Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts | Page 7

if he should be successful in
his new profession, and should be enabled to rob Spaniards for a term
of years, he could return to France, pay off all his debts, and afterward
live the life of a man of honor and respectability.
Other ideas which the buccaneers brought with them from their native
countries soon showed themselves when these daring sailors began
their lives as regular pirates; among these, the idea of organization was
very prominent. Of course it was hard to get a number of free and
untrammelled crews to unite and obey the commands of a few officers.
But in time the buccaneers had recognized leaders, and laws were made
for concerted action. In consequence of this the buccaneers became a
formidable body of men, sometimes superior to the Spanish naval and
military forces.
It must be remembered that the buccaneers lived in a very peculiar age.
So far as the history of America is concerned, it might be called the age
of blood and gold. In the newly discovered countries there were no
laws which European nations or individuals cared to observe. In the
West Indies and the adjacent mainlands there were gold and silver, and
there were also valuable products of other kinds, and when the

Spaniards sailed to their part of the new world, these treasures were the
things for which they came. The natives were weak and not able to
defend themselves. All the Spaniards had to do was to take what they
could find, and when they could not find enough they made the poor
Indians find it for them. Here was a part of the world, and an age of the
world, wherein it was the custom for men to do what they pleased,
provided they felt themselves strong enough, and it was not to be
supposed that any one European nation could expect a monopoly of
this state of mind.
Therefore it was that while the Spaniards robbed and ruined the natives
of the lands they discovered, the English, French, and Dutch
buccaneers robbed the robbers. Great vessels were sent out from Spain,
carrying nothing in the way of merchandise to America, but returning
with all the precious metals and valuable products of the newly
discovered regions, which could in any way be taken from the
unfortunate natives. The gold mines of the new world had long been
worked, and yielded handsome revenues, but the native method of
operating them did not satisfy the Spaniards, who forced the poor
Indians to labor incessantly at the difficult task of digging out the
precious metals, until many of them died under the cruel oppression.
Sometimes the Indians were kept six months under ground, working in
the mines; and at one time, when it was found that the natives had died
off, or had fled from the neighborhood of some of the rich gold
deposits, it was proposed to send to Africa and get a cargo of negroes to
work the mines.
Now it is easy to see that all this made buccaneering a very tempting
occupation. To capture a great treasure ship, after the Spaniards had
been at so much trouble to load it, was a grand thing, according to the
pirate's point of view, and although it often required reckless bravery
and almost superhuman energy to accomplish the feats necessary in this
dangerous vocation, these were qualities which were possessed by
nearly all the sea-robbers of our coast; the stories of some of the most
interesting of these wild and desperate fellows,--men who did not
combine piracy with discoveries and explorations, but who were
out-and-out sea-robbers, and gained in that way all the reputation they

ever possessed,--will be told in subsequent chapters.
Chapter IV
Peter the Great
Very prominent among the early regular buccaneers was a Frenchman
who came to be called Peter the Great. This man seems to have been
one of those adventurers who were not buccaneers in the earlier sense
of the word (by which I mean they were not traders who touched at
Spanish settlements to procure cattle and hides, and who were prepared
to fight any Spaniards who might interfere with them), but they were
men who came from Europe on purpose to prey upon Spanish
possessions, whether on land or sea. Some of them made a rough sort
of settlement on the island of Tortuga, and then it was that Peter the
Great seems to have come into prominence. He gathered about him a
body of adherents, but although he had a great reputation as an
individual pirate, it seems to have been a good while before he
achieved any success as a leader.
The fortunes of Peter and his men must have been at a pretty low ebb
when they found themselves cruising in a large,