Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
of men of doubtful character and women of whose character there could
be no doubt whatever, began pouring in upon the island, for it was
said that the buccaneers thought no more of a doubloon than of a Lima
bean, so that this was the place for the brothel and the brandy shop
to reap their golden harvest, and the island remained French.
Hitherto the Tortugans had been content to gain as much as possible
from the homeward-bound vessels through the orderly channels of
legitimate trade. It was reserved for Pierre le Grand to introduce
piracy as a quicker and more easy road to wealth than the semihonest
exchange they had been used to practice.
Gathering together eight-and-twenty other spirits as hardy and
reckless as himself, he put boldly out to sea in a boat hardly large
enough to hold his crew, and running down the Windward Channel and out
into the Caribbean Sea, he lay in wait for such a prize as might be
worth the risks of winning.
For a while their luck was steadily against them; their provisions and
water began to fail, and they saw nothing before them but starvation
or a humiliating return. In this extremity they sighted a Spanish ship
belonging to a "flota" which had become separated from her consorts.
The boat in which the buccaneers sailed might, perhaps, have served
for the great ship's longboat; the Spaniards outnumbered them three to
one, and Pierre and his men were armed only with pistols and
cutlasses; nevertheless this was their one and their only chance, and
they determined to take the Spanish ship or to die in the attempt.
Down upon the Spaniard they bore through the dusk of the night, and
giving orders to the "chirurgeon" to scuttle their craft under them as
they were leaving it, they swarmed up the side of the unsuspecting
ship and upon its decks in a torrent--pistol in one hand and cutlass
in the other. A part of them ran to the gun room and secured the arms
and ammunition, pistoling or cutting down all such as stood in their
way or offered opposition; the other party burst into the great cabin
at the heels of Pierre le Grand, found the captain and a party of his
friends at cards, set a pistol to his breast, and demanded him to
deliver up the ship. Nothing remained for the Spaniard but to yield,
for there was no alternative between surrender and death. And so the
great prize was won.
It was not long before the news of this great exploit and of the vast
treasure gained reached the ears of the buccaneers of Tortuga and
Hispaniola. Then what a hubbub and an uproar and a tumult there was!
Hunting wild cattle and buccanning the meat was at a discount, and the
one and only thing to do was to go a-pirating; for where one such
prize had been won, others were to be had.
In a short time freebooting assumed all of the routine of a regular
business. Articles were drawn up betwixt captain and crew, compacts
were sealed, and agreements entered into by the one party and the
other.
In all professions there are those who make their mark, those who
succeed only moderately well, and those who fail more or less
entirely. Nor did pirating differ from this general rule, for in it
were men who rose to distinction, men whose names, something tarnished
and rusted by the lapse of years, have come down even to us of the
present day.
Pierre Francois, who, with his boatload of six-and-twenty desperadoes,
ran boldly into the midst of the pearl fleet off the coast of South
America, attacked the vice admiral under the very guns of two
men-of-war, captured his ship, though she was armed with eight guns
and manned with threescore men, and would have got her safely away,
only that having to put on sail, their main-mast went by the board,
whereupon the men-of-war came up with them, and the prize was lost.
But even though there were two men-of-war against all that remained of
six-and-twenty buccaneers, the Spaniards were glad enough to make
terms with them for the surrender of the vessel, whereby Pierre
Francois and his men came off scot-free.
Bartholomew Portuguese was a worthy of even more note. In a boat
manned with thirty fellow adventurers he fell upon a great ship off
Cape Corrientes, manned with threescore and ten men, all told.
Her he assaulted again and again, beaten off with the very pressure of
numbers only to renew the assault, until the Spaniards who survived,
some fifty in all, surrendered to twenty living pirates, who poured
upon their decks like a score of blood-stained, powder-grimed devils.
They lost their vessel by recapture, and Bartholomew Portuguese barely
escaped with his life through a series of almost unbelievable
adventures. But no sooner had he fairly escaped from the clutches of
the Spaniards than, gathering together another band of adventurers, he
fell upon the very same vessel in the gloom of the night, recaptured
her when she rode at anchor in the harbor of Campeche under the guns
of the fort, slipped the cable, and was away without the loss of a
single man. He lost her in a hurricane soon afterward, just off the
Isle of Pines; but the deed was none the less daring for all that.
Another notable no less famous than these two worthies was Roch
Braziliano, the truculent Dutchman who came up from the coast of
Brazil to the Spanish Main with a name ready-made for him. Upon the
very first adventure which he undertook he captured a plate ship of
fabulous value, and brought her safely into Jamaica; and when at last
captured by the Spaniards, he fairly frightened them into letting him
go by truculent threats of vengeance from his followers.
Such were three of the pirate buccaneers who infested the Spanish
Main. There were hundreds no less desperate, no less reckless, no less
insatiate in their lust for plunder, than they.
The effects of this freebooting soon became apparent. The risks to be
assumed by the owners of vessels and the shippers of merchandise
became so enormous that Spanish commerce was practically swept away
from these waters. No vessel dared to venture out of port excepting
under escort of powerful men-of-war, and even then they were not
always secure from molestation. Exports from Central and South America
were sent to Europe by way of the Strait of Magellan, and little or
none went through the passes between the Bahamas and the Caribbees.
So at last "buccaneering," as it had come to be generically called,
ceased to pay the vast dividends that it had done at first. The cream
was skimmed off, and only very thin milk was left in the dish.
Fabulous fortunes were no longer earned in a ten days' cruise, but
what money was won hardly paid for the risks of the winning. There
must be a new departure, or buccaneering would cease to exist.
Then arose one who showed the buccaneers a new way to squeeze money
out of the Spaniards. This man was an Englishman--Lewis Scot.
The stoppage of commerce on the Spanish Main had naturally tended to
accumulate all the wealth gathered and produced into the chief
fortified cities and towns of the West Indies. As there no longer
existed prizes upon the sea, they must be gained upon the land, if
they were to be gained at all. Lewis Scot was the first to appreciate
this fact.
Gathering together a large and powerful body of men as hungry for
plunder and as desperate as himself, he descended upon the town of
Campeche, which he captured and sacked, stripping it of everything
that could possibly be carried away.
When the town was cleared to the bare walls Scot threatened to set the
torch to every house in the place if it was not ransomed by a large
sum of money which he demanded. With this booty he set sail for
Tortuga, where he arrived safely--and the problem was solved.
After him came one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of lesser note, who first
made a descent upon the isle of Saint Catharine, now Old Providence,
which he took, and, with this as a base, made an unsuccessful descent
upon Neuva Granada and Cartagena. His name might not have been handed
down to us along with others of greater fame had he not been the
master of that most apt of pupils, the great Captain Henry Morgan,
most famous of all the buccaneers, one time governor of Jamaica, and
knighted by King Charles II.
After Mansvelt followed the bold John Davis, native of Jamaica, where
he sucked in the lust of piracy with his mother's milk. With only
fourscore men, he swooped down upon the great city of Nicaragua in the
darkness of the night, silenced the sentry with the thrust of a knife,
and then fell to pillaging the churches and houses "without any
respect or veneration."
Of course it was but a short time until the whole town was in an
uproar of alarm, and there was nothing left for the little handful of
men to do but to make the best of their way to their boats. They were
in the town but a short time, but in that time they were able to
gather together and to carry away money and jewels to the value of
fifty thousand pieces of eight, besides dragging off with them a dozen
or more notable prisoners, whom they held for ransom.
And now one appeared upon the scene who reached a far greater height
than any had arisen to before. This was Francois l'Olonoise, who
sacked the great city of Maracaibo and the town of Gibraltar. Cold,
unimpassioned, pitiless, his sluggish blood was never moved by one
single pulse of human warmth, his icy heart was never touched by one
ray of mercy or one spark of pity for the hapless wretches who chanced
to fall into his bloody hands.
Against him the governor of Havana sent out a great war vessel, and
with it a negro executioner, so that there might be no inconvenient
delays of law after the pirates had been captured. But l'Olonoise did
not wait for the coming of the war vessel; he went out to meet it, and
he found it where it lay riding at anchor in the mouth of the river
Estra. At the dawn of the morning he made his attack--sharp,
unexpected, decisive. In a little while the Spaniards were forced
below the hatches, and the vessel was taken. Then came the end. One by
one the poor shrieking wretches were dragged up from below, and one by
one they were butchered in cold blood, while l'Olonoise stood upon the
poop deck and looked coldly down upon what was being done. Among the
rest the negro was dragged upon the deck. He begged and implored that
his life might be spared, promising to tell all that might be asked of
him. L'Olonoise questioned him, and when he had squeezed him dry,
waved his hand coldly, and the poor black went with the rest. Only one
man was spared; him he sent to the governor of Havana with a message
that henceforth he would give no quarter to any Spaniard whom he might
meet in arms--a message which was not an empty threat.
The rise of l'Olonoise was by no means rapid. He worked his way up by
dint of hard labor and through much ill fortune. But by and by, after
many reverses, the tide turned, and carried him with it from one
success to another, without let or stay, to the bitter end.
Cruising off Maracaibo, he captured a rich prize laden with a vast
amount of plate and ready money, and there conceived the design of
descending upon the powerful town of Maracaibo itself. Without loss of
time he gathered together five hundred picked scoundrels from Tortuga,
and taking with him one Michael de Basco as land captain, and two
hundred more buccaneers whom he commanded, down he came into the Gulf