Book of Pirates | Page 6

and from Panama to the coasts of Peru.
About the middle of the seventeenth century certain French adventurers set out from the
fortified island of St. Christopher in longboats and hoys, directing their course to the
westward, there to discover new islands. Sighting Hispaniola "with abundance of joy,"
they landed, and went into the country, where they found great quantities of wild cattle,
horses, and swine.
Now vessels on the return voyage to Europe from the West Indies needed revictualing,
and food, especially flesh, was at a premium in the islands of the Spanish Main;
wherefore a great profit was to be turned in preserving beef and pork, and selling the
flesh to homeward-bound vessels.
The northwestern shore of Hispaniola, lying as it does at the eastern outlet of the old
Bahama Channel, running between the island of Cuba and the great Bahama Banks, lay
almost in the very main stream of travel. The pioneer Frenchmen were not slow to
discover the double advantage to be reaped from the wild cattle that cost them nothing to
procure, and a market for the flesh ready found for them. So down upon Hispaniola they
came by boatloads and shiploads, gathering like a swarm of mosquitoes, and overrunning
the whole western end of the island. There they established themselves, spending the time
alternately in hunting the wild cattle and buccanning[1] the meat, and squandering their
hardly earned gains in wild debauchery, the opportunities for which were never lacking in
the Spanish West Indies.
[1] Buccanning, by which the "buccaneers" gained their name, was of process of curing
thin strips of meat by salting, smoking, and drying in the sun.
At first the Spaniards thought nothing of the few travel-worn Frenchmen who dragged
their longboats and hoys up on the beach, and shot a wild bullock or two to keep body
and soul together; but when the few grew to dozens, and the dozens to scores, and the
scores to hundreds, it was a very different matter, and wrathful grumblings and
mutterings began to be heard among the original settlers.
But of this the careless buccaneers thought never a whit, the only thing that troubled them
being the lack of a more convenient shipping point than the main island afforded them.
This lack was at last filled by a party of hunters who ventured across the narrow channel
that separated the main island from Tortuga. Here they found exactly what they needed--a
good harbor, just at the junction of the Windward Channel with the old Bahama
Channel--a spot where four- fifths of the Spanish-Indian trade would pass by their very
wharves.
There were a few Spaniards upon the island, but they were a quiet folk, and well disposed
to make friends with the strangers; but when more Frenchmen and still more Frenchmen

crossed the narrow channel, until they overran the Tortuga and turned it into one great
curing house for the beef which they shot upon the neighboring island, the Spaniards
grew restive over the matter, just as they had done upon the larger island.
Accordingly, one fine day there came half a dozen great boatloads of armed Spaniards,
who landed upon the Turtle's Back and sent the Frenchmen flying to the woods and
fastnesses of rocks as the chaff flies before the thunder gust. That night the Spaniards
drank themselves mad and shouted themselves hoarse over their victory, while the beaten
Frenchmen sullenly paddled their canoes back to the main island again, and the Sea
Turtle was Spanish once more.
But the Spaniards were not contented with such a petty triumph as that of sweeping the
island of Tortuga free from the obnoxious strangers, down upon Hispaniola they came,
flushed with their easy victory, and determined to root out every Frenchman, until not
one single buccaneer remained. For a time they had an easy thing of it, for each French
hunter roamed the woods by himself, with no better company than his half-wild dogs, so
that when two or three Spaniards would meet such a one, he seldom if ever came out of
the woods again, for even his resting place was lost.
But the very success of the Spaniards brought their ruin along with it, for the buccaneers
began to combine together for self-protection, and out of that combination arose a strange
union of lawless man with lawless man, so near, so close, that it can scarce be compared
to any other than that of husband and wife. When two entered upon this comradeship,
articles were drawn up and signed by both parties, a common stock was made of all their
possessions, and out into the woods they went to seek their fortunes; thenceforth they
were as one man; they lived together by day, they slept together by night; what one
suffered, the