This booty was originally carried to the island of Tortuga, the common rendezvous of the buccaneers, and then their only place of safety. But afterwards the French went to some of the ports of Hispaniola, where they had established themselves in defiance of the Spaniards, and the English, to those of Jamaica, where they could dispose of their prizes to more advantage, and lay out their money more agreeably, either in business or pleasure.

Before the distribution of the spoil, each adventurer held up his hand, and protested he had secreted nothing of what he had taken, and if any one was convicted of perjury, a case that seldom occurred, he was punished in a manner truly exemplary, and worthy the imitation of better men. He was expelled the community, and left, as soon as an opportunity offered, upon some desert island, as a wretch unworthy to live in society, even with the destroyers of their species!

After providing for the sick, the wounded, the maimed, and settling their several shares, the buccaneers indulged themselves in all kinds of licentiousness. Their debauches, which they carried to the greatest excess, were limited only by the want that such prodigality occasioned. If they were asked, what satisfaction they could find in dissipating so rapidly, what they had earned with so much jeopardy, they made this very ingenious reply:" Exposed as we "are to a variety of perils, our life is totally different from "that of other men. Why should we, who are alive to"day, and run the hazard of being dead to-morrow, think "of hoarding! Studious only of enjoying the present hour, (C we never think of that which is to come"," This has ever been the language of men in such circumstances: the desire of dissipating life, not solicitude for the preserva tion of existence, seems to increase in proportion to the danger of losing it.

. Hist. Gen. des Voyages, tom. xv. liv. vii. cà, iz

The

The ships that sailed from Europe to America seldom tempted the avidity of the first buccaneers, as the merchandize they carried could not readily have been sold in the West-Indies in those early times. But they eagerly watched the Spanish vessels in their return to Europe, when certain they were partly laden with treasure. They commonly followed the galleons and flota, employed in transporting the produce of the mines of Mexico and Peru, as far as the channel of Bahama; and if, by any accident, a ship was separated from the fleet, they instantly beset her, and she seldom escaped them. They even ventured to attack several ships at once: and the Spaniards, who considered them as dæmons, and trembled at their approach, commonly surrendered, if they came to close quarters9.

A remarkable instance of this timidity on the one side, and temerity on the other, occurs in the history of Peter Legrand, a native of Dieppe in Normandy; who, with a small vessel, carrying no more than twenty-eight men, and four guns, had the boldness to attack the vice-admiral of the galleons. Resolved to conquer or die, and having exacted an oath to the same purpose from his crew, he ordered the carpenter to bore a hole in the side of his own vessel, that all hope of escape might be cut off. This was no sooner done than he boarded the Spanish ship, with a sword in one hand, and a pistol in the other; and bearing down all resistance, entered the great cabin, attended by a few of the most desperate of his associates. He there found the admiral surrounded by his officers, presented a pistol to his breast, and ordered him to surrender. Meanwhile the rest of the buccaneers took possession of the gun-room, and seized the arms. Struck with terror and amazement, the Spaniards demanded quarter. Like examples are numerous in the history of the buccaneers.

The Spaniards almost reduced to despair, by finding themselves a continual prey to those ravagers, diminished

Id. ibid..

10. Hist. Buccaneers, part i. chap. vii.

the

the number of their ships, and the colonies gave up their connections with each other. These humiliating precautions, however, served but to increase the boldness of the buccaneers. They had hitherto invaded the Spanish settlements only to procure provisions; but no sooner did they find their captures decrease, than they determined to procure by land, that wealth which the sea denied them. They accordingly formed themselves into larger bodies, and plundered many of the richest and strongest towns in the new world. Maracaybo, Campeachy, Vera Cruz, Porto-Bello, and Carthagena, on this side of the continent, severely felt the effects of their fury; and Quayaquil, Panama, and many other places on the coasts of the South-Sea, were not more fortunate in their resistance, or treated with greater leni. ty''. In a word, the buccaneers, the most extraordinary set of men that ever appeared upon the face of the globe, but whose duration was transitory, subjected to their arms, without a regular system of government, without laws, without any permanent subordination, and even without revenue, cities and castles which have baffled the utmost efforts of national force; and if conquest, not plunder, had been their object, they might have made themselves masters of all Spanish America.

Among the buccaneers who first acquired distinction in this new mode of plundering, was Montbars, a gentleman of Languedoc. Having by chance, in his infancy, met with a circumstantial, and perhaps exaggerated account of the cruelties practised by the Spaniards in the conquest of the new world, he conceived a strong antipathy against a nation' that had committed so many enormities. His heated imagination, which he loved to indulge, continually represented to him innumerable multitudes of innocent people, murdered by a brood of savage monsters nursed in the moun. tains of Castile. The unhappy victims, whose names were

11. Ibid. part. i. ii. Hist. Gen. des Voyages, ubi sup. VOL, Y.

L

ever

ever present to his memory, seemed to call upon him for vengeance: he longed to embrue his hands in Spanish blood, and to retaliate the cruelties of the Spaniards, on the same shores where they had been perpetrated. He accordingly embarked on board a French ship bound to the West-Indies, about the middle of the last century, and joined the buccaneers, whose natural ferocity he inflamed. Humanity in him became the source of the most unfeeling barbarity. The Spaniards suffered so much from his fury, that he acquired the name of the Exterminator 2.

Michael de Baso and Francis Lolonois were also greatly renowned for their exploits, both by sea and land. Their most important, though not their most fortunate enterprise, was that of the Gulf of Venezuela, with eight vessels, and six hundred and sixty associates. This gulf runs a considerable way up into the country, and communicates with the lake of Maracaybo, by a narrow strait. That strait is defended by a castle called la Barra, which the A.D.1667. buccaneers took, and nailed up the cannon.They then passed the bar, and advanced to the city of Maracaybo, built on the western coast of the lake, at the distance of about ten leagues from its mouth. But, to their inexpressible disappointment, they found it utterly deserted and unfurnished; the inhabitants, apprised of their danger, having removed to the other side of the lake with their most valuable effects.

If the buccaneers had not spent a fortnight in riot and debauchery, they would have found at Gibraltar, a town near the extremity of the lake, every thing which the people of Maracaybo had carried off, in order to elude their rapacity. On the contrary, by their imprudent delay, they met with fortifications newly erected, which they had the glory of reducing at the expense of much blood, and the mortification of finding another empty town. Exasperated at this second disappointment, the buccaneers set fire to

12. Hist. Gen. des Voyages, tom. liv. vii. ch. i.

Gibraltar;

Gibraltar; and Maracaybo would have shared the same fate, had it not been ransomed. Biside the bribe they received for their lenity, they took with them the bells, images, and all the ornamental furniture of the churches; intending, as they said, to build a chapel in the island of Tortuga, and to consecrate that part of their spoils to sacred uses 3! Like other plunderers of more exalted character, they had no idea of the absurdity of offering to heaven the fruits of robbery and murder, procured in direct violation of its laws.

But of all the buccaneers, French or English, none was so uniformly successful, or executed so many great and daring enterprises, as Henry Morgan, a native of the prin cipality of Wales. While de Basco, Lolonois, and their companions, were squandering at Tortuga the spoils they had acquired in the gulf of Venezuela, Morgan sailed from Jamaica to attack Porto-Bello; and his meaA.D. 1668. sures were so well concerted, that soon after his landing, he surprised the centinels, and made himself master of the town, before the Spaniards could put themselves in a posture of defence.

In hopes of reducing with the same facility the citadel, or chief castle, into which the citizens had conveyed their most valuable property, and all the plate belonging to the churches, Morgan bethought himself of an expedient that discovers his knowledge of national character, as well as of human nature in general. He compelled the priests, nuns, and other women, whom he had made prisoners, to plant the scaling ladders against the walls of the fortress, from a persuasion that the gallantry and superstition of the Spaniards would not suffer them to fire on the objects of their love and veneration. But he found himself deceived in this flattering conjecture. The Spanish governor, who was a resolute soldier, used his utmost efforts to destroy every one that approached the works. Morgan and his English associates, however, carried the place by storm, in

13. Hist. Buccaneers, part ii. chap. i.