrid, dated 5th February
1672:—”Il est tellement necessaire d’avoir soin d’assister les particuliers qui
font leur trafic en Espagne, pour maintenir le plus important commerce que
nous ayons, que je suis persuadé que vous ferez toutes les instances qui pourront
dépendre de vous … en sorte que cette protection produira des avantages
considérables au commerce des sujets de Sa Majesté” (ibid., p. 188).

Cf. also the instructions of Louis XIV. to the Comte d’Estrées, 1st April
1680. The French admiral was to visit all the ports of the Spaniards in the
West Indies, especially Cartagena and San Domingo; and to be always informed
of the situation and advantages of these ports, and of the facilities and
difficulties to be met with in case of an attack upon them; so that the
Spaniards might realise that if they failed to do justice to the French merchants
on the return of the galleons, his Majesty was always ready to force
them to do so, either by attacking these galleons, or by capturing one of their
West Indian ports (ibid.).

Footnote 6: (return)

Weiss, op. cit., II. p. 205.

Footnote 7: (return)

Ibid., II. p. 206.

Footnote 8: (return)

Oppenheim: The Naval Tracts of Sir Wm. Monson. Vol. II.
Appendix B., p. 316.

Footnote 9: (return)

In 1509, owing to the difficulties experienced by merchants in ascending
the Guadalquivir, ships were given permission to load and register at Cadiz
under the supervision of an inspector or “visitador,” and thereafter commerce
and navigation tended more and more to gravitate to that port. After 1529,
in order to facilitate emigration to America, vessels were allowed to sail from
certain other ports, notably San Sebastian, Bilboa, Coruna, Cartagena and
Malaga. The ships might register in these ports, but were obliged always to
make their return voyage to Seville. But either the cedula was revoked, or
was never made use of, for, according to Scelle, there are no known instances
of vessels sailing to America from those towns. The only other exceptions
were in favour of the Company of Guipuzcoa in 1728, to send ships from San
Sebastian to Caracas, and of the Company of Galicia in 1734, to send two
vessels annually to Campeache and Vera Cruz. (Scelle, op. cit., i. pp. 48-49
and notes.)

Footnote 10: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 36 ff.

Footnote 11: (return)

In Nov. 1530 Charles V., against the opposition of the Contratacion,
ordered the Council of the Indies to appoint a resident judge at Cadiz to
replace the officers of the Casa there. This institution, called the “Juzgado
de Indias,” was, until the removal of the Casa to Cadiz in 1717, the source of
constant disputes and irritation.

Footnote 12: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 52 and note; Duro: Armada
Espanola, I. p. 204.

Footnote 13: (return)

The distinction between the Flota or fleet for New Spain and the
galleons intended for Terra Firma only began with the opening of the great
silver mines of Potosi, the rich yields of which after 1557 made advisable an
especial fleet for Cartagena and Nombre de Dios. (Oppenheim, II.
Appendix B., p. 322.)

Footnote 14: (return)

Memoir of MM. Duhalde and de Rochefort to the French king, 1680
(Margry, op. cit., p. 192 ff.).

Footnote 15: (return)

Memoir of MM. Duhalde and de Rochefort to the French king, 1680
(Margry, op. cit., p. 192 ff.)

Footnote 16: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 64; Dampier: Voyages, ed. 1906, i. p. 200.

Footnote 17: (return)

Gage: A New Survey of the West Indies, ed. 1655, pp. 185-6. When
Gage was at Granada, in February 1637, strict orders were received from
Gautemala that the ships were not to sail that year, because the President and
Audiencia were informed of some Dutch and English ships lying in wait at
the mouth of the river.

Footnote 18: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. pp. 64-5; Duhalde and de Rochefort.
There were two
ways of sending goods from Panama to Porto Bello. One was an overland
route of 18 leagues, and was used only during the summer. The other was
by land as far as Venta Cruz, 7 leagues from Panama, and thence by water
on the river Chagre to its mouth, a distance of 26 leagues. When the river
was high the transit might be accomplished in two or three days, but at
other times from six to twelve days were required. To transfer goods from
Chagre to Porto Bello was a matter of only eight or nine hours. This route
was used in winter when the roads were rendered impassable by the great
rains and floods. The overland journey, though shorter, was also more difficult
and expensive. The goods were carried on long mule-trains, and the
“roads, so-called, were merely bridle paths … running through swamps
and jungles, over hills and rocks, broken by unbridged rivers, and situated in
one of the deadliest climates in the world.” The project of a canal to be cut
through the isthmus was often proposed to the Councils in Spain, but was
never acted upon. (Descript. … of Cartagena; Oppenheim, i. p. 333.)

Footnote 19: (return)

Nombre de Dios, a few leagues to the east of Porto Bello, had formerly
been the port where the galleons received the treasure brought from Panama,
but in 1584 the King of Spain ordered the settlement to be abandoned on
account of its unhealthiness, and because the harbour, being open to the sea,
afforded little shelter to shipping. Gage says that in his time Nombre de
Dios was almost forsaken because of its climate. Dampier, writing thirty
years later, describes the site as a waste. “Nombre de Dios,” he says, “is
now nothing but a name. For I have lain ashore in the place where that City
stood, but it is all overgrown with Wood, so as to have no sign that any
Town hath been there.” (Voyages, ed. 1906, i. p. 81.)

Footnote 20: (return)

Gage, ed. 1655, pp. 196-8.

Footnote 21: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 65.

Footnote 22: (return)

Oppenheim, ii. p. 338.

Footnote 23: (return)

When the Margarita patache failed to meet the galleons at Cartagena,
it was given its clearance and allowed to sail alone to Havana—a tempting
prey to buccaneers hovering in those seas.

Footnote 24: (return)

Duhalde and de Rochefort.

Footnote 25: (return)

Rawl. MSS., A. 175, 313 b; Oppenheim, ii. p. 338.

Footnote 26: (return)

Here I am following the MSS. quoted by Oppenheim (ii. pp. 335 ff.).
Instead of watering in Hispaniola, the fleet sometimes stopped at Dominica,
or at Aguada in Porto Rico.

Footnote 27: (return)

Duhalde and de Rochefort.

Footnote 28: (return)

Quintal=about 100 pounds.

Footnote 29: (return)

These “vaisseaux de registre” were supposed not to exceed
300 tons, but through fraud were often double that burden.

Footnote 30: (return)

Duhalde and de Rochefort; Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 54.

Footnote 31: (return)

Gage, ed. 1655, pp. 199-200.

Footnote 32: (return)

Duhalde and de Rochefort; Oppenheim, ii. p. 318.

Footnote 33: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. 45; Recop., t. i. lib. iii. tit. viii.

Footnote 34: (return)

There seems to have been a contraband trade carried on at Cadiz itself.
Foreign merchants embarked their goods upon the galleons directly from
their own vessels in the harbour, without registering them with the Contratacion;
and on the return of the fleets received the price of their goods in
ingots of gold and silver by the same fraud. It is scarcely possible that this
was done without the tacit authorization of the Council of the Indies at
Madrid, for if the Council had insisted upon a rigid execution of the laws
regarding registration, detection would have been inevitable.

Footnote 35: (return)

Weiss, op. cit., ii. p. 226.

Footnote 36: (return)

Most of the offices in the Spanish Indies were venal. No one obtained a
post without paying dearly for it, except the viceroys of Mexico and Peru,
who were grandees, and received their places through favour at court. The
governors of the ports, and the presidents of the Audiencias established at
Panama, San Domingo, and Gautemala, bought their posts in Spain. The
offices in the interior were in the gift of the viceroys and sold to the highest
bidder. Although each port had three corregidors who audited the finances,
as they also paid for their places, they connived with the governors. The
consequence was inevitable. Each official during his tenure of office expected
to recover his initial outlay, and amass a small fortune besides. So
not only were the bribes of interlopers acceptable, but the officials often themselves
bought and sold the contraband articles.

Footnote 37: (return)

Froude: History of England, viii. p. 436 ff.

Footnote 38: (return)

1585, August 12th. Ralph Lane to Sir Philip Sidney. Port Ferdinando,
Virginia.—He has discovered the infinite riches of St. John (Porto Rico?) and
Hispaniola by dwelling on the islands five weeks. He thinks that if the Queen
finds herself burdened with the King of Spain, to attempt them would be most
honourable, feasible and profitable. He exhorts him not to refuse this good
opportunity of rendering so great a service to the Church of Christ. The
strength of the Spaniards doth altogether grow from the mines of her treasure.
Extract, C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660.

Footnote 39: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., ii. p. xiii.

Footnote 40: (return)

Scelle, op. cit., i. p. ix.

Footnote 41: (return)

1611, February 28. Sir Thos. Roe to Salisbury. Port d’Espaigne,
Trinidad.—He has seen more of the coast from the River Amazon to the
Orinoco than any other Englishman alive. The Spaniards here are proud
and insolent, yet needy and weak, their force is reputation, their safety is
opinion. The Spaniards treat the English worse than Moors. The government
is lazy and has more skill in planting and selling tobacco than in erecting
colonies and marching armies. Extract, C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660. (Roe was
sent by Prince Henry upon a voyage of discovery to the Indies.)

Footnote 42: (return)

“An historical account of the rise and growth of the West India
Colonies.” By Dalby Thomas, Lond., 1690. (Harl. Miscell., 1808, ii.
357.)

Footnote 43: (return)

Oviedo: Historia general de las Indias, lib. xix. cap. xiii.;
Coleccion de documentos … de ultramar, tom. iv. p. 57 (deposition of
the Spanish captain at the Isle of Mona); Pacheco, etc.: Coleccion de
documentos … de las posesiones espanoles en America y Oceania, tom.
xl. p. 305 (cross-examination of witnesses by officers of the Royal Audiencia
in San Domingo just after the visit of the English ship to that place); English
Historical Review, XX. p. 115.

The ship is identified with the “Samson” dispatched by Henry VIII. in
1527 “with divers cunning men to seek strange regions,” which sailed from
the Thames on 20th May in company with the “Mary of Guildford,” was lost
by her consort in a storm on the night of 1st July, and was believed to have
foundered with all on board. (Ibid.)

Footnote 44: (return)

Hakluyt, ed. 1600, iii. p. 700; Froude, op.
cit., viii. p. 427.

Footnote 45: (return)

Scelle., op. cit., i. pp. 123-25, 139-61.

Footnote 46: (return)

Colecc. de doc. … de ultramar. tom. vi. p. 15.

Footnote 47: (return)

Froude, op. cit., viii. pp. 470-72.

Footnote 48: (return)

Corbett: Drake and the Tudor Navy, i. ch. 3.

Footnote 49: (return)

Corbett: Drake and the Tudor Navy, ii. chs. 1, 2, 11.

Footnote 50: (return)

Corbett: The Successors of Drake, ch. x.

Footnote 51: (return)

Marcel: Les corsaires français au XVIe siècle, p. 7. As early as 1501 a
royal ordinance in Spain prescribed the construction of carracks to pursue the
privateers, and in 1513 royal cedulas were sent to the officials of the Casa de
Contratacion ordering them to send two caravels to guard the coasts of Cuba
and protect Spanish navigation from the assaults of French corsairs. (Ibid.,
p. 8).

Footnote 52: (return)

Colecc. de doc. … de ultramar, tomos i., iv., vi.; Ducéré: Les
corsaires sous l’ancien régime. Append. II.; Duro., op. cit., i. Append.
XIV.

Footnote 53: (return)

Colecc. de doc. … de ultramar, tom. vi. p. 22.

Footnote 54: (return)

Ibid., p. 23.

Footnote 55: (return)

Marcel, op. cit., p. 16.

Footnote 56: (return)

Colecc. de doc. … de ultramar, tom. vi. p. 360.

Footnote 57: (return)

Colecc. de doc. … de ultramar, tom. vi. p. 360.

Footnote 58: (return)

Lucas: A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, vol. ii.
pp. 37, 50.

Footnote 59: (return)

Weiss, op. cit., ii. p. 292.

Footnote 60: (return)

Duro, op. cit., iii. ch. xvi.; iv. chs. iii., viii.

Footnote 61: (return)

Portugal between 1581 and 1640 was subject to the Crown of Spain, and
Brazil, a Portuguese colony, was consequently within the pale of Spanish
influence and administration.

Footnote 62: (return)

Blok: History of the People of the Netherlands, iv. p. 36.

Footnote 63: (return)

Blok: History of the People of the Netherlands, iv. p. 37; Duro, op.
cit., iv. p. 99; Gage, ed. 1655, p. 80.

Footnote 64: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,325, No. 10.

Footnote 65: (return)

Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, was created admiral of the fleet by order
of Parliament in March 1642, and although removed by Charles I. was reinstated
by Parliament on 1st July.

Footnote 66: (return)

Brit. Mus., Sloane MSS., 793 or 894; Add. MSS., 36,327, No. 9.

Footnote 67: (return)

Winwood Papers, ii. pp. 75-77.

Footnote 68: (return)

Brown: Genesis of the United States, i. pp. 120-25, 172.

Footnote 69: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660.

Footnote 70: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660.

Footnote 71: (return)

Clarendon State Papers, ii. p. 87; Rymer: Fœdera, xx. p. 416.

Footnote 72: (return)

Duro, op. cit., ii. p. 462.

Footnote 73: (return)

Duro, op. cit., iii. pp. 236-37.

Footnote 74: (return)

C.S.P. Venet., 1603-07, p. 199.

Footnote 75: (return)

Winwood Papers, ii. p. 233.

Footnote 76: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,319, No. 7; 36,320, No. 8; 36,321, No.
24; 36,322, No. 23.

Footnote 77: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660:—1629, 5th and 30th Nov.; 1630, 29th July.

Footnote 78: (return)

Gage saw at Cartagena about a dozen English prisoners captured by the
Spaniards at sea, and belonging to the settlement on Providence Island.

Footnote 79: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660:—1635, 19th March; 1636, 26th March.

Footnote 80: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,323, No. 10.

Footnote 81: (return)

Duro, Tomo., iv. p. 339; cf. also in Bodleian Library:—”A letter
written upon occasion in the Low Countries, etc. Whereunto is added avisos
from several places, of the taking of the Island of Providence, by the Spaniards
from the English. London. Printed for Nath. Butter, Mar. 22, 1641.

“I have letter by an aviso from Cartagena, dated the 14th of September,
wherein they advise that the galleons were ready laden with the silver, and
would depart thence the 6th of October. The general of the galleons, named
Francisco Dias Pimienta, had beene formerly in the moneth of July with
above 3000 men, and the least of his ships, in the island of S. Catalina, where
he had taken and carried away with all the English, and razed the forts,
wherein they found 600 negroes, much gold and indigo, so that the prize is
esteemed worth above halfe a million.”

Footnote 82: (return)

Rawl. MSS., A. 32,297; 31, 121.

CHAPTER II

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE BUCCANEERS

In the second half of the sixteenth and the early part
of the seventeenth centuries, strangers who visited the
great Spanish islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica or
Porto Rico, usually remarked the extraordinary number
of wild cattle and boars found roaming upon them.
These herds were in every case sprung from domestic
animals originally brought from Spain. For as the
aborigines in the Greater Antilles decreased in numbers
under the heavy yoke of their conquerors, and as the
Spaniards themselves turned their backs upon the Antilles
for the richer allurements of the continent, less and less
land was left under cultivation; and cattle, hogs, horses
and even dogs ran wild, increased at a rapid rate, and
soon filled the broad savannas and deep woods which
covered the greater part of these islands. The northern
shore of Hispaniola the Spaniards had never settled, and
thither, probably from an early period, interloping ships
were accustomed to resort when in want of victuals.
With a long range of uninhabited coast, good anchorage
and abundance of provisions, this northern shore could
not fail to induce some to remain. In time we find there
scattered groups of hunters, mostly French and English,
who gained a rude livelihood by killing wild cattle for their
skins, and curing the flesh to supply the needs of passing
vessels. The origin of these men we do not know. They
may have been deserters from ships, crews of wrecked
{58}
vessels, or even chance marooners. In any case the charm
of their half-savage, independent mode of life must soon
have attracted others, and a fairly regular traffic sprang up
between them and the ubiquitous Dutch traders, whom
they supplied with hides, tallow and cured meat in return
for the few crude necessities and luxuries they required.
Their numbers were recruited in 1629 by colonists from
St. Kitts who had fled before Don Federico de Toledo.
Making common lot with the hunters, the refugees
found sustenance so easy and the natural bounty of
the island so rich and varied, that many remained and
settled.

To the north-west of Hispaniola lies a small, rocky
island about eight leagues in length and two in breadth,
separated by a narrow channel from its larger neighbour.
From the shore of Hispaniola the island appears in form
like a monster sea-turtle floating upon the waves, and
hence was named by the Spaniards “Tortuga.” So
mountainous and inaccessible on the northern side as to
be called the Côte-de-Fer, and with only one harbour upon
the south, it offered a convenient refuge to the French and
English hunters should the Spaniards become troublesome.
These hunters probably ventured across to Tortuga before
1630, for there are indications that a Spanish expedition
was sent against the island from Hispaniola in 1630 or
1631, and a division of the spoil made in the city of San
Domingo after its return.⁸³ It was then, apparently, that
the Spaniards left upon Tortuga an officer and twenty-eight
men, the small garrison which, says Charlevoix, was
found there when the hunters returned. The Spanish
soldiers were already tired of their exile upon this lonely,
inhospitable rock, and evacuated with the same satisfaction
with which the French and English resumed their occupancy.
From the testimony of some documents in the
{59}
English colonial archives we may gather that the English
from the first were in predominance in the new colony, and
exercised almost sole authority. In the minutes of the
Providence Company, under date of 19th May 1631, we find
that a committee was “appointed to treat with the agents
for a colony of about 150 persons, settled upon Tortuga”;⁸⁴
and a few weeks later that “the planters upon the island
of Tortuga desired the company to take them under their
protection, and to be at the charge of their fortification, in
consideration of a twentieth part of the commodities raised
there yearly.”⁸⁵ At the same time the Earl of Holland,
governor of the company, and his associates petitioned
the king for an enlargement of their grant “only of 3 or 4
degrees of northerly latitude, to avoid all doubts as to
whether one of the islands (Tortuga) was contained in
their former grant.”⁸⁶ Although there were several islands
named Tortuga in the region of the West Indies, all the
evidence points to the identity of the island concerned in
this petition with the Tortuga near the north coast of
Hispaniola.⁸⁷

The Providence Company accepted the offer of the
settlers upon Tortuga, and sent a ship to reinforce the
little colony with six pieces of ordnance, a supply of
ammunition and provisions, and a number of apprentices
or engagés. A Captain Hilton was appointed governor,
with Captain Christopher Wormeley to succeed him in
case of the governor’s death or absence, and the name of
{60}
the island was changed from Tortuga to Association.⁸⁸
Although consisting for the most part of high land covered
with tall cedar woods, the island contained in the south
and west broad savannas which soon attracted planters as
well as cattle-hunters. Some of the inhabitants of St.
Kitts, wearied of the dissensions between the French and
English there, and allured by reports of quiet and plenty in
Tortuga, deserted St. Kitts for the new colony. The
settlement, however, was probably always very poor and
struggling, for in January 1634 the Providence Company
received advice that Captain Hilton intended to desert the
island and draw most of the inhabitants after him; and a
declaration was sent out from England to the planters,
assuring them special privileges of trade and domicile, and
dissuading them from “changing certain ways of profit
already discovered for uncertain hopes suggested by fancy
or persuasion.”⁸⁹ The question of remaining or departing,
indeed, was soon decided for the colonists without their
volition, for in December 1634 a Spanish force from
Hispaniola invaded the island and drove out all the
English and French they found there. It seems that an
Irishman named “Don Juan Morf” (John Murphy?),⁹⁰ who
had been “sargento-mayor” in Tortuga, became discontented
with the régime there and fled to Cartagena. The
Spanish governor of Cartagena sent him to Don Gabriel
de Gaves, President of the Audiencia in San Domingo,
thinking that with the information the renegade was able
to supply the Spaniards of Hispaniola might drive out the
foreigners. The President of San Domingo, however, died
three months later without bestirring himself, and it was
left to his successor to carry out the project. With the
{61}
information given by Murphy, added to that obtained from
prisoners, he sent a force of 250 foot under command of
Rui Fernandez de Fuemayor to take the island.⁹¹ At this
time, according to the Spaniards’ account, there were in
Tortuga 600 men bearing arms, besides slaves, women and
children. The harbour was commanded by a platform of
six cannon. The Spaniards approached the island just
before dawn, but through the ignorance of the pilot the
whole armadilla was cast upon some reefs near the shore.
Rui Fernandez with about thirty of his men succeeded in
reaching land in canoes, seized the fort without any
difficulty, and although his followers were so few managed
to disperse a body of the enemy who were approaching,
with the English governor at their head, to recover it. In
the mêlée the governor was one of the first to be killed—stabbed,
say the Spaniards, by the Irishman, who took
active part in the expedition and fought by the side of
Rui Fernandez. Meanwhile some of the inhabitants,
thinking that they could not hold the island, had regained
the fort, spiked the guns and transferred the stores to
several ships in the harbour, which sailed away leaving
only two dismantled boats and a patache to fall into the
hands of the Spaniards. Rui Fernandez, reinforced by
some 200 of his men who had succeeded in escaping from
the stranded armadilla, now turned his attention to the
settlement. He found his way barred by another body of
several hundred English, but dispersed them too, and took
seventy prisoners. The houses were then sacked and the
tobacco plantations burned by the soldiers, and the Spaniards
returned to San Domingo with four captured banners, the
six pieces of artillery and 180 muskets.⁹²

The Spanish occupation apparently did not last very
long, for in the following April the Providence Company
appointed Captain Nicholas Riskinner to be governor of
Tortuga in place of Wormeley, and in February 1636 it
learned that Riskinner was in possession of the island.⁹³
Two planters just returned from the colony, moreover, informed
the company that there were then some 80 English
in the settlement, besides 150 negroes. It is evident that
the colonists were mostly cattle-hunters, for they assured
the company that they could supply Tortuga with 200
beasts a month from Hispaniola, and would deliver calves
there at twenty shillings apiece.⁹⁴ Yet at a later meeting
of the Adventurers on 20th January 1637, a project for
sending more men and ammunition to the island was
suddenly dropped “upon intelligence that the inhabitants
had quitted it and removed to Hispaniola.”⁹⁵ For three
years thereafter the Providence records are silent concerning
Tortuga. A few Frenchmen must have remained on
the island, however, for Charlevoix informs us that in 1638
the general of the galleons swooped down upon the colony,
put to the sword all who failed to escape to the hills and
woods, and again destroyed all the habitations.⁹⁶ Persuaded
that the hunters would not expose themselves to a repetition
of such treatment, the Spaniards neglected to leave a
garrison, and a few scattered Frenchmen gradually filtered
back to their ruined homes. It was about this time, it
seems, that the President of San Domingo formed a body
{63}
of 500 armed lancers in an effort to drive the intruders
from the larger island of Hispaniola. These lancers, half
of whom were always kept in the field, were divided
into companies of fifty each, whence they were called
by the French, “cinquantaines.” Ranging the woods
and savannas this Spanish constabulary attacked isolated
hunters wherever they found them, and they formed
an important element in the constant warfare between
the French and Spanish colonists throughout the rest of
the century.⁹⁷

Meanwhile an English adventurer, some time after the
Spanish descent of 1638, gathered a body of 300 of his
compatriots in the island of Nevis near St. Kitts, and sailing
for Tortuga dispossessed the few Frenchmen living
there of the island. According to French accounts he was
received amicably by the inhabitants and lived with them for
four months, when he turned upon his hosts, disarmed them
and marooned them upon the opposite shore of Hispaniola.
A few made their way to St. Kitts and complained to M.
de Poincy, the governor-general of the French islands,
who seized the opportunity to establish a French governor
in Tortuga. Living at that time in St. Kitts was a
Huguenot gentleman named Levasseur, who had been a
companion-in-arms of d’Esnambuc when the latter settled
St. Kitts in 1625, and after a short visit to France had returned
and made his fortune in trade. He was a man of
courage and command as well as a skilful engineer, and
soon rose high in the councils of de Poincy. Being a
Calvinist, however, he had drawn upon the governor the
reproaches of the authorities at home; and de Poincy proposed
to get rid of his presence, now become inconvenient,
by sending him to subdue Tortuga. Levasseur received
his commission from de Poincy in May 1640, assembled
forty or fifty followers, all Calvinists, and sailed in a barque
{64}
to Hispaniola. He established himself at Port Margot,
about five leagues from Tortuga, and entered into friendly
relations with his English neighbours. He was but biding
his time, however, and on the last day of August 1640, on
the plea that the English had ill-used some of his followers
and had seized a vessel sent by de Poincy to obtain provisions,
he made a sudden descent upon the island with
only 49 men and captured the governor. The inhabitants
retired to Hispaniola, but a few days later returned and
besieged Levasseur for ten days. Finding that they could
not dislodge him, they sailed away with all their people to
the island of Providence.⁹⁸

Levasseur, fearing perhaps another descent of the
Spaniards, lost no time in putting the settlement in a state
of defence. Although the port of Tortuga was little more
than a roadstead, it offered a good anchorage on a bottom
of fine sand, the approaches to which were easily defended
by a hill or promontory overlooking the harbour. The
top of this hill, situated 500 or 600 paces from the shore,
was a level platform, and upon it rose a steep rock some
30 feet high. Nine or ten paces from the base of the rock
gushed forth a perennial fountain of fresh water. The new
governor quickly made the most of these natural advantages.
The platform he shaped into terraces, with means for accommodating
several hundred men. On the top of the rock
he built a house for himself, as well as a magazine, and
mounted a battery of two guns. The only access to the
{65}
rock was by a narrow approach, up half of which steps
were cut in the stone, the rest of the ascent being by means
of an iron ladder which could easily be raised and lowered.⁹⁹
This little fortress, in which the governor could repose with
a feeling of entire security, he euphuistically called his
“dove-cote.” The dove-cote was not finished any too soon,
for the Spaniards of San Domingo in 1643 determined to
destroy this rising power in their neighbourhood, and sent
against Levasseur a force of 500 or 600 men. When they
tried to land within a half gunshot of the shore, however,
they were greeted with a discharge of artillery from the
fort, which sank one of the vessels and forced the rest to
retire. The Spaniards withdrew to a place two leagues
to leeward, where they succeeded in disembarking, but fell
into an ambush laid by Levasseur, lost, according to the
French accounts, between 100 and 200 men, and fled to
their ships and back to Hispaniola. With this victory the
reputation of Levasseur spread far and wide throughout
the islands, and for ten years the Spaniards made no
further attempt to dislodge the French settlement.¹⁰⁰

Planters, hunters and corsairs now came in greater
numbers to Tortuga. The hunters, using the smaller
island merely as a headquarters for supplies and a retreat
in time of danger, penetrated more boldly than ever into
the interior of Hispaniola, plundering the Spanish plantations
in their path, and establishing settlements on the
north shore at Port Margot and Port de Paix. Corsairs,
after cruising and robbing along the Spanish coasts, retired
to Tortuga to refit and find a market for their spoils.
Plantations of tobacco and sugar were cultivated, and
although the soil never yielded such rich returns as upon
the other islands, Dutch and French trading ships frequently
resorted there for these commodities, and especially for the
skins prepared by the hunters, bringing in exchange
{66}
brandy, guns, powder and cloth. Indeed, under the active,
positive administration of Levasseur, Tortuga enjoyed a
degree of prosperity which almost rivalled that of the
French settlements in the Leeward Islands.

The term “buccaneer,” though usually applied to the
corsairs who in the seventeenth century ravaged the
Spanish possessions in the West Indies and the South Seas,
should really be restricted to these cattle-hunters of west
and north-west Hispaniola. The flesh of the wild-cattle
was cured by the hunters after a fashion learnt from the
Caribbee Indians. The meat was cut into long strips, laid
upon a grate or hurdle constructed of green sticks, and
dried over a slow wood fire fed with bones and the
trimmings of the hide of the animal. By this means an
excellent flavour was imparted to the meat and a fine red
colour. The place where the flesh was smoked was called
by the Indians a “boucan,” and the same term, from the
poverty of an undeveloped language, was applied to the
frame or grating on which the flesh was dried. In
course of time the dried meat became known as
“viande boucannée,” and the hunters themselves as
“boucaniers” or “buccaneers.” When later circumstances
led the hunters to combine their trade in flesh
and hides with that of piracy, the name gradually lost
its original significance and acquired, in the English
language at least, its modern and better-known meaning
of corsair or freebooter. The French adventurers, however,
seem always to have restricted the word “boucanier”
to its proper signification, that of a hunter and curer of
meat; and when they developed into corsairs, by a curious
contrast they adopted an English name and called themselves
“filibustiers,” which is merely the French sailor’s
way of pronouncing the English word “freebooter.”¹⁰¹

The buccaneers or West Indian corsairs owed their
origin as well as their name to the cattle and hog-hunters
of Hispaniola and Tortuga. Doubtless many of the wilder,
more restless spirits in the smaller islands of the Windward
and Leeward groups found their way into the ranks
of this piratical fraternity, or were willing at least to lend
a hand in an occasional foray against their Spanish
neighbours. We know that Jackson, in 1642, had no
difficulty in gathering 700 or 800 men from Barbadoes
and St. Kitts for his ill-starred dash upon the Spanish
Main. And when the French in later years made their
periodical descents upon the Dutch stations on Tobago,
Curaçao and St. Eustatius, they always found in their
island colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe buccaneers
enough and more, eager to fill their ships. It seems to be
generally agreed, however, among the Jesuit historians of
the West Indies—and upon these writers we are almost
entirely dependent for our knowledge of the origins of
buccaneering—that the corsairs had their source and
nucleus in the hunters who infested the coasts of Hispaniola.
Between the hunter and the pirate at first no impassable
line was drawn. The same person combined in himself
the occupations of cow-killing and cruising, varying the
monotony of the one by occasionally trying his hand at
the other. In either case he lived at constant enmity with
the Spaniards. With the passing of time the sea attracted
more and more away from their former pursuits. Even
the planters who were beginning to filter into the new
settlements found the attractions of coursing against the
Spaniards to be irresistible. Great extremes of fortune,
such as those to which the buccaneers were subject, have
always exercised an attraction over minds of an adventurous
stamp. It was the same allurement which drew the “forty-niners”
to California, and in 1897 the gold-seekers to the
Canadian Klondyke. If the suffering endured was often
{68}
great, the prize to be gained was worth it. Fortune, if
fickle one day, might the next bring incredible bounty,
and the buccaneers who sweltered in a tropical sea, with
starvation staring them in the face, dreamed of rolling in
the oriental wealth of a Spanish argosy. Especially to
the cattle-hunter must this temptation have been great,
for his mode of life was the very rudest. He roamed the
woods by day with his dog and apprentices, and at night
slept in the open air or in a rude shed hastily constructed
of leaves and skins, which served as a house, and which he
called after the Indian name, “ajoupa” or “barbacoa.”
His dress was of the simplest—coarse cloth trousers, and
a shirt which hung loosely over them, both pieces so black
and saturated with the blood and grease of slain animals
that they looked as if they had been tarred (“de toile
gaudronnée”).¹⁰² A belt of undressed bull’s hide bound the
shirt, and supported on one side three or four large knives,
on the other a pouch for powder and shot. A cap with a
short pointed brim extending over the eyes, rude shoes of
cowhide or pigskin made all of one piece bound over the
foot, and a short, large-bore musket, completed the hunter’s
grotesque outfit. Often he carried wound about his waist
a sack of netting into which he crawled at night to keep
off the pestiferous mosquitoes. With creditable regularity
he and his apprentices arose early in the morning and
started on foot for the hunt, eating no food until they had
killed and skinned as many wild cattle or swine as there
were persons in the company. After having skinned the
last animal, the master-hunter broke its softest bones and
made a meal for himself and his followers on the marrow.
Then each took up a hide and returned to the boucan,
where they dined on the flesh they had killed.¹⁰³ In this
{69}
fashion the hunter lived for the space of six months or a
year. Then he made a division of the skins and dried
meat, and repaired to Tortuga or one of the French settlements
on the coast of Hispaniola to recoup his stock of
ammunition and spend the rest of his gains in a wild
carouse of drunkenness and debauchery. His money gone,
he returned again to the hunt. The cow-killers, as they
had neither wife nor children, commonly associated in
pairs with the right of inheriting from each other, a custom
which was called “matelotage.” These private associations,
however, did not prevent the property of all from
being in a measure common. Their mode of settling
quarrels was the most primitive—the duel. In other
things they governed themselves by a certain “coutumier,”
a medley of bizarre laws which they had originated among
themselves. At any attempt to bring them under
civilised rules, the reply always was, “telle étoit la
coutume de la côte”; and that definitely closed the
matter. They based their rights thus to live upon the
fact, they said, of having passed the Tropic, where, borrowing
from the sailor’s well-known superstition, they pretended
to have drowned all their former obligations.¹⁰⁴
Even their family names they discarded, and the saying
was in those days that one knew a man in the Isles only
when he was married. From a life of this sort, cruising
against Spanish ships, if not an unmixed good, was at
least always a desirable recreation. Every Spanish prize
brought into Tortuga, moreover, was an incitement to
fresh adventure against the common foe. The “gens de
la côte,” as they called themselves, ordinarily associated a
score or more together, and having taken or built themselves
a canoe, put to sea with intent to seize a Spanish
barque or some other coasting vessel. With silent paddles,
under cover of darkness, they approached the unsuspecting
{70}
prey, killed the frightened sailors or drove them overboard,
and carried the prize to Tortuga. There the raiders either
dispersed to their former occupations, or gathered a larger
crew of congenial spirits and sailed away for bigger game.

All the Jesuit historians of the West Indies, Dutertre,
Labat and Charlevoix, have left us accounts of the
manners and customs of the buccaneers. The Dutch
physician, Exquemelin, who lived with the buccaneers
for several years, from 1668 to 1674, and wrote a picturesque
narrative from materials at his disposal, has also
been a source for the ideas of most later writers on the
subject. It may not be out of place to quote his description
of the men whose deeds he recorded.

“Before the Pirates go out to sea,” he writes, “they
give notice to every one who goes upon the voyage of
the day on which they ought precisely to embark,
intimating also to them their obligation of bringing each
man in particular so many pounds of powder and bullets
as they think necessary for that expedition. Being all
come on board, they join together in council, concerning
what place they ought first to go wherein to get
provisions—especially of flesh, seeing they scarce eat
anything else. And of this the most common sort
among them is pork. The next food is tortoises, which
they are accustomed to salt a little. Sometimes they
resolve to rob such or such hog-yards, wherein the
Spaniards often have a thousand heads of swine together.
They come to these places in the dark of night, and
having beset the keeper’s lodge, they force him to rise,
and give them as many heads as they desire, threatening
withal to kill him in case he disobeys their command
or makes any noise. Yea, these menaces are oftentimes
put in execution, without giving any quarter to the
miserable swine-keepers, or any other person that
endeavours to hinder their robberies.

“Having got provisions of flesh sufficient for their
voyage, they return to their ship. Here their allowance,
twice a day to every one, is as much as he can eat, without
either weight or measure. Neither does the steward of the
vessel give any greater proportion of flesh or anything
else to the captain than to the meanest mariner. The
ship being well victualled, they call another council,
to deliberate towards what place they shall go, to seek
their desperate fortunes. In this council, likewise, they
agree upon certain Articles, which are put in writing, by
way of bond or obligation, which everyone is bound to
observe, and all of them, or the chief, set their hands to it.
Herein they specify, and set down very distinctly, what
sums of money each particular person ought to have for
that voyage, the fund of all the payments being the
common stock of what is gotten by the whole expedition;
for otherwise it is the same law, among these people, as
with other Pirates, ‘No prey, no pay.’ In the first place,
therefore, they mention how much the Captain ought to
have for his ship. Next the salary of the carpenter, or
shipwright, who careened, mended and rigged the vessel.
This commonly amounts to 100 or 150 pieces of eight, being,
according to the agreement, more or less. Afterwards for
provisions and victualling they draw out of the same
common stock about 200 pieces of eight. Also a
competent salary for the surgeon and his chest of
medicaments, which is usually rated at 200 or 250
pieces of eight. Lastly they stipulate in writing what
recompense or reward each one ought to have, that is
either wounded or maimed in his body, suffering the loss
of any limb, by that voyage. Thus they order for the loss
of a right arm 600 pieces of eight, or six slaves; for the
loss of a left arm 500 pieces of eight, or five slaves; for
a right leg 500 pieces of eight, or five slaves; for the left
leg 400 pieces of eight, or four slaves; for an eye 100
{72}
pieces of eight or one slave; for a finger of the hand the
same reward as for the eye. All which sums of money,
as I have said before, are taken out of the capital sum
or common stock of what is got by their piracy. For a
very exact and equal dividend is made of the remainder
among them all. Yet herein they have also regard to
qualities and places. Thus the Captain, or chief Commander,
is allotted five or six portions to what the
ordinary seamen have; the Master’s Mate only two;
and other Officers proportionate to their employment.
After whom they draw equal parts from the highest even
to the lowest mariner, the boys not being omitted. For
even these draw half a share, by reason that, when they
happen to take a better vessel than their own, it is the
duty of the boys to set fire to the ship or boat wherein
they are, and then retire to the prize which they have
taken.

“They observe among themselves very good orders.
For in the prizes they take it is severely prohibited to
everyone to usurp anything in particular to themselves.
Hence all they take is equally divided, according to what
has been said before. Yea, they make a solemn oath to
each other not to abscond or conceal the least thing they
find amongst the prey. If afterwards anyone is found
unfaithful, who has contravened the said oath, immediately
he is separated and turned out of the society. Among
themselves they are very civil and charitable to each
other. Insomuch that if any wants what another has,
with great liberality they give it one to another. As soon
as these pirates have taken any prize of ship or boat, the
first thing they endeavour is to set on shore the prisoners,
detaining only some few for their own help and service,
to whom also they give their liberty after the space of two
or three years. They put in very frequently for refreshment
at one island or another; but more especially into
{73}
those which lie on the southern side of the Isle of Cuba.
Here they careen their vessels, and in the meanwhile
some of them go to hunt, others to cruise upon the seas in
canoes, seeking their fortune. Many times they take the
poor fishermen of tortoises, and carrying them to their
habitations they make them work so long as the pirates
are pleased.”

The articles which fixed the conditions under which
the buccaneers sailed were commonly called the “chasse-partie.”¹⁰⁵
In the earlier days of buccaneering, before the
period of great leaders like Mansfield, Morgan and Grammont,
the captain was usually chosen from among their
own number. Although faithfully obeyed he was removable
at will, and had scarcely more prerogative than the
ordinary sailor. After 1655 the buccaneers generally
sailed under commissions from the governors of Jamaica
or Tortuga, and then they always set aside one tenth of
the profits for the governor. But when their prizes were
unauthorised they often withdrew to some secluded coast
to make a partition of the booty, and on their return to
port eased the governor’s conscience with politic gifts; and
as the governor generally had little control over these
difficult people he found himself all the more obliged to
dissimulate. Although the buccaneers were called by the
Spaniards “ladrones” and “demonios,” names which they
richly deserved, they often gave part of their spoil to
churches in the ports which they frequented, especially
if among the booty they found any ecclesiastical ornaments
or the stuffs for making them—articles which not
infrequently formed an important part of the cargo of
Spanish treasure ships. In March 1694 the Jesuit writer,
Labat, took part in a Mass at Martinique which was
{74}
performed for some French buccaneers in pursuance of a
vow made when they were taking two English vessels near
Barbadoes. The French vessel and its two prizes were
anchored near the church, and fired salutes of all their
cannon at the beginning of the Mass, at the Elevation of
the Host, at the Benediction, and again at the end of the
Te Deum sung after the Mass.¹⁰⁶ Labat, who, although a
priest, is particularly lenient towards the crimes of the
buccaneers, and who we suspect must have been the
recipient of numerous “favours” from them out of their
store of booty, relates a curious tale of the buccaneer,
Captain Daniel, a tale which has often been used by other
writers, but which may bear repetition. Daniel, in need
of provisions, anchored one night off one of the “Saintes,”
small islands near Dominica, and landing without opposition,
took possession of the house of the curé and of some
other inhabitants of the neighbourhood. He carried the
curé and his people on board his ship without offering
them the least violence, and told them that he merely
wished to buy some wine, brandy and fowls. While these
were being gathered, Daniel requested the curé to celebrate
Mass, which the poor priest dared not refuse. So
the necessary sacred vessels were sent for and an altar
improvised on the deck for the service, which they chanted
to the best of their ability. As at Martinique, the Mass
was begun by a discharge of artillery, and after the
Exaudiat and prayer for the King was closed by a loud
“Vive le Roi!” from the throats of the buccaneers. A
single incident, however, somewhat disturbed the devotions.
One of the buccaneers, remaining in an indecent attitude
during the Elevation, was rebuked by the captain, and
instead of heeding the correction, replied with an impertinence
and a fearful oath. Quick as a flash Daniel whipped
out his pistol and shot the buccaneer through the head,
{75}
adjuring God that he would do as much to the first who
failed in his respect to the Holy Sacrifice. The shot was
fired close by the priest, who, as we can readily imagine,
was considerably agitated. “Do not be troubled, my
father,” said Daniel; “he is a rascal lacking in his duty
and I have punished him to teach him better.” A very
efficacious means, remarks Labat, of preventing his falling
into another like mistake. After the Mass the body of
the dead man was thrown into the sea, and the curé was
recompensed for his pains by some goods out of their stock
and the present of a negro slave.¹⁰⁷

The buccaneers preferred to sail in barques, vessels of
one mast and rigged with triangular sails. This type of
boat, they found, could be more easily manœuvred, was
faster and sailed closer to the wind. The boats were built
of cedar, and the best were reputed to come from Bermuda.
They carried very few guns, generally from six to twelve
or fourteen, the corsairs believing that four muskets did
more execution than one cannon.¹⁰⁸ The buccaneers
sometimes used brigantines, vessels with two masts,
the fore or mizzenmast being square-rigged with two
sails and the mainmast rigged like that of a barque.
The corsair at Martinique of whom Labat speaks was
captain of a corvette, a boat like a brigantine, except that
all the sails were square-rigged. At the beginning of a
voyage the freebooters were generally so crowded in their
small vessels that they suffered much from lack of room.
Moreover, they had little protection from sun and rain, and
with but a small stock of provisions often faced starvation.
It was this as much as anything which frequently inspired
them to attack without reflection any possible prize, great
or small, and to make themselves masters of it or perish in
the attempt. Their first object was to come to close
quarters; and although a single broadside would have
{76}
sunk their small craft, they manœuvred so skilfully as to
keep their bow always presented to the enemy, while
their musketeers cleared the enemy’s decks until the
time when the captain judged it proper to board. The
buccaneers rarely attacked Spanish ships on the outward
voyage from Europe to America, for such ships were loaded
with wines, cloths, grains and other commodities for which
they had little use, and which they could less readily turn
into available wealth. Outgoing vessels also carried large
crews and a considerable number of passengers. It was
the homeward-bound ships, rather, which attracted their
avarice, for in such vessels the crews were smaller and
the cargo consisted of precious metals, dye-woods and
jewels, articles which the freebooters could easily dispose
of to the merchants and tavern-keepers of the ports they
frequented.

The Gulf of Honduras and the Mosquito Coast, dotted
with numerous small islands and protecting reefs, was a
favourite retreat for the buccaneers. As the clumsy
Spanish war-vessels of the period found it ticklish work
threading these tortuous channels, where a sudden adverse
wind usually meant disaster, the buccaneers there felt
secure from interference; and in the creeks, lagoons and
river-mouths densely shrouded by tropical foliage, they
were able to careen and refit their vessels, divide their
booty, and enjoy a respite from their sea-forays. Thence,
too, they preyed upon the Spanish ships which sailed from
the coast of Cartagena to Porto Bello, Nicaragua, Mexico,
and the larger Antilles, and were a constant menace to the
great treasure galleons of the Terra-Firma fleet. The
English settlement on the island of Providence, lying as
it did off the Nicaragua coast and in the very track of
Spanish commerce in those regions, was, until captured in
1641, a source of great fear to Spanish mariners; and when
in 1642 some English occupied the island of Roatan, near
{77}
Truxillo, the governor of Cuba and the Presidents of the
Audiencias at Gautemala and San Domingo jointly equipped
an expedition of four vessels under D. Francisco de
Villalba y Toledo, which drove out the intruders.¹⁰⁹ Closer
to the buccaneering headquarters in Tortuga (and later in
Jamaica) were the straits separating the great West Indian
islands:—the Yucatan Channel at the western end of Cuba,
the passage between Cuba and Hispaniola in the east, and
the Mona Passage between Hispaniola and Porto Rico.
In these regions the corsairs waited to pick up stray
Spanish merchantmen, and watched for the coming of the
galleons or the Flota.¹¹⁰
When the buccaneers returned from their cruises they
generally squandered in a few days, in the taverns of the
towns which they frequented, the wealth which had cost
them such peril and labour. Some of these outlaws, says
Exquemelin, would spend 2000 or 3000 pieces of eight¹¹¹ in
one night, not leaving themselves a good shirt to wear on
their backs in the morning. “My own master,” he continues,
“would buy, on like occasions, a whole pipe of wine,
and placing it in the street would force every one that
passed by to drink with him; threatening also to pistol
them in case they would not do it. At other times he
would do the same with barrels of ale or beer. And, very
often, with both in his hands, he would throw these liquors
about the streets, and wet the clothes of such as walked
by, without regarding whether he spoiled their apparel or
not, were they men or women.” The taverns and ale-houses
always welcomed the arrival of these dissolute
corsairs; and although they extended long credits, they
{78}
also at times sold as indentured servants those who
had run too deeply into debt, as happened in Jamaica
to this same patron or master of whom Exquemelin
wrote.

Until 1640 buccaneering in the West Indies was more
or less accidental, occasional, in character. In the second
half of the century, however, the numbers of the freebooters
greatly increased, and men entirely deserted their
former occupations for the excitement and big profits of
the “course.” There were several reasons for this increase
in the popularity of buccaneering. The English adventurers
in Hispaniola had lost their profession of hunting
very early, for with the coming of Levasseur the French
had gradually elbowed them out of the island, and compelled
them either to retire to the Lesser Antilles or to
prey upon their Spanish neighbours. But the French
themselves were within the next twenty years driven to
the same expedient. The Spanish colonists on Hispaniola,
unable to keep the French from the island, at last
foolishly resolved, according to Charlevoix’s account, to
remove the principal attraction by destroying all the wild
cattle. If the trade with French vessels and the barter of
hides for brandy could be arrested, the hunters would be
driven from the woods by starvation. This policy, together
with the wasteful methods pursued by the hunters, caused
a rapid decrease in the number of cattle. The Spaniards,
however, did not dream of the consequences of their
action. Many of the French, forced to seek another
occupation, naturally fell into the way of buccaneering.
The hunters of cattle became hunters of Spaniards, and
the sea became the savanna on which they sought their
game. Exquemelin tells us that when he arrived at the
island there were scarcely three hundred engaged in
hunting, and even these found their livelihood precarious.
It was from this time forward to the end of the century
{79}
that the buccaneers played so important a rôle on the
stage of West Indian history.

Another source of recruits for the freebooters were the
indentured servants or engagés. We hear a great deal
of the barbarity with which West Indian planters and
hunters in the seventeenth century treated their servants,
and we may well believe that many of the latter, finding
their situation unendurable, ran away from their plantations
or ajoupas to join the crew of a chance corsair
hovering in the neighbourhood. The hunters’ life, as we
have seen, was not one of revelry and ease. On the one
side were all the insidious dangers lurking in a wild,
tropical forest; on the other, the relentless hostility of the
Spaniards. The environment of the hunters made them
rough and cruel, and for many an engagé his three years
of servitude must have been a veritable purgatory. The
servants of the planters were in no better position.
Decoyed from Norman and Breton towns and villages by
the loud-sounding promises of sea-captains and West
Indian agents, they came to seek an El Dorado, and often
found only despair and death. The want of sufficient
negroes led men to resort to any artifice in order to obtain
assistance in cultivating the sugar-cane and tobacco. The
apprentices sent from Europe were generally bound out in
the French Antilles for eighteen months or three years,
among the English for seven years. They were often
resold in the interim, and sometimes served ten or twelve
years before they regained their freedom. They were
veritable convicts, often more ill-treated than the slaves
with whom they worked side by side, for their lives, after
the expiration of their term of service, were of no consequence
to their masters. Many of these apprentices, of
good birth and tender education, were unable to endure
the debilitating climate and hard labour, let alone the
cruelty of their employers. Exquemelin, himself originally
{80}
an engagé, gives a most piteous description of their
sufferings. He was sold to the Lieutenant-Governor of
Tortuga, who treated him with great severity and
refused to take less than 300 pieces of eight for his
freedom. Falling ill through vexation and despair, he
passed into the hands of a surgeon, who proved kind to
him and finally gave him his liberty for 100 pieces of
eight, to be paid after his first buccaneering voyage.¹¹²

We left Levasseur governor in Tortuga after the
abortive Spanish attack of 1643. Finding his personal
ascendancy so complete over the rude natures about him,
Levasseur, like many a greater man in similar circumstances,
lost his sense of the rights of others. His
character changed, he became suspicious and intolerant,
and the settlers complained bitterly of his cruelty and
overbearing temper. Having come as the leader of a band
of Huguenots, he forbade the Roman Catholics to hold
services on the island, burnt their chapel and turned out
their priest. He placed heavy imposts on trade, and soon
amassed a considerable fortune.¹¹³ In his eyrie upon the
rock fortress, he is said to have kept for his enemies a cage
of iron, in which the prisoner could neither stand nor lie
down, and which Levasseur, with grim humour, called his
“little hell.” A dungeon in his castle he termed in like
fashion his “purgatory.” All these stories, however, are
reported by the Jesuits, his natural foes, and must be
taken with a grain of salt. De Poincy, who himself ruled
with despotic authority and was guilty of similar cruelties,
would have turned a deaf ear to the denunciations against
his lieutenant, had not his jealousy been aroused by the
suspicion that Levasseur intended to declare himself an
independent prince.¹¹⁴ So the governor-general, already in
{81}
bad odour at court for having given Levasseur means of
establishing a little Geneva in Tortuga, began to disavow
him to the authorities at home. He also sent his nephew,
M. de Lonvilliers, to Tortuga, on the pretext of complimenting
Levasseur on his victory over the Spaniards, but
really to endeavour to entice him back to St. Kitts.
Levasseur, subtle and penetrating, skilfully avoided the
trap, and Lonvilliers returned to St. Kitts alone.

Charlevoix relates an amusing instance of the governor’s
stubborn resistance to de Poincy’s authority. A silver
statue of the Virgin, captured by some buccaneer from a
Spanish ship, had been appropriated by Levasseur, and de
Poincy, desiring to decorate his chapel with it, wrote to
him demanding the statue, and observing that a Protestant
had no use for such an object. Levasseur, however,
replied that the Protestants had a great adoration for
silver virgins, and that Catholics being “trop spirituels
pour tenir à la matière,” he was sending him, instead, a
madonna of painted wood.

After a tenure of power for twelve years, Levasseur
came to the end of his tether. While de Poincy
was resolving upon an expedition to oust him from
authority, two adventurers named Martin and Thibault,
whom Levasseur had adopted as his heirs, and with whom,
it is said, he had quarrelled over a mistress, shot him as he
was descending from the fort to the shore, and completed
the murder by a poniard’s thrust. They then seized the
government without any opposition from the inhabitants.¹¹⁵
Meanwhile there had arrived at St. Kitts the Chevalier de
Fontenay, a soldier of fortune who had distinguished
himself against the Turks and was attracted by the gleam
of Spanish gold. He it was whom de Poincy chose as the
man to succeed Levasseur. The opportunity for action
was eagerly accepted by de Fontenay, but the project was
{82}
kept secret, for if Levasseur had got wind of it all the
forces in St. Kitts could not have dislodged him.
Volunteers were raised on the pretext of a privateering
expedition to the coasts of Cartagena, and to complete
the deception de Fontenay actually sailed for the Main
and captured several prizes. The rendezvous was on the
coast of Hispaniola, where de Fontenay was eventually
joined by de Poincy’s nephew, M. de Treval, with another
frigate and materials for a siege. Learning of the murder
of Levasseur, the invaders at once sailed for Tortuga and
landed several hundred men at the spot where the Spaniards
had formerly been repulsed. The two assassins, finding
the inhabitants indisposed to support them, capitulated
to de Fontenay on receiving pardon for their crime and
the peaceful possession of their property. Catholicism
was restored, commerce was patronized and buccaneers
encouraged to use the port. Two stone bastions were
raised on the platform and more guns were mounted.¹¹⁶ De
Fontenay himself was the first to bear the official title of
“Governor for the King of Tortuga and the Coast of S.
Domingo.”

The new governor was not fated to enjoy his success
for any length of time. The President of S. Domingo,
Don Juan Francisco de Montemayor, with orders from the
King of Spain, was preparing for another effort to get rid
of his troublesome neighbour, and in November 1653 sent
an expedition of five vessels and 400 infantry against
the French, under command of Don Gabriel Roxas de
Valle-Figueroa. The ships were separated by a storm,
{83}
two ran aground and a third was lost, so that only the
“Capitana” and “Almirante” reached Tortuga on 10th
January. Being greeted with a rough fire from the platform
and fort as they approached the harbour, they
dropped anchor a league to leeward and landed with little
opposition. After nine days of fighting and siege of the
fort, de Fontenay capitulated with the honours of war.¹¹⁷
According to the French account, the Spaniards, lashing
their cannon to rough frames of wood, dragged a battery
of eight or ten guns to the top of some hills commanding
the fort, and began a furious bombardment. Several
sorties of the besieged to capture the battery were unsuccessful.
The inhabitants began to tire of fighting, and
de Fontenay, discovering some secret negotiations with
the enemy, was compelled to sue for terms. With incredible
exertions, two half-scuttled ships in the harbour
were fitted up and provisioned within three days, and upon
them the French sailed for Port Margot.¹¹⁸ The Spaniards
claimed that the booty would have been considerable but
for some Dutch trading-ships in the harbour which conveyed
all the valuables from the island. They burned the
settlements, however, carried away with them some guns,
munitions of war and slaves, and this time taking the precaution
to leave behind a garrison of 150 men, sailed for
Hispaniola. Fearing that the French might join forces
with the buccaneers and attack their small squadron on
the way back, they retained de Fontenay’s brother as a
hostage until they reached the city of San Domingo.
De Fontenay, indeed, after his brother’s release, did determine
to try and recover the island. Only 130 of his men
{84}
stood by him, the rest deserting to join the buccaneers in
western Hispaniola. While he was careening his ship at Port
Margot, however, a Dutch trader arrived with commodities
for Tortuga, and learning of the disaster, offered him aid
with men and supplies. A descent was made upon the
smaller island, and the Spaniards were besieged for twenty
days, but after several encounters they compelled the
French to withdraw. De Fontenay, with only thirty
companions, sailed for Europe, was wrecked among the
Azores, and eventually reached France, only to die a short
time afterwards.

Footnote 83: (return)

Bibl. Nat., Nouv. Acq., 9334, f. 48.

Footnote 84: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660, p. 130. This company had been organised
under the name of “The Governor and Company of Adventurers for the
Plantations of the Islands of Providence, Henrietta and the adjacent islands,
between 10 and 20 degrees of north latitude and 290 and 310 degrees of
longitude.” The patent of incorporation is dated 4th December 1630 (ibid.,
p. 123).

Footnote 85: (return)

Ibid., p. 131.

Footnote 86: (return)

Ibid.

Footnote 87: (return)

This identity was first pointed out by Pierre de Vaissière in his recent
book: “Saint Domingue (1629-1789). La societé et la vie créoles sous
l’ancien régime,” Paris, 1909, p. 7.

Footnote 88: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660, pp. 131-33.

Footnote 89: (return)

Ibid., pp. 174, 175.

Footnote 90: (return)

This was probably the same man as the “Don Juan de Morfa Geraldino”
who was admiral of the fleet which attacked Tortuga in 1654. Cf. Duro,
op. cit., v. p. 35.

Footnote 91: (return)

In 1642 Rui Fernandez de Fuemayor was governor and captain-general
of the province of Venezuela. Cf. Doro, op. cit., iv. p. 341; note 2.

Footnote 92: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 13,977, f. 505. According to the minutes of
the Providence Company, a certain Mr. Perry, newly arrived from Association,
gave information on 19th March 1635 that the island had been surprised by
the Spaniards (C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660, p. 200). This news was confirmed
by a Mrs. Filby at another meeting of the company on 10th April, when Capt.
Wormeley, “by reason of his cowardice and negligence in losing the island,”
was formally deprived of his office as governor and banished from the colony
(ibid., p. 201).

Footnote 93: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 13,977, pp. 222-23.

Footnote 94: (return)

Ibid., pp. 226-27, 235.

Footnote 95: (return)

Ibid., pp. 226, 233, 235-37, 244.

Footnote 96: (return)

Charlevoix: Histoire de. … Saint Domingue, liv. vii. pp. 9-10.
The story is repeated by Duro (op. cit., v. p. 34), who says that the Spaniards
were led by “el general D. Carlos Ibarra.”

Footnote 97: (return)

Charlevoix, op. cit., liv. vii. p. 10; Bibl.
Nat. Nouv. Acq., 9334, p. 48 ff.

Footnote 98: (return)

Charlevoix, op. cit., liv. vii. pp. 10-12;
Vaissière., op. cit., Appendix I (“Mémoire envoyé aux seigneurs
de la Compagnie des Isles de l’Amérique par M. de Poincy, le 15 Novembre
1640”).

According to the records of the Providence Company, Tortuga in 1640
had 300 inhabitants. A Captain Fload, who had been governor, was then in
London to clear himself of charges preferred against him by the planters,
while a Captain James was exercising authority as “President” in the island.
(C.S.P. Colon., 1574-1660. pp. 313, 314.) Fload was probably the “English
captain” referred to in de Poincy’s memoir. His oppressive rule seems to
have been felt as well by the English as by the French.

Footnote 99: (return)

Dutertre: Histoire générale des Antilles, tom. i. p. 171.

Footnote 100: (return)

Charlevoix: op. cit., liv. vii. pp. 12-13.

Footnote 101: (return)

In this monograph, by “buccaneers” are always meant the corsairs and
filibusters, and not the cattle and hog killers of Hispaniola and Tortuga.

Footnote 102: (return)

Labat: Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amerique, ed. 1742, tom. vii.
p. 233.

Footnote 103: (return)

Le Pers, printed in Margry, op. cit.

Footnote 104: (return)

Le Pers, printed in Margry, op. cit.

Footnote 105: (return)

Dampier writes that “Privateers are not obliged to any ship, but free to
go ashore where they please, or to go into any other ship that will entertain
them, only paying for their provision.” (Edition 1906, i. p. 61).

Footnote 106: (return)

Labat, op. cit., tom. i. ch. 9.

Footnote 107: (return)

Labat, op. cit., tom. vii. ch. 17.

Footnote 108: (return)

Ibid., tom. ii. ch. 17.

Footnote 109: (return)

Gibbs: British Honduras, p. 25.

Footnote 110: (return)

A Spaniard, writing from S. Domingo in 1635, complains of an English
buccaneer settlement at Samana (on the north coast of Hispaniola, near the
Mona Passage), where they grew tobacco, and preyed on the ships sailing
from Cartagena and S. Domingo for Spain. (Add. MSS., 13,977, f. 508.)

Footnote 111: (return)

A piece of eight was worth in Jamaica from 4s. 6d. to 5s.

Footnote 112: (return)

Exquemelin, ed. 1684, Part I. pp. 21-22.

Footnote 113: (return)

Dutertre, op. cit., tom. i. ch. vi.

Footnote 114: (return)

Charlevoix, op. cit., liv. vii. p. 16.

Footnote 115: (return)

Charlevoix, op. cit., liv. vii. pp. 17-18.

Footnote 116: (return)

According to a Spanish MS., there were in Tortuga in 1653 700 French
inhabitants, more than 200 negroes, and 250 Indians with their wives and
children. The negroes and Indians were all slaves; the former seized on the
coasts of Havana and Cartagena, the latter brought over from Yucatan. In
the harbour the platform had fourteen cannon, and in the fort above were
forty-six cannon, many of them of bronze (Add. MSS., 13,992, f. 499 ff.).
The report of the amount of ordnance is doubtless an exaggeration.

Footnote 117: (return)

Add. MSS., 13,992, f. 499.

Footnote 118: (return)

According to Dutertre, one vessel was commanded by the assassins,
Martin and Thibault, and contained the women and children. The latter,
when provisions ran low, were marooned on one of the Caymans, north-west
of Jamaica, where they would have perished had not a Dutch ship found and
rescued them. Martin and Thibault were never heard of again.

CHAPTER III

THE CONQUEST OF JAMAICA

The capture of Jamaica by the expedition sent out
by Cromwell in 1655 was the blundering beginning
of a new era in West Indian history. It was
the first permanent annexation by another European
power of an integral part of Spanish America. Before
1655 the island had already been twice visited by English
forces. The first occasion was in January 1597, when
Sir Anthony Shirley, with little opposition, took and
plundered St. Jago de la Vega. The second was in 1643,
when William Jackson repeated the same exploit with
500 men from the Windward Islands. Cromwell’s expedition,
consisting of 2500 men and a considerable fleet, set
sail from England in December 1654, with the secret
object of “gaining an interest” in that part of the West
Indies in possession of the Spaniards. Admiral Penn
commanded the fleet, and General Venables the land
forces.¹¹⁹ The expedition reached Barbadoes at the end of
January, where some 4000 additional troops were raised,
{86}
besides about 1200 from Nevis, St. Kitts, and neighbouring
islands. The commanders having resolved to direct their
first attempt against Hispaniola, on 13th April a landing
was effected at a point to the west of San Domingo, and
the army, suffering terribly from a tropical sun and lack
of water, marched thirty miles through woods and
savannahs to attack the city. The English received two
shameful defeats from a handful of Spaniards on 17th and
25th April, and General Venables, complaining loudly of
the cowardice of his men and of Admiral Penn’s failure
to co-operate with him, finally gave up the attempt and
sailed for Jamaica. On 11th May, in the splendid harbour
on which Kingston now stands, the English fleet dropped
anchor. Three small forts on the western side were
battered by the guns from the ships, and as soon as the
troops began to land the garrisons evacuated their posts.
St. Jago, six miles inland, was occupied next day. The
terms offered by Venables to the Spaniards (the same as
those exacted from the English settlers on Providence
Island in 1641—emigration within ten days on pain of
death, and forfeiture of all their property) were accepted on
the 17th; but the Spaniards were soon discovered to have
entered into negotiations merely to gain time and retire
with their families and goods to the woods and mountains,
whence they continued their resistance. Meanwhile the
army, wretchedly equipped with provisions and other
necessities, was decimated by sickness. On the 19th
two long-expected store-ships arrived, but the supplies
brought by them were limited, and an appeal for assistance
was sent to New England. Admiral Penn, disgusted
with the fiasco in Hispaniola and on bad terms with
Venables, sailed for England with part of his fleet on
25th June; and Venables, so ill that his life was despaired
of, and also anxious to clear himself of the responsibility
for the initial failure of the expedition, followed in the
{87}
“Marston Moor” nine days later. On 20th September both
commanders appeared before the Council of State to
answer the charge of having deserted their posts, and together
they shared the disgrace of a month in the Tower.¹²⁰

The army of General Venables was composed of very
inferior and undisciplined troops, mostly the rejected of
English regiments or the offscourings of the West Indian
colonies; yet the chief reasons for the miscarriage before
San Domingo were the failure of Venables to command
the confidence of his officers and men, his inexcusable
errors in the management of the attack, and the lack of
cordial co-operation between him and the Admiral. The
difficulties with which he had to struggle were, of course,
very great. On the other hand, he seems to have been
deficient both in strength of character and in military
capacity; and his ill-health made still more difficult a
task for which he was fundamentally incompetent. The
comparative failure of this, Cromwell’s pet enterprise, was
a bitter blow to the Protector. For a whole day he shut
himself up in his room, brooding over the disaster for
which he, more than any other, was responsible. He had
aimed not merely to plant one more colony in America,
but to make himself master of such parts of the West
Indian islands and Spanish Main as would enable him to
dominate the route of the Spanish-American treasure
fleets. To this end Jamaica contributed few advantages
beyond those possessed by Barbadoes and St. Kitts, and
it was too early for him to realize that island for island
Jamaica was much more suitable than Hispaniola as the
seat of an English colony.¹²¹

Religious and economic motives form the key to
Cromwell’s foreign policy, and it is difficult to discover
{88}
which, the religious or the economic, was uppermost in
his mind when he planned this expedition. He inherited
from the Puritans of Elizabeth’s time the traditional
religious hatred of Spain as the bulwark of Rome, and
in his mind as in theirs the overthrow of the Spaniards
in the West Indies was a blow at antichrist and an
extension of the true religion. The religious ends of
the expedition were fully impressed upon Venables and
his successors in Jamaica.¹²² Second only, however, to
Oliver’s desire to protect “the people of God,” was his
ambition to extend England’s empire beyond the seas.
He desired the unquestioned supremacy of England
over the other nations of Europe, and that supremacy,
as he probably foresaw, was to be commercial and
colonial. Since the discovery of America the world’s
commerce had enormously increased, and its control
brought with it national power. America had become
the treasure-house of Europe. If England was to be set
at the head of the world’s commerce and navigation,
she must break through Spain’s monopoly of the Indies
and gain a control in Spanish America. San Domingo
was to be but a preliminary step, after which the rest
of the Spanish dominions in the New World would be
gradually absorbed.¹²³

The immediate excuse for the attack on Hispaniola
and Jamaica was the Spaniards’ practice of seizing
English ships and ill-treating English crews merely because
they were found in some part of the Caribbean
Sea, and even though bound for a plantation actually in
possession of English colonists. It was the old question
of effective occupation versus papal donation, and both
{89}
Cromwell and Venables convinced themselves that
Spanish assaults in the past on English ships and
colonies supplied a sufficient casus belli.¹²⁴ There was no
justification, however, for a secret attack upon Spain.
She had been the first to recognize the young republic,
and was willing and even anxious to league herself
with England. There had been actual negotiations for
an alliance, and Cromwell’s offers, though rejected, had
never been really withdrawn. Without a declaration
of war or formal notice of any sort, a fleet was fitted
out and sent in utmost secrecy to fall unawares upon
the colonies of a friendly nation. The whole aspect
of the exploit was Elizabethan. It was inspired by
Drake and Raleigh, a reversion to the Elizabethan
gold-hunt. It was the first of the great buccaneering
expeditions.¹²⁵

Cromwell was doubtless influenced, too, by the
representations of Thomas Gage. Gage was an Englishman
who had joined the Dominicans and had been
sent by his Order out to Spanish America. In 1641
he returned to England, announced his conversion to
Protestantism, took the side of Parliament and became
a minister. His experiences in the West Indies and
Mexico he published in 1648 under the name of “The
English-American, or a New Survey of the West
Indies,” a most entertaining book, which aimed to
arouse Englishmen against Romish “idolatries,” to show
how valuable the Spanish-American provinces might
be to England in trade and bullion and how easily
they might be seized. In the summer of 1654, moreover,
Gage had laid before the Protector a memorial in
which he recapitulated the conclusions of his book,
assuring Cromwell that the Spanish colonies were
sparsely peopled and that the few whites were unwarlike
and scantily provided with arms and ammunition. He
asserted that the conquest of Hispaniola and Cuba
would be a matter of no difficulty, and that even Central
America was too weak to oppose a long resistance.¹²⁶
All this was true, and had Cromwell but sent a respectable
force under an efficient leader the result
would have been different. The exploits of the
buccaneers a few years later proved it.

It was fortunate, considering the distracted state
of affairs in Jamaica in 1655-56, that the Spaniards were
in no condition to attempt to regain the island. Cuba,
the nearest Spanish territory to Jamaica, was being
ravaged by the most terrible pestilence known there
in years, and the inhabitants, alarmed for their own
safety, instead of trying to dispossess the English, were
{91}
busy providing for the defence of their own coasts.¹²⁷ In 1657,
however, some troops under command of the old Spanish
governor of Jamaica, D. Christopher Sasi Arnoldo, crossed
from St. Jago de Cuba and entrenched themselves on the
northern shore as the advance post of a greater force expected
from the mainland. Papers of instructions relating to
the enterprise were intercepted by Colonel Doyley, then
acting-governor of Jamaica; and he with 500 picked men
embarked for the north side, attacked the Spaniards in their
entrenchments and utterly routed them.¹²⁸ The next year
about 1000 men, the long-expected corps of regular Spanish
infantry, landed and erected a fort at Rio Nuevo. Doyley,
displaying the same energy, set out again on 11th June
with 750 men, landed under fire on the 22nd, and next
day captured the fort in a brilliant attack in which about
300 Spaniards were killed and 100 more, with many
officers and flags, captured. The English lost about
sixty in killed and wounded.¹²⁹ After the failure of a
similar, though weaker, attempt in 1660, the Spaniards
despaired of regaining Jamaica, and most of those still
upon the island embraced the first opportunity to retire
to Cuba and other Spanish settlements.

As colonists the troops in Jamaica proved to be
very discouraging material, and the army was soon in
a wretched state. The officers and soldiers plundered
and mutinied instead of working and planting. Their
wastefulness led to scarcity of food, and scarcity of food
brought disease and death.¹³⁰ They wished to force the
{92}
Protector to recall them, or to employ them in assaulting
the opulent Spanish towns on the Main, an occupation
far more lucrative than that of planting corn and provisions
for sustenance. Cromwell, however, set himself
to develop and strengthen his new colony. He issued
a proclamation encouraging trade and settlement in the
island by exempting the inhabitants from taxes, and
the Council voted that 1000 young men and an equal
number of girls be shipped over from Ireland. The
Scotch government was instructed to apprehend and
transport idlers and vagabonds, and commissioners were
sent into New England and to the Windward and Leeward
Islands to try and attract settlers.¹³¹ Bermudians,
Jews, Quakers from Barbadoes and criminals from Newgate,
helped to swell the population of the new colony,
and in 1658 the island is said to have contained 4500
whites, besides 1500 or more negro slaves.¹³²

To dominate the Spanish trade routes was one of the
principal objects of English policy in the West Indies.
This purpose is reflected in all of Cromwell’s instructions
to the leaders of the Jamaican design, and it appears again
in his instructions of 10th October 1655 to Major-General
Fortescue and Vice-Admiral Goodson. Fortescue was
given power and authority to land men upon territory
claimed by the Spaniards, to take their forts, castles and
places of strength, and to pursue, kill and destroy all who
opposed him. The Vice-Admiral was to assist him with
his sea-forces, and to use his best endeavours to seize all
{93}
ships belonging to the King of Spain or his subjects in
America.¹³³ The soldiers, as has been said, were more
eager to fight the Spaniards than to plant, and opportunities
were soon given them to try their hand. Admiral
Penn had left twelve ships under Goodson’s charge, and
of these, six were at sea picking up a few scattered Spanish
prizes which helped to pay for the victuals supplied out of
New England.¹³⁴ Goodson, however, was after larger prey,
no less than the galleons or a Spanish town upon the
mainland. He did not know where the galleons were,
but at the end of July he seems to have been lying with
eight vessels before Cartagena and Porto Bello, and on
22nd November he sent Captain Blake with nine ships to
the same coast to intercept all vessels going thither from
Spain or elsewhere. The fleet was broken up by foul
weather, however, and part returned on 14th December
to refit, leaving a few small frigates to lie in wait for some
merchantmen reported to be in that region.¹³⁵ The first
town on the Main to feel the presence of this new power
in the Indies was Santa Marta, close to Cartagena on the
shores of what is now the U.S. of Columbia. In the
latter part of October, just a month before the departure
of Blake, Goodson sailed with a fleet of eight vessels to
ravage the Spanish coasts. According to one account his
original design had been against Rio de la Hacha near
the pearl fisheries, “but having missed his aim” he sailed
for Santa Marta. He landed 400 sailors and soldiers
under the protection of his guns, took and demolished the
two forts which barred his way, and entered the town.
Finding that the inhabitants had already fled with as
much of their belongings as they could carry, he pursued
{94}
them some twelve miles up into the country; and on his
return plundered and burnt their houses, embarked with
thirty pieces of cannon and other booty, and sailed for
Jamaica.¹³⁶ It was a gallant performance with a handful
of men, but the profits were much less than had been
expected. It had been agreed that the seamen and
soldiers should receive half the spoil, but on counting the
proceeds it was found that their share amounted to no
more than £400, to balance which the State took the
thirty pieces of ordnance and some powder, shot, hides,
salt and Indian corn.¹³⁷ Sedgwick wrote to Thurloe that
“reckoning all got there on the State’s share, it did not
pay for the powder and shot spent in that service.”¹³⁸
Sedgwick was one of the civil commissioners appointed
for the government of Jamaica. A brave, pious soldier
with a long experience and honourable military record in
the Massachusetts colony, he did not approve of this type
of warfare against the Spaniards. “This kind of marooning
cruising West India trade of plundering and burning
towns,” he writes, “though it hath been long practised in
these parts, yet is not honourable for a princely navy,
neither was it, I think, the work designed, though perhaps
it may be tolerated at present.” If Cromwell was to
accomplish his original purpose of blocking up the Spanish
treasure route, he wrote again, permanent foothold must
be gained in some important Spanish fortress, either
Cartagena or Havana, places strongly garrisoned, however,
and requiring for their reduction a considerable army and
fleet, such as Jamaica did not then possess. But to waste
and burn towns of inferior rank without retaining them
merely dragged on the war indefinitely and effected little
advantage or profit to anybody.¹³⁹ Captain Nuberry
{95}
visited Santa Marta several weeks after Goodson’s descent,
and, going on shore, found that about a hundred people had
made bold to return and rebuild their devastated homes.
Upon sight of the English the poor people again fled
incontinently to the woods, and Nuberry and his men
destroyed their houses a second time.¹⁴⁰

On 5th April 1656 Goodson, with ten of his best ships,
set sail again and steered eastward along the coast of
Hispaniola as far as Alta Vela, hoping to meet with some
Spanish ships reported in that region. Encountering
none, he stood for the Main, and landed on 4th May with
about 450 men at Rio de la Hacha. The story of the
exploit is merely a repetition of what happened at Santa
Marta. The people had sight of the English fleet six
hours before it could drop anchor, and fled from the town
to the hills and surrounding woods. Only twelve men
were left behind to hold the fort, which the English stormed
and took within half an hour. Four large brass cannon
were carried to the ships and the fort partly demolished.
The Spaniards pretended to parley for the ransom of their
town, but when after a day’s delay they gave no sign of
complying with the admiral’s demands, he burned the place
on 8th May and sailed away.¹⁴¹ Goodson called again at
Santa Marta on the 11th to get water, and on the 14th
stood before Cartagena to view the harbour. Leaving
three vessels to ply there, he returned to Jamaica, bringing
back with him only two small prizes, one laden with wine,
the other with cocoa.

The seamen of the fleet, however, were restless and
eager for further enterprises of this nature, and Goodson
by the middle of June had fourteen of his vessels lying off
the Cuban coast near Cape S. Antonio in wait for the
galleons or the Flota, both of which fleets were then
expected at Havana. His ambition to repeat the achievement
{96}
of Piet Heyn was fated never to be realised. The
fleet of Terra-Firma, he soon learned, had sailed into
Havana on 15th May, and on 13th June, three days before
his arrival on that coast, had departed for Spain.¹⁴² Meanwhile,
one of his own vessels, the “Arms of Holland,” was
blown up, with the loss of all on board but three men and
the captain, and two other ships were disabled. Five of
the fleet returned to England on 23rd August, and with
the rest Goodson remained on the Cuban coast until the
end of the month, watching in vain for the fleet from
Vera Cruz which never sailed.¹⁴³

Colonel Edward Doyley, the officer who so promptly
defeated the attempts of the Spaniards in 1657-58 to
re-conquer Jamaica, was now governor of the island. He
had sailed with the expedition to the West Indies as
lieutenant-colonel in the regiment of General Venables,
and on the death of Major-General Fortescue in November
1655 had been chosen by Cromwell’s commissioners in
Jamaica as commander-in-chief of the land forces. In
May 1656 he was superseded by Robert Sedgwick, but
the latter died within a few days, and Doyley petitioned
the Protector to appoint him to the post. William Brayne,
however, arrived from England in December 1656 to take
chief command; and when he, like his two predecessors,
was stricken down by disease nine months later, the place
devolved permanently upon Doyley. Doyley was a very
efficient governor, and although he has been accused of
showing little regard or respect for planting and trade, the
{97}
charge appears to be unjust.¹⁴⁴ He firmly maintained order
among men disheartened and averse to settlement, and at
the end of his service delivered up the colony a comparatively
well-ordered and thriving community. He was
confirmed in his post by Charles II. at the Restoration, but
superseded by Lord Windsor in August 1661. Doyley’s
claim to distinction rests mainly upon his vigorous policy
against the Spaniards, not only in defending Jamaica, but
by encouraging privateers and carrying the war into the
enemies’ quarters. In July 1658, on learning from some
prisoners that the galleons were in Porto Bello awaiting
the plate from Panama, Doyley embarked 300 men on a
fleet of five vessels and sent it to lie in an obscure bay
between that port and Cartagena to intercept the Spanish
ships. On 20th October the galleons were espied, twenty-nine
vessels in all, fifteen galleons and fourteen stout
merchantmen. Unfortunately, all the English vessels
except the “Hector” and the “Marston Moor” were at
that moment absent to obtain fresh water. Those two
alone could do nothing, but passing helplessly through the
Spaniards, hung on their rear and tried without success to
scatter them. The English fleet later attacked and burnt
the town of Tolu on the Main, capturing two Spanish
ships in the road; and afterwards paid another visit to
the unfortunate Santa Marta, where they remained three
days, marching several miles into the country and burning
and destroying everything in their path.¹⁴⁵

On 23rd April 1659, however, there returned to Port
Royal another expedition whose success realised the
wildest dreams of avarice. Three frigates under command
{98}
of Captain Christopher Myngs,¹⁴⁶ with 300 soldiers on
board, had been sent by Doyley to harry the South
American coast. They first entered and destroyed
Cumana, and then ranging along the coast westward,
landed again at Puerto Cabello and at Coro. At the
latter town they followed the inhabitants into the woods,
where besides other plunder they came upon twenty-two
chests of royal treasure intended for the King of Spain,
each chest containing 400 pounds of silver.¹⁴⁷ Embarking
this money and other spoil in the shape of plate, jewels
and cocoa, they returned to Port Royal with the richest
prize that ever entered Jamaica. The whole pillage was
estimated at between £200,000 and £300,000.¹⁴⁸ The
abundance of new wealth introduced into Jamaica did much
to raise the spirits of the colonists, and set the island well
upon the road to more prosperous times. The sequel to
this brilliant exploit, however, was in some ways unfortunate.
Disputes were engendered between the officers of the
expedition and the governor and other authorities on
shore over the disposal of the booty, and in the early part
of June 1659 Captain Myngs was sent home in the
“Marston Moor,” suspended for disobeying orders and
plundering the hold of one of the prizes to the value of
12,000 pieces of eight. Myngs was an active, intrepid
commander, but apparently avaricious and impatient of
{99}
control. He seems to have endeavoured to divert most
of the prize money into the pockets of his officers and men,
by disposing of the booty on his own initiative before
giving a strict account of it to the governor or steward-general
of the island. Doyley writes that there was a
constant market aboard the “Marston Moor,” and that
Myngs and his officers, alleging it to be customary to break
and plunder the holds, permitted the twenty-two chests of
the King of Spain’s silver to be divided among the men
without any provision whatever for the claims of the State.¹⁴⁹
There was also some friction over the disposal of six Dutch
prizes which Doyley had picked up for illegal trading at
Barbadoes on his way out from England. These, too, had
been plundered before they reached Jamaica, and when
Myngs found that there was no power in the colony to try
and condemn ships taken by virtue of the Navigation Laws,
it only added fuel to his dissatisfaction. When Myngs
reached England he lodged counter-complaints against
Governor Doyley, Burough, the steward-general, and Vice-Admiral
Goodson, alleging that they received more than
their share of the prize money; and a war of mutual
recrimination followed.¹⁵⁰ Amid the distractions of the
Restoration, however, little seems ever to have been made
of the matter in England. The insubordination of officers
in 1659-60 was a constant source of difficulty and impediment
to the governor in his efforts to establish peace and
order in the colony. In England nobody was sure where
the powers of government actually resided. As Burough
wrote from Jamaica on 19th January 1660, “We are here
just like you at home; when we heard of the Lord-Protector’s
{100}
death we proclaimed his son, and when we
heard of his being turned out we proclaimed a Parliament
and now own a Committee of safety.”¹⁵¹ The effect of this
uncertainty was bound to be prejudicial in Jamaica, a new
colony filled with adventurers, for it loosened the reins of
authority and encouraged lawless spirits to set the governor
at defiance.

On 8th May 1660 Charles II. was proclaimed King of
England, and entered London on 29th May. The war
which Cromwell had begun with Spain was essentially a
war of the Commonwealth. The Spanish court was
therefore on friendly terms with the exiled prince, and
when he returned into possession of his kingdom a
cessation of hostilities with Spain naturally followed.
Charles wrote a note to Don Luis de Haro on 2nd June
1660, proposing an armistice in Europe and America
which was to lead to a permanent peace and a re-establishment
of commercial relations between the two kingdoms.¹⁵²
At the same time Sir Henry Bennett, the English resident
in Madrid, made similar proposals to the Spanish king.
A favourable answer was received in July, and the cessation
of arms, including a revival of the treaty of 1630
was proclaimed on 10th-20th September 1660. Preliminary
negotiations for a new treaty were entered upon at
Madrid, but the marriage of Charles to Catherine of
Braganza in 1662, and the consequent alliance with
Portugal, with whom Spain was then at war, put a
damper upon all such designs. The armistice with Spain
was not published in Jamaica until 5th February of the
following year. On 4th February Colonel Doyley received
from the governor of St. Jago de Cuba a letter enclosing
an order from Sir Henry Bennett for the cessation of
arms, and this order Doyley immediately made public.¹⁵³
{101}
About thirty English prisoners were also returned by the
Spaniards with the letter. Doyley was confirmed in his
command of Jamaica by Charles II., but his commission
was not issued till 8th February 1661.¹⁵⁴ He was very
desirous, however, of returning to England to look after
his private affairs, and on 2nd August another commission
was issued to Lord Windsor, appointing him as Doyley’s
successor.¹⁵⁵ Just a year later, in August 1662, Windsor
arrived at Port Royal, fortified with instructions “to
endeavour to obtain and preserve a good correspondence
and free commerce with the plantations belonging to the
King of Spain,” even resorting to force if necessary.¹⁵⁶

The question of English trade with the Spanish
colonies in the Indies had first come to the surface in the
negotiations for the treaty of 1604, after the long wars
between Elizabeth and Philip II. The endeavour of the
Spaniards to obtain an explicit prohibition of commerce
was met by the English demand for entire freedom. The
Spaniards protested that it had never been granted in
former treaties or to other nations, or even without
restriction to Spanish subjects, and clamoured for at least
a private article on the subject; but the English commissioners
steadfastly refused, and offered to forbid trade
only with ports actually under Spanish authority. Finally
a compromise was reached in the words “in quibus ante
bellum fuit commercium, juxta et secundum usum et
observantiam.”¹⁵⁷ This article was renewed in Cottington’s
{102}
Treaty of 1630. The Spaniards themselves, indeed, in
1630, were willing to concede a free navigation in the
American seas, and even offered to recognise the English
colony of Virginia if Charles I. would admit articles prohibiting
trade and navigation in certain harbours and
bays. Cottington, however, was too far-sighted, and
wrote to Lord Dorchester: “For my own part, I shall
ever be far from advising His Majesty to think of such
restrictions, for certainly a little more time will open the
navigation to those parts so long as there are no negative
capitulations or articles to hinder it.”¹⁵⁸ The monopolistic
pretensions of the Spanish government were evidently
relaxing, for in 1634 the Conde de Humanes confided to
the English agent, Taylor, that there had been talk in
the Council of the Indies of admitting the English to a
share in the freight of ships sent to the West Indies, and
even of granting them a limited permission to go to those
regions on their own account. And in 1637 the Conde de
Linhares, recently appointed governor of Brazil, told the
English ambassador, Lord Aston, that he was very
anxious that English ships should do the carrying between
Lisbon and Brazilian ports.

The settlement of the Windward and Leeward Islands
and the conquest of Jamaica had given a new impetus to
contraband trade. The commercial nations were setting
up shop, as it were, at the very doors of the Spanish
Indies. The French and English Antilles, condemned
by the Navigation Laws to confine themselves to agriculture
and a passive trade with the home country, had no recourse
but to traffic with their Spanish neighbours.
{103}
Factors of the Assiento established at Cartagena, Porto
Bello and Vera Cruz every year supplied European
merchants with detailed news of the nature and quantity
of the goods which might be imported with advantage;
while the buccaneers, by dominating the whole Caribbean
Sea, hindered frequent communication between Spain and
her colonies. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
commerce of Seville, which had hitherto held its own,
decreased with surprising rapidity, that the sailings of the
galleons and the Flota were separated by several years,
and that the fairs of Porto Bello and Vera Cruz were
almost deserted. To put an effective restraint, moreover,
upon this contraband trade was impossible on either side.
The West Indian dependencies were situated far from
the centre of authority, while the home governments
generally had their hands too full of other matters to
adequately control their subjects in America. The
Spanish viceroys, meanwhile, and the governors in the
West Indian Islands, connived at a practice which lined
their own pockets with the gold of bribery, and at the
same time contributed to the public interest and prosperity
of their respective colonies. It was this illicit commerce
with Spanish America which Charles II., by negotiation at
Madrid and by instructions to his governors in the West
Indies, tried to get within his own control. At the
Spanish court, Fanshaw, Sandwich and Godolphin in turn
were instructed to sue for a free trade with the Colonies.
The Assiento of negroes was at this time held by two
Genoese named Grillo and Lomelin, and with them the
English ambassadors several times entered into negotiation
for the privilege of supplying blacks from the English
islands. By the treaty of 1670 the English colonies in
America were for the first time formally recognised by the
Spanish Crown. Freedom of commerce, however, was as
far as ever from realisation, and after this date Charles
{104}
seems to have given up hope of ever obtaining it through
diplomatic channels.

The peace of 1660 between England and Spain was
supposed to extend to both sides of the “Line.” The
Council in Jamaica, however, were of the opinion that it
applied only to Europe,¹⁵⁹ and from the tenor of Lord
Windsor’s instructions it may be inferred that the English
Court at that time meant to interpret it with the same
limitations. Windsor, indeed, was not only instructed to
force the Spanish colonies to a free trade, but was empowered
to call upon the governor of Barbadoes for aid
“in case of any considerable attempt by the Spaniards
against Jamaica.”¹⁶⁰ The efforts of the Governor, however,
to come to a good correspondence with the Spanish
colonies were fruitless. In the minutes of the Council of
Jamaica of 20th August 1662, we read: “Resolved that the
letters from the Governors of Porto Rico and San Domingo
are an absolute denial of trade, and that according to His
Majesty’s instructions to Lord Windsor a trade by force
or otherwise be endeavoured;”¹⁶¹ and under 12th September
we find another resolution “that men be enlisted for
a design by sea with the ‘Centurion’ and other vessels.”¹⁶²
This “design” was an expedition to capture and destroy
St. Jago de Cuba, the Spanish port nearest to Jamaican
shores. An attack upon St. Jago had been projected by
Goodson as far back as 1655. “The Admiral,” wrote
Major Sedgwick to Thurloe just after his arrival in
Jamaica, “was intended before our coming in to have
taken some few soldiers and gone over to St. Jago de
Cuba, a town upon Cuba, but our coming hindered him
without whom we could not well tell how to do anything.”¹⁶³
In January 1656 the plan was definitely abandoned, because
{105}
the colony could not spare a sufficient number of
soldiers for the enterprise.¹⁶⁴ It was to St. Jago that the
Spaniards, driven from Jamaica, mostly betook themselves,
and from St. Jago as a starting-point had come the expedition
of 1658 to reconquer the island. The instructions
of Lord Windsor afforded a convenient opportunity to
avenge past attacks and secure Jamaica from molestation
in that quarter for the future. The command of the expedition
was entrusted to Myngs, who in 1662 was again
in the Indies on the frigate “Centurion.” Myngs sailed
from Port Royal on 21st September with eleven ships and
1300 men,¹⁶⁵ but, kept back by unfavourable winds, did not
sight the castle of St. Jago until 5th October. Although
he had intended to force the entrance of the harbour, he
was prevented by the prevailing land breeze; so he disembarked
his men to windward, on a rocky coast, where the
path up the bluffs was so narrow that but one man could
march at a time. Night had fallen before all were landed,
and “the way (was) soe difficult and the night soe dark
that they were forced to make stands and fires, and their
guides with brands in their hands, to beat the path.”¹⁶⁶ At
daybreak they reached a plantation by a river’s side, some
six miles from the place of landing and three from St.
Jago. There they refreshed themselves, and advancing
upon the town surprised the enemy, who knew of the late
landing and the badness of the way and did not expect
them so soon. They found 200 Spaniards at the entrance
to the town, drawn up under their governor, Don Pedro
de Moralis, and supported by Don Christopher de Sasi
Arnoldo, the former Spanish governor of Jamaica, with a
reserve of 500 more. The Spaniards fled before the first
charge of the Jamaicans, and the place was easily mastered.

The next day parties were despatched into the country
to pursue the enemy, and orders sent to the fleet to attack
the forts at the mouth of the harbour. This was successfully
done, the Spaniards deserting the great castle after
firing but two muskets. Between scouring the country
for hidden riches, most of which had been carried far
inland beyond their reach, and dismantling and demolishing
the forts, the English forces occupied their time until
October 19th. Thirty-four guns were found in the fortifications
and 1000 barrels of powder. Some of the guns were
carried to the ships and the rest flung over the precipice
into the sea; while the powder was used to blow up the
castle and the neighbouring country houses.¹⁶⁷ The expedition
returned to Jamaica on 22nd October.¹⁶⁸ Only
six men had been killed by the Spaniards, twenty more
being lost by other “accidents.” Of these twenty some
must have been captured by the enemy, for when Sir
Richard Fanshaw was appointed ambassador to Spain in
January 1664, he was instructed among other things to
negotiate for an exchange of prisoners taken in the Indies.
In July we find him treating for the release of Captain
Myngs’ men from the prisons of Seville and Cadiz,¹⁶⁹ and
on 7th November an order to this effect was obtained
from the King of Spain.¹⁷⁰

The instructions of Lord Windsor gave him leave,
as soon as he had settled the government in Jamaica, to
appoint a deputy and return to England to confer with the
King on colonial affairs. Windsor sailed for England on
28th October, and on the same day Sir Charles Lyttleton’s
commission as deputy-governor was read in the Jamaican
Council.¹⁷¹ During his short sojourn of three months the
{107}
Governor had made considerable progress toward establishing
an ordered constitution in the island. He disbanded
the old army, and reorganised the military under a stricter
discipline and better officers. He systematised legal procedure
and the rules for the conveyance of property. He
erected an Admiralty Court at Port Royal, and above all,
probably in pursuance of the recommendation of Colonel
Doyley,¹⁷² had called in all the privateering commissions
issued by previous governors, and tried to submit the
captains to orderly rules by giving them new commissions,
with instructions to bring their Spanish prizes to Jamaica
for judicature.¹⁷³

The departure of Windsor did not put a stop to
the efforts of the Jamaicans to “force a trade” with the
Spanish plantations, and we find the Council, on 11th
December 1662, passing a motion that to this end an
attempt should be made to leeward on the coasts of Cuba,
Honduras and the Gulf of Campeache. On 9th and
10th January between 1500 and 1600 soldiers, many of
them doubtless buccaneers, were embarked on a fleet of
twelve ships and sailed two days later under command
of the redoubtable Myngs. About ninety leagues this
side of Campeache the fleet ran into a great storm, in
which one of the vessels foundered and three others were
separated from their fellows. The English reached the
coast of Campeache, however, in the early morning of
Friday, 9th February, and landing a league and a half
from the town, marched without being seen along an
Indian path with “such speed and good fortune” that
by ten o’clock in the morning they were already masters
of the city and of all the forts save one, the Castle of
Santa Cruz. At the second fort Myngs was wounded by
a gun in three places. The town itself, Myngs reported,
might have been defended like a fortress, for the houses
{108}
were contiguous and strongly built of stone with flat roofs.¹⁷⁴
The forts were partly demolished, a portion of the town
was destroyed by fire, and the fourteen sail lying in the
harbour were seized by the invaders. Altogether the booty
must have been considerable. The Spanish licentiate,
Maldonado de Aldana, placed it at 150,000 pieces of eight,¹⁷⁵
and the general damage to the city in the destruction of
houses and munitions by the enemy, and in the expenditure
of treasure for purposes of defence, at half a million more.
Myngs and his fleet sailed away on 23rd February, but the
“Centurion” did not reach Port Royal until 13th April,
and the rest of the fleet followed a few days later. The
number of casualties on each side was surprisingly small.
The invaders lost only thirty men killed, and the Spaniards
between fifty and sixty, but among the latter were the
two alcaldes and many other officers and prominent
citizens of the town.¹⁷⁶

To satisfactorily explain at Madrid these two presumptuous
assaults upon Spanish territory in America
{109}
was an embarrassing problem for the English Government,
especially as Myngs’ men imprisoned at Seville and
Cadiz were said to have produced commissions to justify
their actions.¹⁷⁷ The Spanish king instructed his resident
in London to demand whether Charles accepted responsibility
for the attack upon St. Jago, and the proceedings of
English cases in the Spanish courts arising from the depredations
of Galician corsairs were indefinitely suspended.¹⁷⁸
When, however, there followed upon this, in May 1663, the
news of the sack and burning of Campeache, it stirred up
the greatest excitement in Madrid.¹⁷⁹ Orders and, what
was rarer in Spain, money were immediately sent to
Cadiz to the Duke of Albuquerque to hasten the work on
the royal Armada for despatch to the Indies; and efforts
were made to resuscitate the defunct Armada de Barlovento,
a small fleet which had formerly been used to
catch interlopers and protect the coasts of Terra-Firma.
In one way the capture of Campeache had touched Spain
in her most vulnerable spot. The Mexican Flota, which
was scheduled to sail from Havana in June 1663, refused to
stir from its retreat at Vera Cruz until the galleons from
Porto Bello came to convoy it. The arrival of the American
treasure in Spain was thus delayed for two months, and
the bankrupt government put to sore straits for money.

The activity of the Spaniards, however, was merely a
blind to hide their own impotence, and their clamours
were eventually satisfied by the King of England’s writing
to Deputy-Governor Lyttleton a letter forbidding all such
undertakings for the future. The text of the letter is as
follows: “Understanding with what jealousy and offence
the Spaniards look upon our island of Jamaica, and how
disposed they are to make some attempt upon it, and
{110}
knowing how disabled it will remain in its own defence if
encouragement be given to such undertakings as have
lately been set on foot, and are yet pursued, and which
divert the inhabitants from that industry which alone can
render the island considerable, the king signifies his dislike
of all such undertakings, and commands that no such
be pursued for the future, but that they unitedly apply
themselves to the improvement of the plantation and
keeping the force in proper condition.”¹⁸⁰ The original draft
of the letter was much milder in tone, and betrays the real
attitude of Charles II. toward these half-piratical enterprises:
“His Majesty has heard of the success of the
undertaking upon Cuba, in which he cannot choose but
please himself in the vigour and resolution wherein it was
performed … but because His Majesty cannot foresee any
utility likely to arise thereby … he has thought fit hereby
to command him to give no encouragement to such undertakings
unless they may be performed by the frigates or
men-of-war attending that place without any addition
from the soldiers or inhabitants.”¹⁸¹ Other letters were
subsequently sent to Jamaica, which made it clear that the
war of the privateers was not intended to be called off by
the king’s instructions; and Sir Charles Lyttleton, therefore,
did not recall their commissions. Nevertheless, in the
early part of 1664, the assembly in Jamaica passed an act
prohibiting public levies of men upon foreign designs, and
forbidding any person to leave the island on any such
design without first obtaining leave from the governor,
council and assembly.¹⁸²

When the instructions of the authorities at home were
so ambiguous, and the incentives to corsairing so alluring,
it was natural that this game of baiting the Spaniards
{111}
should suffer little interruption. English freebooters who
had formerly made Hispaniola and Tortuga their headquarters
now resorted to Jamaica, where they found a
cordial welcome and a better market for their plunder.
Thus in June 1663 a certain Captain Barnard sailed from
Port Royal to the Orinoco, took and plundered the town
of Santo Tomas and returned in the following March.¹⁸³
On 19th October another privateer named Captain Cooper
brought into Port Royal two Spanish prizes, the larger of
which, the “Maria” of Seville, was a royal azogue and
carried 1000 quintals of quicksilver for the King of Spain’s
mines in Mexico, besides oil, wine and olives.¹⁸⁴ Cooper in
his fight with the smaller vessel so disabled his own ship
that he was forced to abandon it and enter the prize; and
it was while cruising off Hispaniola in this prize that he
fell in with the “Maria,” and captured her after a four hours’
combat. There were seventy prisoners, among them a
number of friars going to Campeache and Vera Cruz.
Some of the prize goods were carried to England, and
Don Patricio Moledi, the Spanish resident in London,
importuned the English government for its restoration.¹⁸⁵
Sir Charles Lyttleton had sailed for England on
2nd May 1664, leaving the government of Jamaica in the
hands of the Council with Colonel Thomas Lynch as
president;¹⁸⁶ and on his arrival in England he made formal
answer to the complaints of Moledi. His excuse was that
Captain Cooper’s commission had been derived not from
the deputy-governor himself but from Lord Windsor; and
that the deputy-governor had never received any order
from the king for recalling commissions, or for the
cessation of hostilities against the Spaniards.¹⁸⁷ Lyttleton
{112}
and the English government were evidently attempting
the rather difficult circus feat of riding two mounts at the
same time. The instructions from England, as Lyttleton
himself acknowledged in his letter of 15th October 1663,
distinctly forbade further hostilities against the Spanish
plantations; on the other hand, there were no specific
orders that privateers should be recalled. Lyttleton was
from first to last in sympathy with the freebooters, and
probably believed with many others of his time that “the
Spaniard is most pliable when best beaten.” In August
1664 he presented to the Lord Chancellor his reasons for
advocating a continuance of the privateers in Jamaica.
They are sufficiently interesting to merit a résumé of the
principal points advanced. 1st. Privateering maintained a
great number of seamen by whom the island was protected
without the immediate necessity of a naval force.
2nd. If privateering were forbidden, the king would lose
many men who, in case of a war in the West Indies, would
be of incalculable service, being acquainted, as they were,
with the coasts, shoals, currents, winds, etc., of the Spanish
dominions. 3rd. Without the privateers, the Jamaicans
would have no intelligence of Spanish designs against them,
or of the size or neighbourhood of their fleets, or of the
strength of their resources. 4th. If prize-goods were no
longer brought into Port Royal, few merchants would resort
to Jamaica and prices would become excessively high. 5th.
To reduce the privateers would require a large number
of frigates at considerable trouble and expense; English
seamen, moreover, generally had the privateering spirit
and would be more ready to join with them than oppose
them, as previous experience had shown. Finally, the
privateers, if denied the freedom of Jamaican ports, would
not take to planting, but would resort to the islands of
other nations, and perhaps prey upon English commerce.¹⁸⁸

Footnote 119: (return)

Venables was not bound by his instructions to any definite plan. It had
been proposed, he was told, to seize Hispaniola or Porto Rico or both, after
which either Cartagena or Havana might be taken, and the Spanish revenue-fleets
obstructed. An alternative scheme was to make the first attempt on
the mainland at some point between the mouth of the Orinoco and Porto
Bello, with the ultimate object of securing Cartagena. It was left to Venables,
however, to consult with Admiral Penn and three commissioners, Edward
Winslow (former governor of Plymouth colony in New England), Daniel
Searle (governor of Barbadoes), and Gregory Butler, as to which, if any, of
these schemes should be carried out. Not until some time after the arrival of
the fleet at Barbadoes was it resolved to attack Hispaniola. (Narrative of
Gen. Venables, edition 1900, pp. x, 112-3.)

Footnote 120: (return)

Gardiner: Hist. of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, vol. iii.
ch. xlv.; Narrative of Gen. Venables.

Footnote 121: (return)

Gardiner: op. cit., iii. p. 368.

Footnote 122: (return)

Cf. the “Commission of the Commissioners for the West Indian
Expedition.” (Narrative of Gen. Venables, p. 109.)

Footnote 123: (return)

Cf. American Hist. Review, vol. iv. p. 228; “Instructions unto Gen.
Robt. Venables.” (Narrative of Gen. Venables, p. 111.)

Footnote 124: (return)

Cf. Narrative of Gen. Venables, pp. 3, 90;
“Instructions unto Generall Penn,” etc., ibid., p. 107.

After the outbreak of the Spanish war, Cromwell was anxious to clear his
government of the charges of treachery and violation of international duties.
The task was entrusted to the Latin Secretary, John Milton, who on 26th
October 1655 published a manifesto defending the actions of the Commonwealth.
He gave two principal reasons for the attempt upon the West
Indies:—(1) the cruelties of the Spaniards toward the English in America
and their depredations on English colonies and trade; (2) the outrageous
treatment and extermination of the Indians. He denied the Spanish claims
to all of America, either as a papal gift, or by right of discovery alone, or
even by right of settlement, and insisted upon both the natural and treaty
rights of Englishmen to trade in Spanish seas.

Footnote 125: (return)

The memory of the exploits of Drake and his contemporaries was not
allowed to die in the first half of the seventeenth century. Books like “Sir
Francis Drake Revived,” and “The World encompassed by Sir Francis
Drake,” were printed time and time again. The former was published in 1626
and again two years later; “The World Encompassed” first appeared in 1628
and was reprinted in 1635 and 1653. A quotation from the title-page of the
latter may serve to illustrate the temper of the times:—

Drake, Sir Francis. The world encompassed. Being his next voyage
to that to Nombre de Dios, formerly imprinted … offered … especially
for the stirring up of heroick spirits, to benefit their country and
eternize their names by like bold attempts. Lon. 1628.

Cf. also Gardiner, op. cit., iii. pp. 343-44.

Footnote 126: (return)

Gardiner, op. cit., iii. p. 346; cf. also
“Present State of Jamaica, 1683.”

Footnote 127: (return)

Long: “History of Jamaica,” i. p. 260; C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76.
Addenda, No. 274.

Footnote 128: (return)

Long, op. cit., i. p. 272 ff.

Footnote 129: (return)

Ibid.; Thurloe Papers, VI. p. 540; vii. p. 260; “Present State of
Jamaica, 1683”; C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda, Nos. 303-308.

Footnote 130: (return)

Long, op. cit., i. p. 245; C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76.
Addenda, Nos. 236, 261, 276, etc.

The conditions in Jamaica directly after its capture are in remarkable contrast
to what might have been expected after reading the enthusiastic descriptions
of the island, its climate, soil and products, left us by Englishmen who
visited it. Jackson in 1643 compared it with the Arcadian plains and
Thessalien Tempe, and many of his men wanted to remain and live with the
Spaniards. See also the description of Jamaica contained in the Rawlinson
MSS. and written just after the arrival of the English army:—”As for the
country … more than this.” (Narrative of Gen. Venables, pp. 138-9.)

Footnote 131: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda, Nos. 229, 232; Lucas: Historical
Geography of the British Colonies, ii. p. 101, and note.

Footnote 132: (return)

Lucas, op. cit., ii. p. 109.

Footnote 133: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda, Nos. 230, 231. Fortescue was
Gen. Venables’ successor in Jamaica.

Footnote 134: (return)

Ibid., No. 218; Long, op. cit., i. p. 262.

Footnote 135: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda, Nos. 218, 252; Thurloe Papers,
IV. pp. 451, 457.

Footnote 136: (return)

Thurloe Papers, IV. pp. 152, 493.

Footnote 137: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda, No. 236.

Footnote 138: (return)

Thurloe Papers, IV. p. 604.

Footnote 139: (return)

Ibid., pp. 454-5, 604.

Footnote 140: (return)

Thurloe Papers, IV. p. 452.

Footnote 141: (return)

Ibid., v. pp. 96, 151.

Footnote 142: (return)

This was the treasure fleet which Captain Stayner’s ship and two other
frigates captured off Cadiz on 9th September. Six galleons were captured,
sunk or burnt, with no less than £600,000 of gold and silver. The galleons
which Blake burnt in the harbour of Santa Cruz, on 20th April 1657, were
doubtless the Mexican fleet for which Admiral Goodson vainly waited before
Havana in the previous summer.

Footnote 143: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76, Addenda, Nos. 260, 263, 266, 270, 275;
Thurloe Papers, V. p. 340.

Footnote 144: (return)

Cf. Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 12,430: Journal of Col. Beeston. Col.
Beeston seems to have harboured a peculiar spite against Doyley. For the
contrary view of Doyley, cf. Long, op. cit., i. p. 284.

Footnote 145: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76. Addenda., Nos. 309, 310. In these letters the
towns are called “Tralo” and “St. Mark.” Cf. also Thurloe Papers, VII.
p. 340.

Footnote 146: (return)

Captain Christopher Myngs had been appointed to the “Marston Moor,”
a frigate of fifty-four guns, in October 1654, and had seen two years’ service in
the West Indies under Goodson in 1656 and 1657. In May 1656 he took
part in the sack of Rio de la Hacha. In July 1657 the “Marston Moor”
returned to England and was ordered to be refitted, but by 20th February
1658 Myngs and his frigate were again at Port Royal (C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76,
Addenda, Nos. 295, 297). After Admiral Goodson’s return to England
(Ibid., No. 1202) Myngs seems to have been the chief naval officer in the
West Indies, and greatly distinguished himself in his naval actions against the
Spaniards.

Footnote 147: (return)

Tanner MSS., LI. 82.

Footnote 148: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76, Addenda, Nos. 315, 316. Some figures put it
as high as £500,000.

Footnote 149: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76, Addenda, Nos. 315, 318. Captain Wm. Dalyson
wrote home, on 23rd January 1659/60, that he verily believed if the
General (Doyley) were at home to answer for himself, Captain Myngs would
be found no better than he is, a proud-speaking vain fool, and a knave in
cheating the State and robbing merchants. Ibid., No. 328.

Footnote 150: (return)

Ibid., Nos. 327, 331.

Footnote 151: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1675-76, Addenda, No. 326.

Footnote 152: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 44, f. 318.

Footnote 153: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, Nos. 17, 61.

Footnote 154: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 20.

Footnote 155: (return)

Ibid., No. 145.

Footnote 156: (return)

Ibid., Nos. 259, 278. In Lord Windsor’s original
instructions of 21st March 1662 he was empowered to search ships
suspected of trading with the Spaniards and to adjudicate the same in
the Admiralty Court. A fortnight later, however, the King and Council
seem to have completely changed their point of view, and this too in
spite of the Navigation Laws which prohibited the colonies from trading
with any but the mother-country.

Footnote 157: (return)

Art. ix. of the treaty. Cf. Dumont: Corps
diplomatique, T.V., pt. ii. p. 625. Cf. also C.S.P. Venetian,
1604, p. 189:—”I wished to hear from His Majesty’s own lips” (wrote the
Venetian ambassador in November 1604),
“how he read the clause about the India navigation, and I said, ‘Sire, your
subjects may trade with Spain and Flanders but not with the Indies.’ ‘Why
not?’ said the King. ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘the clause is read in that sense.’
‘They are making a great error, whoever they are that hold this view,’ said
His Majesty; ‘the meaning is quite clear.'”

Footnote 158: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 35.

Footnote 159: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 61.

Footnote 160: (return)

Ibid., No. 259.

Footnote 161: (return)

Ibid., No. 355.

Footnote 162: (return)

Ibid., No. 364.

Footnote 163: (return)

Thurloe Papers, IV. p. 154.

Footnote 164: (return)

Thurloe Papers, IV. p. 457.

Footnote 165: (return)

Beeston’s Journal.

Footnote 166: (return)

Calendar of the Heathcote MSS. (pr. by Hist. MSS. Commiss.),
p. 34.

Footnote 167: (return)

Calendar of the Heathcote MSS., p. 34. Cf. also C.S.P. Colon.,
1661-68, No. 384:—”An act for the sale of five copper guns taken at St.
Jago de Cuba.”

Footnote 168: (return)

Beeston’s Journal.

Footnote 169: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 46.

Footnote 170: (return)

Ibid., vol. 47.

Footnote 171: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, Nos. 294, 375.

Footnote 172: (return)

Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 11,410, f. 16.

Footnote 173: (return)

Ibid., f. 6.

Footnote 174: (return)

Dampier also says of Campeache that “it makes a fine show, being built
all with good stone … the roofs flattish after the Spanish fashion, and
covered with pantile.”—Ed. 1906, ii. p. 147.

Footnote 175: (return)

However, the writer of the “Present State of Jamaica” says (p. 39)
that Myngs got no great plunder, neither at Campeache nor at St. Jago.

Footnote 176: (return)

Beeston’s Journal; Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 13,964, f. 16:—”Original
letter from the Licentiate Maldonado de Aldana to Don Francisco Calderon
y Romero, giving him an account of the taking of Campeache in 1663″; dated
Campeache, March 1663.

According to the Spanish relation there were fourteen vessels in the
English fleet, one large ship of forty-four guns (the “Centurion”?) and thirteen
smaller ones. The discrepancy in the numbers of the fleet may be explained
by the probability that other Jamaican privateering vessels joined it after its
departure from Port Royal. Beeston writes in his Journal that the privateer
“Blessing,” Captain Mitchell, commander, brought news on 28th February
that the Spaniards in Campeache had notice from St. Jago of the English
design and made elaborate preparations for the defence of the town. This is
contradicted by the Spanish report, in which it appears that the authorities
in Campeache had been culpably negligent in not maintaining the defences
with men, powder or provisions.

Footnote 177: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 46. Fanshaw to Sec. Bennet, 13th-23rd July 1664.

Footnote 178: (return)

Ibid., vol. 45. Letter of Consul Rumbold, 31st March 1663.

Footnote 179: (return)

Ibid., 4th May 1663.

Footnote 180: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 443. Dated 28th April 1663.

Footnote 181: (return)

Ibid., Nos. 441, 442.

Footnote 182: (return)

Rawlinson MSS., A. 347, f. 62.

Footnote 183: (return)

Beeston’s Journal.

Footnote 184: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 571; Beeston’s Journal.

Footnote 185: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 46, ff. 94, 96, 108, 121, 123, 127, 309
(April-August 1664).

Footnote 186: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, Nos. 697, 744, 812.

Footnote 187: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 46, f. 280.

Footnote 188: (return)

S.P. Spain, vol. 46, f. 311.

CHAPTER IV

TORTUGA—1655-1664

When the Chevalier de Fontenay was driven from
Tortuga in January 1654, the Spaniards left a
small garrison to occupy the fort and prevent
further settlements of French and English buccaneers.
These troops possessed the island for about eighteen
months, but on the approach of the expedition under Penn
and Venables were ordered by the Conde de Penalva,
President of S. Domingo, to demolish the fort, bury the
artillery and other arms, and retire to his aid in Hispaniola.¹⁸⁹
{114}
Some six months later an Englishman, Elias Watts,¹⁹⁰ with
his family and ten or twelve others, came from Jamaica
in a shallop, re-settled the island, and raised a battery of
four guns upon the ruins of the larger fort previously
erected by the French. Watts received a commission for
the island from General Brayne, who was then governor
of Jamaica, and in a short time gathered about him a
colony of about 150, both English and French. Among
these new-comers was a “poor distressed gentleman” by
the name of James Arundell, formerly a colonel in the
Royalist army and now banished from England, who
eventually married Watts’ daughter and became the head
of the colony.

It was while Watts was governor of Tortuga, if we are
to believe the Jesuit, Dutertre, that the buccaneers
determined to avenge the treachery of the Spaniards
to a French vessel in that neighbourhood by plundering
the city of St. Jago in Hispaniola. According to this
historian, who from the style of the narrative seems to be
reporting the words of an eye-witness, the buccaneers,
including doubtless both hunters and corsairs, formed a
party of 400 men under the leadership of four captains and
obtained a commission for the enterprise from the English
governor, who was very likely looking forward to a share
{115}
of the booty. Compelling the captain of a frigate which
had just arrived from Nantes to lend his ship, they embarked
in it and in two or three other boats found on the
coast for Puerta de Plata, where they landed on Palm
Sunday of 1659.¹⁹¹ St. Jago, which lay in a pleasant, fertile
plain some fifteen or twenty leagues in the interior of
Hispaniola, they approached through the woods on the
night of Holy Wednesday, entered before daybreak, and
surprised the governor in his bed. The buccaneers told
him to prepare to die, whereupon he fell on his knees
and prayed to such effect that they finally offered him his
life for a ransom of 60,000 pieces of eight. They pillaged
for twenty-four hours, taking even the bells, ornaments and
sacred vessels of the churches, and after refreshing themselves
with food and drink, retreated with their plunder
and prisoners, including the governor and chief inhabitants.
Meanwhile the alarm had been given for ten or twelve
leagues round about. Men came in from all directions,
and rallying with the inhabitants of the town till they
amounted to about 1000 men, marched through the woods
by a by-route, got ahead of the buccaneers and attacked
them from ambush. The English and French stood their
ground in spite of inferior numbers, for they were all good
marksmen and every shot told. As the Spaniards persisted,
however, they finally threatened to stab the
governor and all the other prisoners, whereupon the
Spaniards took counsel and retired to their homes. The
invaders lost only ten killed and five or six wounded.
They tarried on the coast several days waiting for the rest
of the promised ransom, but as it failed to arrive they
liberated the prisoners and returned to Tortuga, each adventurer
receiving 300 crowns as his share of the pillage.¹⁹²

In the latter part of 1659 a French gentleman, Jérémie
Deschamps, seigneur du Rausset, who had been one of the
first inhabitants of Tortuga under Levasseur and de
Fontenay, repaired to England and had sufficient influence
there to obtain an order from the Council of State to
Colonel Doyley to give him a commission as governor of
Tortuga, with such instructions as Doyley might think
requisite.¹⁹³ This same du Rausset, it seems, had received
a French commission from Louis XIV. as early as
November 1656.¹⁹⁴ At any rate, he came to Jamaica in
1660 and obtained his commission from Doyley on condition
that he held Tortuga in the English interest.¹⁹⁵
Watts, it seems, had meanwhile learnt that he was to be
superseded by a Frenchman, whereupon he embarked with
his family and all his goods and sought refuge in New
England. About two months later, according to one
story, Doyley heard that Deschamps had given a commission
to a privateer and committed insolences for which
Doyley feared to be called to account. He sent to
remonstrate with him, but Deschamps answered that he
possessed a French commission and that he had better
interest with the powers in England than had the governor
of Jamaica. As there were more French than English on
the island, Deschamps then proclaimed the King of France
and set up the French colours.¹⁹⁶ Doyley as yet had
received no authority from the newly-restored king,
{117}
Charles II., and hesitated to use any force; but he did
give permission to Arundell, Watts’ son-in-law, to surprise
Deschamps and carry him to Jamaica for trial. Deschamps
was absent at the time at Santa Cruz, but Arundell,
relying upon the friendship and esteem which the inhabitants
had felt for his father-in-law, surprised the governor’s
nephew and deputy, the Sieur de la Place, and possessed
himself of the island. By some mischance or neglect,
however, he was disarmed by the French and sent back to
Jamaica.¹⁹⁷ This was not the end of his misfortunes. On
the way to Jamaica he and his company were surprised
by Spaniards in the bay of Matanzas in Cuba,
and carried to Puerto Principe. There, after a month’s
imprisonment, Arundell and Barth. Cock, his shipmaster,
were taken out by negroes into the bush and murdered,
and their heads brought into the town.¹⁹⁸ Deschamps later
returned to France because of ill-health, leaving la Place
to govern the island in his stead, and when the property of
the French Antilles was vested in the new French West
India Company in 1664 he was arrested and sent to the
Bastille. The cause of his arrest is obscure, but it seems
that he had been in correspondence with the English
government, to whom he had offered to restore Tortuga on
condition of being reimbursed with £6000 sterling. A
few days in the Bastille made him think better of his
resolution. He ceded his rights to the company for
15,000 livres, and was released from confinement in
November.¹⁹⁹

The fiasco of Arundell’s attempt was not the only effort
of the English to recover the island. In answer to a
memorial presented by Lord Windsor before his departure
for Jamaica, an Order in Council was delivered to him in
{118}
February 1662, empowering him to use his utmost endeavours
to reduce Tortuga and its governor to obedience.²⁰⁰
The matter was taken up by the Jamaican Council in
September, shortly after Windsor’s arrival;²⁰¹ and on 16th
December an order was issued by deputy-governor Lyttleton
to Captain Robert Munden of the “Charles” frigate
for the transportation of Colonel Samuel Barry and Captain
Langford to Tortuga, where Munden was to receive orders
for reducing the island.²⁰² The design miscarried again,
however, probably because of ill-blood between Barry
and Munden. Clement de Plenneville, who accompanied
Barry, writes that “the expedition failed through
treachery”;²⁰³ and Beeston says in his Journal that Barry,
approaching Tortuga on 30th January, found the French
armed and ready to oppose him, whereupon he ordered
Captain Munden to fire. Munden however refused, sailed
away to Corydon in Hispaniola, where he put Barry and
his men on shore, and then “went away about his
merchandize.”²⁰⁴ Barry made his way in a sloop to Jamaica
where he arrived on 1st March. Langford, however, was
sent to Petit-Goave, an island about the size of Tortuga in
the cul-de-sac at the western end of Hispaniola, where he
was chosen governor by the inhabitants and raised the
first English standard. Petit-Goave had been frequented
by buccaneers since 1659, and after d’Ogeron succeeded
{119}
du Rausset as governor for the French in those regions, it
became with Tortuga one of their chief resorts. In the
latter part of 1664 we find Langford in England petitioning
the king for a commission as governor of Tortuga and the
coast of Hispaniola, and for two ships to go and seize the
smaller island.²⁰⁵ Such a design, however, with the direct
sanction and aid of the English government, might have
endangered a rupture with France. Charles preferred to
leave such irregular warfare to his governor in Jamaica,
whom he could support or disown as best suited the exigencies
of the moment. Langford, moreover, seems not
to have made a brilliant success of his short stay at Petit-Goave,
and was probably distrusted by the authorities both
in England and in the West Indies. When Modyford
came as governor to Jamaica, the possibility of recovering
Tortuga was still discussed, but no effort to effect it was
ever made again.

Footnote 189: (return)

Dutertre, t. iii. p. 126; Add. MSS., 13,992, f. 499.

On 26th February 1656 there arrived at Jamaica a small vessel the
master of which, touching at Tortuga, had found upon the deserted island two
papers, one in Spanish, the other in “sorrie English” (Thurloe Papers, IV.
p. 601). These papers were copies of a proclamation forbidding settlement on
the island, and the English paper (Rawl. MSS., A. 29, f. 500) is printed in
Firth’s “Venables” as follows:—

“The Captane and Sarginge Mager Don Baltearsor Calderon and
Spenoso, Nopte to the President that is now in the sity of Santo-domingo, and
Captane of the gones of the sitye, and Governor and Lord Mare of this
Island, and stranch of this Lland of Tortogo, and Chefe Comander of all for
the Khinge of Spaine.

“Yoo moust understand that all pepell what soever that shall com to this
Iland of the Khinge of Spaine Catholok wich is name is Don Pilep the
Ostere the forth of this name, that with his harmes he hath put of Feleminge
and French men and Englesh with lefee heare from the yeare of 1630 tell the
yeare of thurty fouer and tell the yeare of fifte fouer in wich the Kinge of
Spane uesenge all curtyse and given good quartell to all that was upon this
Iland, after that came and with oute Recepet upon this Iland knowinge that
the Kinge of Spane had planted upon it and fortified in the name of the Kinge
came the forth time the 15th of Augost the last yeare French and Fleminges
to govern this Iland the same Governeore that was heare befor his name was
Themeleon hot man De founttana gentleman of the ourder of Guresalem for
to take this Iland put if fources by se and land and forsed us to beate him oute
of this place with a greate dale of shame, and be caues yoo shall take notes
that wee have puelld doune the Casill and carid all the gonenes and have
puelld doune all the houes and have lefte no thinge, the same Captane and
Sargint-mager in the name of the Kinge wich God blesh hath given yoo notis
that what souer nason souer that shall com to live upon this Iland that thare
shall not a man mother or children cape of the sorde, thare fore I give notiss
to all pepell that they shall have a care with out anye more notis for this is the
order of the Kinge and with out fall you will not want yooer Pamente and this
is the furst and second and thorde time, and this whe leave heare for them that
comes hear to take notis, that when wee com upon you, you shall not pleate
that you dod not know is riten the 25 of August 1656.”

Baltesar Calderon y Espinosa

Por Mandado de Senor Gou^or.

Pedro Fran^co de riva deney xasuss.

Footnote 190: (return)

In Dutertre’s account the name is Eliazouard (Elias Ward).

Footnote 191: (return)

According to a Spanish account of the expedition the date was 1661.
Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 13,992, f. 499.

Footnote 192: (return)

Dutertre, tom. iii. pp. 130-34.

Footnote 193: (return)

Rawl. MSS., A. 347, ff. 31 and 36; S.P. Spain, vol. 47:—Deposition of
Sir Charles Lyttleton; Margry, op. cit., p. 281.

Footnote 194: (return)

Charlevoix, op. cit., liv. vii. p. 36; Vaissière,
op. cit., p. 10.

Footnote 195: (return)

According to Dutertre, Deschamps’ commission extended only to the
French inhabitants upon Tortuga, the French and English living thereafter
under separate governments as at St. Kitts. Dutertre, t. iii. p. 135.

Footnote 196: (return)

Rawl. MSS., A. 347, f. 36.

According to Dutertre’s version, Watts had scarcely forsaken the island
when Deschamps arrived in the Road, and found that the French inhabitants
had already made themselves masters of the colony and had substituted the
French for the English standard. Dutertre, t. iii. p. 136.

Footnote 197: (return)

Rawl. MSS., A. 347, f. 36.

Footnote 198: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 648.

Footnote 199: (return)

Dutertre, t. iii. p. 138; Vaissière, op. cit., p. 11, note 2.

Footnote 200: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 233.

Footnote 201: (return)

Ibid., No. 364.

Footnote 202: (return)

Ibid., No. 390; cf. also No. 474 (1).

Footnote 203: (return)

Ibid., No. 475.

Footnote 204: (return)

Beeston’s Journal, 1st March 1663.

According to Dutertre, some inhabitants of Tortuga ran away to Jamaica
and persuaded the governor that they could no longer endure French domination,
and that if an armed force was sent, it would find no obstacle in restoring
the English king’s authority. Accordingly Col. Barry was despatched to
receive their allegiance, with orders to use no violence but only to accept
their voluntary submission. When Barry landed on Tortuga, however, with
no other support than a proclamation and a harangue, the French inhabitants
laughed in his face, and he returned to Jamaica in shame and confusion.
Dutertre, t. iii. pp. 137-38.

Footnote 205: (return)

C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, Nos. 817-21.

CHAPTER V

PORTO BELLO AND PANAMA

On 4th January 1664, the king wrote to Sir Thomas
Modyford in Barbadoes that he had chosen him
governor of Jamaica.²⁰⁶ Modyford, who had lived
as a planter in Barbadoes since 1650, had taken a prominent
share in the struggles between Parliamentarians
and Royalists in the little island. He was a member of
the Council, and had been governor for a short time in
1660. His commission and instructions for Jamaica²⁰⁷ were
carried to the West Indies by Colonel Edward Morgan,
who went as Modyford’s deputy-governor and landed in
Barbadoes on 21st April.²⁰⁸ Modyford was instructed,
among other things, to prohibit the granting of letters of
marque, and particularly to encourage trade and maintain
friendly relations with the Spanish dominions. Sir Richard
Fanshaw had just been appointed to go to Spain and
negotiate a treaty for wider commercial privileges in the
Indies, and Charles saw that the daily complaints of
violence and depredation done by Jamaican ships on the
King of Spain’s subjects were scarcely calculated to increase
the good-will and compliance of the Spanish Court.
Nor had the attempt in the Indies to force a trade upon
the Spaniards been brilliantly successful. It was soon
evident that another course of action was demanded. Sir
Thomas Modyford seems at first to have been sincerely
{121}
anxious to suppress privateering and conciliate his Spanish
neighbours. On receiving his commission and instructions
he immediately prepared letters to the President of San
Domingo, expressing his fair intentions and requesting the
co-operation of the Spaniards.²⁰⁹ Modyford himself arrived
in Jamaica on 1st June,²¹⁰ proclaimed an entire cessation of
hostilities,²¹¹ and on the 16th sent the “Swallow” ketch to
Cartagena to acquaint the governor with what he had
done. On almost the same day letters were forwarded
from England and from Ambassador Fanshaw in Madrid,
strictly forbidding all violences in the future against the
Spanish nation, and ordering Modyford to inflict condign
punishment on every offender, and make entire restitution
and satisfaction to the sufferers.²¹²

The letters for San Domingo, which had been forwarded
to Jamaica with Colonel Morgan and thence dispatched to
Hispaniola before Modyford’s arrival, received a favourable
answer, but that was about as far as the matter ever
got. The buccaneers, moreover, the principal grievance of
the Spaniards, still remained at large. As Thomas Lynch
wrote on 25th May, “It is not in the power of the governor
to have or suffer a commerce, nor will any necessity or
advantage bring private Spaniards to Jamaica, for we and
they have used too many mutual barbarisms to have a
sudden correspondence. When the king was restored, the
Spaniards thought the manners of the English nation
changed too, and adventured twenty or thirty vessels to
Jamaica for blacks, but the surprises and irruptions by C.
Myngs, for whom the governor of San Domingo has upbraided
the commissioners, made the Spaniards redouble
their malice, and nothing but an order from Spain can give
{122}
us admittance or trade.”²¹³ For a short time, however, a
serious effort was made to recall the privateers. Several
prizes which were brought into Port Royal were seized and
returned to their owners, while the captors had their commissions
taken from them. Such was the experience of
one Captain Searles, who in August brought in two
Spanish vessels, both of which were restored to the
Spaniards, and Searles deprived of his rudder and sails as
security against his making further depredations upon the
Dons.²¹⁴ In November Captain Morris Williams sent a
note to Governor Modyford, offering to come in with a rich
prize of logwood, indigo and silver, if security were given
that it should be condemned to him for the payment of his
debts in Jamaica; and although the governor refused to
give any promises the prize was brought in eight days
later. The goods were seized and sold in the interest of
the Spanish owner.²¹⁵ Nevertheless, the effects of the proclamation
were not at all encouraging. In the first month
only three privateers came in with their commissions, and
Modyford wrote to Secretary Bennet on 30th June that he
feared the only effect of the proclamation would be to
drive them to the French in Tortuga. He therefore
thought it prudent, he continued, to dispense somewhat
with the strictness of his instructions, “doing by degrees
and moderation what he had at first resolved to execute
suddenly and severely.”²¹⁶

Tortuga was really the crux of the whole difficulty.
Back in 1662 Colonel Doyley, in his report to the Lord
Chancellor after his return to England, had suggested the
{123}
reduction of Tortuga to English obedience as the only
effective way of dealing with the buccaneers;²¹⁷ and Modyford
in 1664 also realized the necessity of this preliminary
step.²¹⁸ The conquest of Tortuga, however, was no longer
the simple task it might have been four or five years
earlier. The inhabitants of the island were now almost
entirely French, and with their companions on the coast
of Hispaniola had no intention of submitting to English
dictation. The buccaneers, who had become numerous
and independent and made Tortuga one of their principal
retreats, would throw all their strength in the balance
against an expedition the avowed object of whose coming
was to make their profession impossible. The colony,
moreover, received an incalculable accession of strength in
the arrival of Bertrand d’Ogeron, the governor sent out in
1665 by the new French West India Company. D’Ogeron
was one of the most remarkable figures in the West Indies
in the second half of the seventeenth century. Of broad
imagination and singular kindness of heart, with an indomitable
will and a mind full of resource, he seems to
have been an ideal man for the task, not only of reducing
to some semblance of law and order a people who had
never given obedience to any authority, but also of making
palatable the régime and exclusive privileges of a private
trading company. D’Ogeron first established himself at
Port Margot on the coast of Hispaniola opposite Tortuga
in the early part of 1665; and here the adventurers at
once gave him to understand that they would never submit
to any mere company, much less suffer an interruption
of their trade with the Dutch, who had supplied
them with necessities at a time when it was not even
known in France that there were Frenchmen in that region.
{124}
D’Ogeron pretended to subscribe to these conditions,
passed over to Tortuga where he received the submission
of la Place, and then to Petit-Goave and Leogane, in the
cul-de-sac of Hispaniola. There he made his headquarters,
adopted every means to attract planters and
engagés, and firmly established his authority. He made
advances from his own purse without interest to adventurers
who wished to settle down to planting, bought two
ships to facilitate trade between the colony and France,
and even contrived to have several lots of fifty women
each brought over from France to be sold and distributed
as wives amongst the colonists. The settlements soon put
on a new air of prosperity, and really owed their existence
as a permanent French colony to the efforts of this new
governor.²¹⁹ It was under the administration of d’Ogeron
that l’Olonnais,²²⁰ Michel le Basque, and most of the French
buccaneers flourished, whose exploits are celebrated in
Exquemelin’s history.

The conquest of Tortuga was not the only measure
necessary for the effectual suppression of the buccaneers.
Five or six swift cruisers were also required to pursue and
bring to bay those corsairs who refused to come in with
their commissions.²²¹ Since the Restoration the West
Indies had been entirely denuded of English men-of-war;
while the buccaneers, with the tacit consent or encouragement
of Doyley, had at the same time increased both in
numbers and boldness. Letters written from Jamaica in
1664 placed the number scattered abroad in privateering
at from 1500 to 2000, sailing in fourteen or fifteen ships.²²²
They were desperate men, accustomed to living at sea,
with no trade but burning and plundering, and unlikely
{125}
to take orders from any but stronger and faster frigates.
Nor was this condition of affairs surprising when we consider
that, in the seventeenth century, there flowed from
Europe to the West Indies adventurers from every class
of society; men doubtless often endowed with strong
personalities, enterprising and intrepid; but often, too, of
mediocre intelligence or little education, and usually without
either money or scruples. They included many who
had revolted from the narrow social laws of European
countries, and were disinclined to live peaceably within the
bounds of any organized society. Many, too, had belonged
to rebellious political factions at home, men of the better
classes who were banished or who emigrated in order to
keep their heads upon their shoulders. In France the total
exhaustion of public and private fortune at the end of the
religious wars disposed many to seek to recoup themselves
out of the immense colonial riches of the Spaniards;
while the disorders of the Rebellion and the Commonwealth
in England caused successive emigrations of
Puritans and Loyalists to the newer England beyond
the seas. At the close of the Thirty Years’ War, too, a
host of French and English adventurers, who had fattened
upon Germany and her misfortunes, were left without a
livelihood, and doubtless many resorted to emigration as
the sole means of continuing their life of freedom and even
of licence. Coming to the West Indies these men, so
various in origin and character, hoped soon to acquire
there the riches which they lost or coveted at home; and
their expectations deceived, they often broke in a formal
and absolute manner the bonds which attached them to their
fellow humanity. Jamaica especially suffered in this
respect, for it had been colonized in the first instance by
a discontented, refractory soldiery, and it was being recruited
largely by transported criminals and vagabonds.
In contrast with the policy of Spain, who placed the
{126}
most careful restrictions upon the class of emigrants sent
to her American possessions, England from the very
beginning used her colonies, and especially the West
Indian islands, as a dumping-ground for her refuse
population. Within a short time a regular trade
sprang up for furnishing the colonies with servile
labour from the prisons of the mother country. Scots
captured at the battles of Dunbar and Worcester,²²³
English, French, Irish and Dutch pirates lying in
the gaols of Dorchester and Plymouth,²²⁴ if “not thought
fit to be tried for their lives,” were shipped to Barbadoes,
Jamaica, and the other Antilles. In August 1656 the
Council of State issued an order for the apprehension
of all lewd and dangerous persons, rogues, vagrants
and other idlers who had no way of livelihood and
refused to work, to be transported by contractors to
the English plantations in America;²²⁵ and in June 1661
the Council for Foreign Plantations appointed a committee
to consider the same matter.²²⁶ Complaints were often
made that children and apprentices were “seduced or
spirited away” from their parents and masters and concealed
upon ships sailing for the colonies; and an office of
{127}
registry was established to prevent this abuse.²²⁷ In 1664
Charles granted a licence for five years to Sir James
Modyford, brother of Sir Thomas, to take all felons convicted
in the circuits and at the Old Bailey who were
afterwards reprieved for transportation to foreign plantations,
and to transmit them to the governor of Jamaica;²²⁸
and this practice was continued throughout the whole of
the buccaneering period.

Privateering opened a channel by which these disorderly
spirits, impatient of the sober and laborious life of
the planter, found an employment agreeable to their
tastes. An example had been set by the plundering expeditions
sent out by Fortescue, Brayne and Doyley, and
when these naval excursions ceased, the sailors and others
who had taken part in them fell to robbing on their private
account. Sir Charles Lyttleton, we have seen, zealously
defended and encouraged the freebooters; and Long, the
historian of Jamaica, justified their existence on the
ground that many traders were attracted to the island by
the plunder with which Port Royal was so abundantly
stocked, and that the prosperity of the colony was founded
upon the great demand for provisions for the outfit of the
privateers. These effects, however, were but temporary
and superficial, and did not counterbalance the manifest
evils of the practice, especially the discouragement to
planting, and the element of turbulence and unrest ever
present in the island. Under such conditions Governor
Modyford found it necessary to temporise with the
marauders, and perhaps he did so the more readily because
he felt that they were still needed for the security of the
colony. A war between England and the States-General
then seemed imminent, and the governor considered that
unless he allowed the buccaneers to dispose of their booty
{128}
when they came in to Port Royal, they might, in event of
hostilities breaking out, go to the Dutch at Curaçao and
other islands, and prey upon Jamaican commerce. On
the other hand, if, by adopting a conciliatory attitude, he
retained their allegiance, they would offer the handiest
and most effective instrument for driving the Dutch themselves
out of the Indies.²²⁹ He privately told one captain,
who brought in a Spanish prize, that he only stopped the
Admiralty proceedings to “give a good relish to the
Spaniard”; and that although the captor should have satisfaction,
the governor could not guarantee him his ship. So
Sir Thomas persuaded some merchants to buy the prize-goods
and contributed one quarter of the money himself,
with the understanding that he should receive nothing if the
Spaniards came to claim their property.²³⁰ A letter from
Secretary Bennet, on 12th November 1664, confirmed the
governor in this course;²³¹ and on 2nd February 1665, three
weeks before the declaration of war against Holland, a
warrant was issued to the Duke of York, High Admiral of
England, to grant, through the colonial governors and
vice-admirals, commissions of reprisal upon the ships and
goods of the Dutch.²³² Modyford at once took advantage
of this liberty. Some fourteen pirates, who in the
beginning of February had been tried and condemned to
death, were pardoned; and public declaration was made
that commissions would be granted against the Hollanders.
Before nightfall two commissions had been taken out, and
all the rovers were making applications and planning how
to seize Curaçao.²³³ Modyford drew up an elaborate design²³⁴
for rooting out at one and the same time the Dutch settlements
and the French buccaneers, and on 20th April he
{129}
wrote that Lieutenant-Colonel Morgan had sailed with ten
ships and some 500 men, chiefly “reformed prisoners,”
resolute fellows, and well armed with fusees and pistols.²³⁵
Their plan was to fall upon the Dutch fleet trading at St.
Kitts, capture St. Eustatius, Saba, and perhaps Curaçao,
and on the homeward voyage visit the French settlements
on Hispaniola and Tortuga. “All this is prepared,” he wrote,
“by the honest privateer, at the old rate of no purchase no
pay, and it will cost the king nothing considerable, some
powder and mortar-pieces.” On the same day, 20th April,
Admiral de Ruyter, who had arrived in the Indies with a
fleet of fourteen sail, attacked the forts and shipping at
Barbadoes, but suffered considerable damage and retired
after a few hours. At Montserrat and Nevis, however, he
was more successful and captured sixteen merchant ships,
after which he sailed for Virginia and New York.²³⁶

The buccaneers enrolled in Colonel Morgan’s expedition
proved to be troublesome allies. Before their
departure from Jamaica most of them mutinied, and
refused to sail until promised by Morgan that the plunder
should be equally divided.²³⁷ On 17th July, however, the
expedition made its rendezvous at Montserrat, and on the
23rd arrived before St. Eustatius. Two vessels had been
lost sight of, a third, with the ironical name of the “Olive
Branch,” had sailed for Virginia, and many stragglers had
been left behind at Montserrat, so that Morgan could
muster only 326 men for the assault. There was only one
landing-place on the island, with a narrow path accommodating
but two men at a time leading to an eminence
which was crowned with a fort and 450 Dutchmen.
Morgan landed his division first, and Colonel Carey
followed. The enemy, it seems, gave them but one small
{130}
volley and then retreated to the fort. The governor sent
forward three men to parley, and on receiving a summons
to surrender, delivered up the fort with eleven large guns
and considerable ammunition. “It is supposed they were
drunk or mad,” was the comment made upon the rather
disgraceful defence.²³⁸ During the action Colonel Morgan,
who was an old man and very corpulent, was overcome
by the hard marching and extraordinary heat, and died.
Colonel Carey, who succeeded him in command, was
anxious to proceed at once to the capture of the Dutch
forts on Saba, St. Martins and Tortola; but the buccaneers
refused to stir until the booty got at St. Eustatius was
divided—nor were the officers and men able to agree on
the manner of sharing. The plunder, besides guns and
ammunition, included about 900 slaves, negro and Indian,
with a large quantity of live stock and cotton. Meanwhile
a party of seventy had crossed over to the island
of Saba, only four leagues distant, and secured its
surrender on the same terms as St. Eustatius. As the men
had now become very mutinous, and on a muster numbered
scarcely 250, the officers decided that they could not
reasonably proceed any further and sailed for Jamaica,
leaving a small garrison on each of the islands. Most of
the Dutch, about 250 in number, were sent to St. Martins,
but a few others, with some threescore English, Irish and
Scotch, took the oath of allegiance and remained.²³⁹

Encouraged by a letter from the king,²⁴⁰ Governor
Modyford continued his exertions against the Dutch. In
January (?) 1666 two buccaneer captains, Searles and
Stedman, with two small ships and only eighty men took
the island of Tobago, near Trinidad, and destroyed everything
they could not carry away. Lord Willoughby,
governor of Barbadoes, had also fitted out an expedition
to take the island, but the Jamaicans were three or four
days before him. The latter were busy with their work of
pillage, when Willoughby arrived and demanded the
island in the name of the king; and the buccaneers condescended
to leave the fort and the governor’s house standing
only on condition that Willoughby gave them liberty
to sell their plunder in Barbadoes.²⁴¹ Modyford, meanwhile,
greatly disappointed by the miscarriage of the design
against Curaçao, called in the aid of the “old privateer,”
Captain Edward Mansfield, and in the autumn of 1665,
with the hope of sending another armament against the
island, appointed a rendezvous for the buccaneers in
Bluefields Bay.²⁴²

In January 1666 war against England was openly
declared by France in support of her Dutch allies, and in
the following month Charles II. sent letters to his governors
in the West Indies and the North American colonies,
apprising them of the war and urging them to attack their
French neighbours.²⁴³ The news of the outbreak of
hostilities did not reach Jamaica until 2nd July, but
already in December of the previous year warning had
{132}
been sent out to the West Indies of the coming rupture.²⁴⁴
Governor Modyford, therefore, seeing the French very
much increased in Hispaniola, concluded that it was high
time to entice the buccaneers from French service and
bind them to himself by issuing commissions against the
Spaniards. The French still permitted the freebooters to
dispose of Spanish prizes in their ports, but the better
market afforded by Jamaica was always a sufficient
consideration to attract not only the English buccaneers,
but the Dutch and French as well. Moreover, the difficulties
of the situation, which Modyford had repeatedly
enlarged upon in his letters, seem to have been appreciated
by the authorities in England, for in the spring of 1665,
following upon Secretary Bennet’s letter of 12th November
and shortly after the outbreak of the Dutch war, the Duke
of Albemarle had written to Modyford in the name of the
king, giving him permission to use his own discretion in
granting commissions against the Dons.²⁴⁵ Modyford was
convinced that all the circumstances were favourable to
such a course of action, and on 22nd February assembled
the Council. A resolution was passed that it was to the
interest of the island to grant letters of marque against
the Spaniards,²⁴⁶ and a proclamation to this effect was
published by the governor at Port Royal and Tortuga.
In the following August Modyford sent home to Bennet,
now become Lord Arlington, an elaborate defence of his
actions. “Your Lordship very well knows,” wrote Modyford,
“how great an aversion I had for the privateers while
at Barbadoes, but after I had put His Majesty’s orders for
restitution in strict execution, I found my error in the
decay of the forts and wealth of this place, and also the
affections of this people to His Majesty’s service; yet I
{133}
continued discountenancing and punishing those kind of
people till your Lordship’s of the 12th November 1664
arrived, commanding a gentle usage of them; still we
went to decay, which I represented to the Lord General
faithfully the 6th of March following, who upon serious
consideration with His Majesty and the Lord Chancellor,
by letter of 1st June 1665, gave me latitude to
grant or not commissions against the Spaniard, as I
found it for the advantage of His Majesty’s service and the
good of this island. I was glad of this power, yet
resolved not to use it unless necessity drove me to it; and
that too when I saw how poor the fleets returning from
Statia were, so that vessels were broken up and the men
disposed of for the coast of Cuba to get a livelihood
and so be wholly alienated from us. Many stayed at the
Windward Isles, having not enough to pay their engagements,
and at Tortuga and among the French buccaneers;
still I forebore to make use of my power, hoping their
hardships and great hazards would in time reclaim them
from that course of life. But about the beginning of
March last I found that the guards of Port Royal, which
under Colonel Morgan were 600, had fallen to 138, so I
assembled the Council to advise how to strengthen that
most important place with some of the inland forces; but
they all agreed that the only way to fill Port Royal with
men was to grant commissions against the Spaniards,
which they were very pressing in … and looking on our
weak condition, the chief merchants gone from Port Royal,
no credit given to privateers for victualling, etc., and
rumours of war with the French often repeated, I issued
a declaration of my intentions to grant commissions against
the Spaniards. Your Lordship cannot imagine what an
universal change there was on the faces of men and things,
ships repairing, great resort of workmen and labourers to
Port Royal, many returning, many debtors released out of
{134}
prison, and the ships from the Curaçao voyage, not daring
to come in for fear of creditors, brought in and fitted out
again, so that the regimental forces at Port Royal are near
400. Had it not been for that seasonable action, I could
not have kept my place against the French buccaneers,
who would have ruined all the seaside plantations at least,
whereas I now draw from them mainly, and lately David
Marteen, the best man of Tortuga, that has two frigates at
sea, has promised to bring in both.”²⁴⁷

In so far as the buccaneers affected the mutual relations
of England and Spain, it after all could make little difference
whether commissions were issued in Jamaica or not,
for the plundering and burning continued, and the
harassed Spanish-Americans, only too prone to call the
rogues English of whatever origin they might really be,
continued to curse and hate the English nation and make
cruel reprisals whenever possible. Moreover, every expedition
into Spanish territory, finding the Spaniards very
weak and very rich, gave new incentive to such endeavour.
While Modyford had been standing now on one foot, now
on the other, uncertain whether to repulse the buccaneers
or not, secretly anxious to welcome them, but fearing the
authorities at home, the corsairs themselves had entirely
ignored him. The privateers whom Modyford had invited
to rendezvous in Bluefield’s Bay in November 1665 had
chosen Captain Mansfield as their admiral, and in the
middle of January sailed from the south cays of Cuba for
Curaçao. In the meantime, however, because they had
been refused provisions which, according to Modyford’s
account, they sought to buy from the Spaniards in Cuba,
they had marched forty-two miles into the island, and on
the strength of Portuguese commissions which they held
against the Spaniards, had plundered and burnt the town
of Sancti Spiritus, routed a body of 200 horse, carried
{135}
some prisoners to the coast, and for their ransom extorted
300 head of cattle.²⁴⁸ The rich and easy profits to be got by
plundering the Spaniards were almost too much for the
loyalty of the men, and Modyford, hearing of many
defections from their ranks, had despatched Captain
Beeston on 10th November to divert them, if possible, from
Sancti Spiritus, and confirm them in their designs against
Curaçao.²⁴⁹ The officers of the expedition, indeed, sent to
the governor a letter expressing their zeal for the enterprise;
but the men still held off, and the fleet, in consequence,
eventually broke up. Two vessels departed for
Tortuga, and four others, joined by two French rovers,
sailed under Mansfield to attempt the recapture of
Providence Island, which, since 1641, had been garrisoned
by the Spaniards and used as a penal settlement.²⁵⁰ Being
resolved, as Mansfield afterwards told the governor of
Jamaica, never to see Modyford’s face until he had done
some service to the king, he sailed for Providence with
about 200 men,²⁵¹ and approaching the island in the night
by an unusual passage among the reefs, landed early in
{136}
the morning, and surprised and captured the Spanish
commander. The garrison of about 200 yielded up the
fort on the promise that they would be carried to the
mainland. Twenty-seven pieces of ordnance were taken,
many of which, it is said, bore the arms of Queen
Elizabeth engraved upon them. Mansfield left thirty-five
men under command of a Captain Hattsell to hold the
island, and sailed with his prisoners for Central America.
After cruising along the shores of the mainland, he
ascended the San Juan River and entered and sacked
Granada, the capital of Nicaragua. From Granada the
buccaneers turned south into Costa Rica, burning plantations,
breaking the images in the churches, ham-stringing
cows and mules, cutting down the fruit trees, and in
general destroying everything they found. The Spanish
governor had only thirty-six soldiers at his disposal and
scarcely any firearms; but he gathered the inhabitants and
some Indians, blocked the roads, laid ambuscades, and did
all that his pitiful means permitted to hinder the progress
of the invaders. The freebooters had designed to visit
Cartago, the chief city of the province, and plunder it as
they had plundered Granada. They penetrated only as
far as Turrialva, however, whence weary and footsore from
their struggle through the Cordillera, and harassed by the
Spaniards, they retired through the province of Veragua in
military order to their ships.²⁵² On 12th June the buccaneers,
laden with booty, sailed into Port Royal. There was at
that moment no declared war between England and
{137}
Spain. Yet the governor, probably because he believed
Mansfield to be justified, ex post facto, by the issue of
commissions against the Spaniards in the previous
February, did no more than mildly reprove him for acting
without his orders; and “considering its good situation
for favouring any design on the rich main,” he accepted
the tender of the island in behalf of the king. He
despatched Major Samuel Smith, who had been one of
Mansfield’s party, with a few soldiers to reinforce the
English garrison;²⁵³ and on 10th November the Council
in England set the stamp of their approval upon his
actions by issuing a commission to his brother, Sir
James Modyford, to be lieutenant-governor of the new
acquisition.²⁵⁴

In August 1665, only two months before the departure
of Mansfield from Jamaica, there had returned to Port
Royal from a raid in the same region three privateer
captains named Morris, Jackman and Morgan.²⁵⁵ These
men, with their followers, doubtless helped to swell the
ranks of Mansfield’s buccaneers, and it was probably their
report of the wealth of Central America which induced
Mansfield to emulate their performance. In the previous
January these three captains, still pretending to sail under
commissions from Lord Windsor, had ascended the river
{138}
Tabasco, in the province of Campeache, with 107 men, and
guided by Indians made a detour of 300 miles, according
to their account, to Villa de Mosa,²⁵⁶ which they took and
plundered. When they returned to the mouth of the
river, they found that their ships had been seized by
Spaniards, who, on their approach, attacked them 300
strong. The Spaniards, softened by the heat and indolent
life of the tropics, were no match for one-third their
number of desperadoes, and the buccaneers beat them off
without the loss of a man. The freebooters then fitted up
two barques and four canoes, sailed to Rio Garta and
stormed the place with only thirty men; crossed the Gulf
of Honduras to the Island of Roatan to rest and obtain
fresh water, and then captured and plundered the port of
Truxillo. Down the Mosquito Coast they passed like a
devouring flame, consuming all in their path. Anchoring
in Monkey Bay, they ascended the San Juan River in
canoes for a distance of 100 miles to Lake Nicaragua.
The basin into which they entered they described as a
veritable paradise, the air cool and wholesome, the shores
of the lake full of green pastures and broad savannahs
dotted with horses and cattle, and round about all a
coronal of azure mountains. Hiding by day among the
numerous islands and rowing all night, on the fifth night
they landed near the city of Granada, just a year before
Mansfield’s visit to the place. The buccaneers marched
unobserved to the central square of the city, overturned
eighteen cannon mounted there, seized the magazine, and
{139}
took and imprisoned in the cathedral 300 of the citizens.
They plundered for sixteen hours, then released their
prisoners, and taking the precaution to scuttle all the
boats, made their way back to the sea coast. The town
was large and pleasant, containing seven churches besides
several colleges and monasteries, and most of the buildings
were constructed of stone. About 1000 Indians, driven to
rebellion by the cruelty and oppression of the Spaniards,
accompanied the marauders and would have massacred the
prisoners, especially the religious, had they not been told
that the English had no intentions of retaining their
conquest. The news of the exploit produced a lively
impression in Jamaica, and the governor suggested Central
America as the “properest place” for an attack from
England on the Spanish Indies.²⁵⁷

Providence Island was now in the hands of an English
garrison, and the Spaniards were not slow to realise that
the possession of this outpost by the buccaneers might
be but the first step to larger conquests on the mainland.
The President of Panama, Don Juan Perez de Guzman,
immediately took steps to recover the island. He transferred
himself to Porto Bello, embargoed an English
ship of thirty guns, the “Concord,” lying at anchor there
with licence to trade in negroes, manned it with 350
Spaniards under command of José Sánchez Jiménez,
and sent it to Cartagena. The governor of Cartagena
contributed several small vessels and a hundred or more
men to the enterprise, and on 10th August 1666 the
united Spanish fleet appeared off the shores of Providence.
On the refusal of Major Smith to surrender, the Spaniards
{140}
landed, and on 15th August, after a three days’ siege,
forced the handful of buccaneers, only sixty or seventy
in number, to capitulate. Some of the English defenders
later deposed before Governor Modyford that the
Spaniards had agreed to let them depart in a barque
for Jamaica. However this may be, when the English
came to lay down their arms they were made prisoners
by the Spaniards, carried to Porto Bello, and all except
Sir Thomas Whetstone, Major Smith and Captain
Stanley, the three English captains, submitted to the
most inhuman cruelties. Thirty-three were chained to
the ground in a dungeon 12 feet by 10. They were
forced to work in the water from five in the morning
till seven at night, and at such a rate that the Spaniards
themselves confessed they made one of them do more
work than any three negroes; yet when weak for want
of victuals and sleep, they were knocked down and
beaten with cudgels so that four or five died. “Having
no clothes, their backs were blistered with the sun,
their heads scorched, their necks, shoulders and hands
raw with carrying stones and mortar, their feet chopped
and their legs bruised and battered with the irons, and
their corpses were noisome to one another.” The three
English captains were carried to Panama, and there
cast into a dungeon and bound in irons for seventeen
months.²⁵⁸

On 8th January 1664 Sir Richard Fanshaw, formerly
ambassador to Portugal, had arrived in Madrid from
England to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Spain,
and if possible to patch up a peace between the Spanish
and Portuguese crowns. He had renewed the old
demand for a free commerce in the Indies; and the
negotiations had dragged through the years of 1664 and
{141}
1665, hampered and crossed by the factions in the
Spanish court, the hostile machinations of the Dutch
resident in Madrid, and the constant rumours of cruelties
and desolations by the freebooters in America.²⁵⁹ The
Spanish Government insisted that by sole virtue of the
articles of 1630 there was peace on both sides of the
“Line,” and that the violences of the buccaneers in the
West Indies, and even the presence of English colonists
there, was a breach of the articles. In this fashion they
endeavoured to reduce Fanshaw to the position of a
suppliant for favours which they might only out of their
grace and generosity concede. It was a favourite trick
of Spanish diplomacy, which had been worked many times
before. The English ambassador was, in consequence,
compelled strenuously to deny the existence of any
peace in America, although he realised how ambiguous
his position had been rendered by the original orders of
Charles II. to Modyford in 1664.²⁶⁰ After the death of
Philip IV. in 1665, negotiations were renewed with the
encouragement of the Queen Regent, and on 17th
December provisional articles were signed by Fanshaw
and the Duke de Medina de los Torres and sent to
England for ratification.²⁶¹ Fanshaw died shortly after,
and Lord Sandwich, his successor, finally succeeded in
concluding a treaty on 23rd May 1667.²⁶² The provisions
of the treaty extended to places “where hitherto trade
and commerce hath been accustomed,” and the only
privileges obtained in America were those which had
been granted to the Low Countries by the Treaty of
Munster. On 21st July of the same year a general
peace was concluded at Breda between England, Holland
and France.

It was in the very midst of Lord Sandwich’s negotiations
that Modyford had, as Beeston expresses it in his
Journal, declared war against the Spaniards by the
re-issue of privateering commissions. He had done it
all in his own name, however, so that the king might
disavow him should the exigencies of diplomacy demand
it.²⁶³ Moreover, at this same time, in the middle of 1666,
Albemarle was writing to Modyford that notwithstanding
the negotiations, in which, as he said, the West Indies
were not at all concerned, the governor might still employ
the privateers as formerly, if it be for the benefit of
English interests in the Indies.²⁶⁴ The news of the
general peace reached Jamaica late in 1667; yet Modyford
did not change his policy. It is true that in February
Secretary Lord Arlington had sent directions to restrain
the buccaneers from further acts of violence against the
Spaniards;²⁶⁵ but Modyford drew his own conclusions
from the contradictory orders received from England,
and was conscious, perhaps, that he was only reflecting
the general policy of the home government when he
wrote to Arlington:—”Truly it must be very imprudent
to run the hazard of this place, for obtaining a correspondence
which could not but by orders from Madrid be
had…. The Spaniards look on us as intruders and
trespassers, wheresoever they find us in the Indies, and
use us accordingly; and were it in their power, as it is
fixed in their wills, would soon turn us out of all our
plantations; and is it reasonable that we should quietly let
them grow upon us until they are able to do it? It must be
force alone that can cut in sunder that unneighbourly maxim
of their government to deny all access to strangers.”²⁶⁶

These words were very soon translated into action, for
in June 1668 Henry Morgan, with a fleet of nine or ten
ships and between 400 and 500 men, took and sacked
Porto Bello, one of the strongest cities of Spanish
America, and the emporium for most of the European
trade of the South American continent. Henry Morgan
was a nephew of the Colonel Edward Morgan who died
in the assault of St. Eustatius. He is said to have been
kidnapped at Bristol while he was a mere lad and sold
as a servant in Barbadoes, whence, on the expiration of
his time, he found his way to Jamaica. There he joined
the buccaneers and soon rose to be captain of a ship.
It was probably he who took part in the expedition with
Morris and Jackman to Campeache and Central America.
He afterwards joined the Curaçao armament of Mansfield
and was with the latter when he seized the island of
Providence. After Mansfield’s disappearance Morgan
seems to have taken his place as the foremost buccaneer
leader in Jamaica, and during the next twenty years he was
{144}
one of the most considerable men in the colony. He was
but thirty-three years old when he led the expedition
against Porto Bello.²⁶⁷

In the beginning of 1668 Sir Thomas Modyford,
having had “frequent and strong advice” that the
Spaniards were planning an invasion of Jamaica, had
commissioned Henry Morgan to draw together the
English privateers and take some Spanish prisoners in
order to find out if these rumours were true. The
buccaneers, according to Morgan’s own report to the
governor, were driven to the south cays of Cuba, where
being in want of victuals and “like to starve,” and meeting
some Frenchmen in a similar plight, they put their men
ashore to forage. They found all the cattle driven up
into the country, however, and the inhabitants fled. So
the freebooters marched twenty leagues to Puerto Principe
on the north side of the island, and after a short encounter,
in which the Spanish governor was killed, possessed
themselves of the place. Nothing of value escaped the
rapacity of the invaders, who resorted to the extremes of
torture to draw from their prisoners confessions of hidden
wealth. On the entreaty of the Spaniards they forebore
to fire the town, and for a ransom of 1000 head of cattle
released all the prisoners; but they compelled the
Spaniards to salt the beef and carry it to the ships.²⁶⁸
Morgan reported, with what degree of truth we have no
means of judging, that seventy men had been impressed in
Puerto Principe to go against Jamaica, and that a similar
{145}
levy had been made throughout the island. Considerable
forces, moreover, were expected from the mainland to
rendezvous at Havana and St. Jago, with the final object
of invading the English colony.

On returning to the ships from the sack of Puerto
Principe, Morgan unfolded to his men his scheme of
striking at the very heart of Spanish power in the Indies
by capturing Porto Bello. The Frenchmen among his
followers, it seems, wholly refused to join him in this
larger design, full of danger as it was; so Morgan sailed
away with only the English freebooters, some 400 in
number, for the coasts of Darien. Exquemelin has left us
a narrative of this exploit which is more circumstantial
than any other we possess, and agrees so closely with
what we know from other sources that we must accept
the author’s statement that he was an eye-witness. He
relates the whole story, moreover, in so entertaining and
picturesque a manner that he deserves quotation.

“Captain Morgan,” he says, “who knew very well all
the avenues of this city, as also all the neighbouring coasts,
arrived in the dusk of the evening at the place called
Puerto de Naos, distant ten leagues towards the west of
Porto Bello.²⁶⁹ Being come unto this place, they mounted
the river in their ships, as far as another harbour called
Puerto Pontin, where they came to anchor. Here they
put themselves immediately into boats and canoes, leaving
in the ships only a few men to keep them and conduct
{146}
them the next day unto the port. About midnight they
came to a certain place called Estera longa Lemos, where
they all went on shore, and marched by land to the first
posts of the city. They had in their company a certain
Englishman, who had been formerly a prisoner in those
parts, and who now served them for a guide. Unto him,
and three or four more, they gave commission to take the
sentry, if possible, or to kill him upon the place. But they
laid hands on him and apprehended him with such cunning
as he had no time to give warning with his musket, or
make any other noise. Thus they brought him, with his
hands bound, unto Captain Morgan, who asked him:
‘How things went in the city, and what forces they had’;
with many other circumstances, which he was desirous to
know. After every question they made him a thousand
menaces to kill him, in case he declared not the truth.
Thus they began to advance towards the city, carrying
always the said sentry bound before them. Having
marched about one quarter of a league, they came to the
castle that is nigh unto the city, which presently they
closely surrounded, so that no person could get either in
or out of the said fortress.

“Being thus posted under the walls of the castle,
Captain Morgan commanded the sentry, whom they had
taken prisoner, to speak to those that were within, charging
them to surrender, and deliver themselves up to his discretion;
otherwise they should be all cut in pieces, without
giving quarter to any one. But they would hearken to
none of these threats, beginning instantly to fire; which
gave notice unto the city, and this was suddenly alarmed.
Yet, notwithstanding, although the Governor and soldiers
of the said castle made as great resistance as could be
performed, they were constrained to surrender unto the
Pirates. These no sooner had taken the castle, than they
resolved to be as good as their words, in putting the
{147}
Spaniards to the sword, thereby to strike a terror into
the rest of the city. Hereupon, having shut up all the
soldiers and officers as prisoners into one room, they instantly
set fire to the powder (whereof they found great
quantity), and blew up the whole castle into the air, with
all the Spaniards that were within. This being done, they
pursued the course of their victory, falling upon the city,
which as yet was not in order to receive them. Many of
the inhabitants cast their precious jewels and moneys into
wells and cisterns or hid them in other places underground,
to excuse, as much as were possible, their being totally
robbed. One party of the Pirates being assigned to this
purpose, ran immediately to the cloisters, and took as
many religious men and women as they could find. The
Governor of the city not being able to rally the citizens,
through the huge confusion of the town, retired unto one
of the castles remaining, and from thence began to fire
incessantly at the Pirates. But these were not in the least
negligent either to assault him or defend themselves with
all the courage imaginable. Thus it was observed that,
amidst the horror of the assault, they made very few shot
in vain. For aiming with great dexterity at the mouths
of the guns, the Spaniards were certain to lose one or two
men every time they charged each gun anew.

“The assault of this castle where the Governor was
continued very furious on both sides, from break of day
until noon. Yea, about this time of the day the case was
very dubious which party should conquer or be conquered.
At last the Pirates, perceiving they had lost many men and
as yet advanced but little towards the gaining either this
or the other castles remaining, thought to make use of fireballs,
which they threw with their hands, designing, if
possible, to burn the doors of the castle. But going about
to put this in execution, the Spaniards from the walls let
fall great quantity of stones and earthen pots full of powder
{148}
and other combustible matter, which forced them to desist
from that attempt. Captain Morgan, seeing this generous
defence made by the Spaniards, began to despair of the
whole success of the enterprise. Hereupon many faint
and calm meditations came into his mind; neither could
he determine which way to turn himself in that straitness
of affairs. Being involved in these thoughts, he was
suddenly animated to continue the assault, by seeing the
English colours put forth at one of the lesser castles, then
entered by his men, of whom he presently after spied a
troop that came to meet him proclaiming victory with loud
shouts of joy. This instantly put him upon new resolutions
of making new efforts to take the rest of the castles
that stood out against him; especially seeing the chief
citizens were fled unto them, and had conveyed thither
great part of their riches, with all the plate belonging to
the churches, and other things dedicated to divine service.

“To this effect, therefore, he ordered ten or twelve
ladders to be made, in all possible haste, so broad that
three or four men at once might ascend by them. These
being finished, he commanded all the religious men and
women whom he had taken prisoners to fix them against
the walls of the castle. Thus much he had beforehand
threatened the Governor to perform, in case he delivered
not the castle. But his answer was: ‘He would never
surrender himself alive.’ Captain Morgan was much persuaded
that the Governor would not employ his utmost
forces, seeing religious women and ecclesiastical persons
exposed in the front of the soldiers to the greatest dangers.
Thus the ladders, as I have said, were put into the hands
of religious persons of both sexes; and these were forced,
at the head of the companies, to raise and apply them to
the walls. But Captain Morgan was deceived in his judgment
of this design. For the Governor, who acted like a
brave and courageous soldier, refused not, in performance
{149}
of his duty, to use his utmost endeavours to destroy whosoever
came near the walls. The religious men and women
ceased not to cry unto him and beg of him by all the
Saints of Heaven he would deliver the castle, and hereby
spare both his and their own lives. But nothing could
prevail with the obstinacy and fierceness that had possessed
the Governor’s mind. Thus many of the religious men
and nuns were killed before they could fix the ladders.
Which at last being done, though with great loss of the
said religious people, the Pirates mounted them in great
numbers, and with no less valour; having fireballs in their
hands, and earthen pots full of powder. All which things,
being now at the top of the walls, they kindled and cast in
among the Spaniards.

“This effort of the Pirates was very great, insomuch as
the Spaniards could no longer resist nor defend the castle,
which was now entered. Hereupon they all threw down
their arms, and craved quarter for their lives. Only the
Governor of the city would admit or crave no mercy; but
rather killed many of the Pirates with his own hands, and
not a few of his own soldiers, because they did not stand
to their arms. And although the Pirates asked him if he
would have quarter, yet he constantly answered: ‘By no
means; I had rather die as a valiant soldier, than be
hanged as a coward.’ They endeavoured as much as they
could to take him prisoner. But he defended himself so
obstinately that they were forced to kill him; notwithstanding
all the cries and tears of his own wife and
daughter, who begged of him upon their knees he would
demand quarter and save his life. When the Pirates had
possessed themselves of the castle, which was about night,
they enclosed therein all the prisoners they had taken,
placing the women and men by themselves, with some
guards upon them. All the wounded were put into a
certain apartment by itself, to the intent their own complaints
{150}
might be the cure of their diseases; for no other
was afforded them.

“This being done, they fell to eating and drinking
after their usual manner; that is to say, committing in
both these things all manner of debauchery and excess…. After
such manner they delivered themselves up
unto all sort of debauchery, that if there had been found
only fifty courageous men, they might easily have re-taken
the city, and killed all the Pirates. The next day, having
plundered all they could find, they began to examine some
of the prisoners (who had been persuaded by their companions
to say they were the richest of the town), charging
them severely to discover where they had hidden their
riches and goods. But not being able to extort anything
out of them, as they were not the right persons that
possessed any wealth, they at last resolved to torture
them. This they performed with such cruelty that many
of them died upon the rack, or presently after. Soon
after, the President of Panama had news brought him of
the pillage and ruin of Porto Bello. This intelligence
caused him to employ all his care and industry to raise
forces, with design to pursue and cast out the Pirates
from thence. But these cared little for what extraordinary
means the President used, as having their ships nigh at
hand, and being determined to set fire unto the city and
retreat. They had now been at Porto Bello fifteen days,
in which space of time they had lost many of their men,
both by the unhealthiness of the country and the extravagant
debaucheries they had committed.²⁷⁰

“Hereupon they prepared for a departure, carrying on
{151}
board their ships all the pillage they had gotten. But,
before all, they provided the fleet with sufficient victuals
for the voyage. While these things were getting ready,
Captain Morgan sent an injunction unto the prisoners,
that they should pay him a ransom for the city, or else he
would by fire consume it to ashes, and blow up all the
castles into the air. Withal, he commanded them to send
speedily two persons to seek and procure the sum he
demanded, which amounted to one hundred thousand
pieces of eight. Unto this effect, two men were sent to
the President of Panama, who gave him an account of all
these tragedies. The President, having now a body of
men in readiness, set forth immediately towards Porto
Bello, to encounter the Pirates before their retreat. But
these people, hearing of his coming, instead of flying away,
went out to meet him at a narrow passage through which
of necessity he ought to pass. Here they placed an
hundred men very well armed; the which, at the first
encounter, put to flight a good party of those of Panama.
This accident obliged the President to retire for that time,
as not being yet in a posture of strength to proceed any
farther. Presently after this rencounter he sent a message
unto Captain Morgan to tell him: ‘That in case he departed
not suddenly with all his forces from Porto Bello,
he ought to expect no quarter for himself nor his companions,
when he should take them, as he hoped soon to
do.’ Captain Morgan, who feared not his threats knowing
he had a secure retreat in his ships which were nigh at
hand, made him answer: ‘He would not deliver the castles,
before he had received the contribution money he had
demanded. Which in case it were not paid down, he
would certainly burn the whole city, and then leave it,
demolishing beforehand the castles and killing the
prisoners.’

“The Governor of Panama perceived by this answer
{152}
that no means would serve to mollify the hearts of the
Pirates, nor reduce them to reason. Hereupon he determined
to leave them; as also those of the city, whom he
came to relieve, involved in the difficulties of making the
best agreement they could with their enemies.²⁷¹ Thus, in
a few days more, the miserable citizens gathered the contribution
wherein they were fined, and brought the entire
sum of one hundred thousand pieces of eight unto the
Pirates, for a ransom of the cruel captivity they were
fallen into. But the President of Panama, by these transactions,
was brought into an extreme admiration, considering
that four hundred men had been able to take such
a great city, with so many strong castles; especially seeing
they had no pieces of cannon, nor other great guns, wherewith
to raise batteries against them. And what was
more, knowing that the citizens of Porto Bello had always
great repute of being good soldiers themselves, and who
had never wanted courage in their own defence. This
astonishment was so great, that it occasioned him, for to
be satisfied therein, to send a messenger unto Captain
Morgan, desiring him to send him some small pattern of
those arms wherewith he had taken with such violence
so great a city. Captain Morgan received this messenger
very kindly, and treated him with great civility. Which
being done, he gave him a pistol and a few small bullets
of lead, to carry back unto the President, his Master,
telling him withal: ‘He desired him to accept that slender
pattern of the arms wherewith he had taken Porto Bello
and keep them for a twelvemonth; after which time he
promised to come to Panama and fetch them away.’ The
governor of Panama returned the present very soon unto
Captain Morgan, giving him thanks for the favour of lending
him such weapons as he needed not, and withal sent
{153}
him a ring of gold, with this message: ‘That he desired
him not to give himself the labour of coming to Panama,
as he had done to Porto Bello; for he did certify unto
him, he should not speed so well here as he had done
there.’

“After these transactions, Captain Morgan (having
provided his fleet with all necessaries, and taken with
him the best guns of the castles, nailing the rest which he
could not carry away) set sail from Porto Bello with all
his ships. With these he arrived in a few days unto the
Island of Cuba, where he sought out a place wherein with
all quiet and repose he might make the dividend of the
spoil they had gotten. They found in ready money two
hundred and fifty thousand pieces of eight, besides all
other merchandises, as cloth, linen, silks and other goods.
With this rich purchase they sailed again from thence
unto their common place of rendezvous, Jamaica. Being
arrived, they passed here some time in all sorts of vices
and debauchery, according to their common manner of
doing, spending with huge prodigality what others had
gained with no small labour and toil.”²⁷²

Morgan and his officers, on their return to Jamaica in
the middle of August, made an official report which places
their conduct in a peculiarly mild and charitable light,²⁷³ and
forms a sharp contrast to the account left us by Exquemelin.
According to Morgan the town and castles were restored
“in as good condition as they found them,” and the people
were so well treated that “several ladies of great quality
and other prisoners” who were offered “their liberty to
go to the President’s camp, refused, saying they were now
prisoners to a person of quality, who was more tender of
their honours than they doubted to find in the president’s
camp, and so voluntarily continued with them till the
surrender of the town and castles.” This scarcely tallies
with what we know of the manners of the freebooters, and
Exquemelin’s evidence is probably nearer the truth. When
Morgan returned to Jamaica Modyford at first received
him somewhat doubtfully, for Morgan’s commission, as
the Governor told him, was only against ships, and the
Governor was not at all sure how the exploit would be
taken in England. Morgan, however, had reported that
at Porto Bello, as well as in Cuba, levies were being made
for an attack upon Jamaica, and Modyford laid great stress
upon this point when he forwarded the buccaneer’s narrative
to the Duke of Albemarle.

The sack of Porto Bello was nothing less than an act
of open war against Spain, and Modyford, now that he
had taken the decisive step, was not satisfied with half
measures. Before the end of October 1668 the whole
fleet of privateers, ten sail and 800 men, had gone out
again under Morgan to cruise on the coasts of Caracas,
while Captain Dempster with several other vessels and 300
{155}
followers lay before Havana and along the shores of
Campeache.²⁷⁴ Modyford had written home repeatedly
that if the king wished him to exercise any adequate
control over the buccaneers, he must send from England
two or three nimble fifth-rate frigates to command their
obedience and protect the island from hostile attacks.
Charles in reply to these letters sent out the “Oxford,” a
frigate of thirty-four guns, which arrived at Port Royal on
14th October. According to Beeston’s Journal, it brought
instructions countenancing the war, and empowering the
governor to commission whatever persons he thought good
to be partners with His Majesty in the plunder, “they
finding victuals, wear and tear.”²⁷⁵ The frigate was
immediately provisioned for a several months’ cruise, and
sent under command of Captain Edward Collier to join
Morgan’s fleet as a private ship-of-war. Morgan had
appointed the Isle la Vache, or Cow Island, on the south
side of Hispaniola, as the rendezvous for the privateers;
and thither flocked great numbers, both English and
French, for the name of Morgan was, by his exploit at
Porto Bello, rendered famous in all the neighbouring
islands. Here, too, arrived the “Oxford” in December.
Among the French privateers were two men-of-war, one of
which, the “Cour Volant” of La Rochelle, commanded by
M. la Vivon, was seized by Captain Collier for having
robbed an English vessel of provisions. A few days later,
on 2nd January, a council of war was held aboard the
“Oxford,” where it was decided that the privateers, now
numbering about 900 men, should attack Cartagena.
While the captains were at dinner on the quarter-deck,
however, the frigate blew up, and about 200 men, including
five captains, were lost.²⁷⁶ “I was eating my dinner with
{156}
the rest,” writes the surgeon, Richard Browne, “when the
mainmasts blew out, and fell upon Captains Aylett,
Bigford, and others, and knocked them on the head; I
saved myself by getting astride the mizzenmast.” It
seems that out of the whole ship only Morgan and those
who sat on his side of the table were saved. The accident
was probably caused by the carelessness of a gunner.
Captain Collier sailed in la Vivon’s ship for Jamaica,
where the French captain was convicted of piracy in the
Admiralty Court, and reprieved by Governor Modyford,
but his ship confiscated.²⁷⁷