The Monarchs of the Main Volume I Part 1

The Monarchs of the Main.

Volume I.

by Walter Thornbury.

PREFACE.

I claim for this book, at least originality. But this originality, unfortunately, if it attaches interest to an author's labours, adds also to his responsibilities.

The history of the Buccaneers has. .h.i.therto remained unwritten. Three or four forgotten volumes contain literally all that is recorded of the wars and conquests of these extraordinary men. Of these volumes two are French, one Dutch, and one in English. The majority of our readers, therefore, it is probable, know nothing more of the freebooters but their name, confound them with the mere pirates of two centuries later, and derive their knowledge of their manners from those dozen lines of the Abbe Reynal, that have been transferred from historian to historian, and from writer to writer, for the last two centuries.

The chief records of Buccaneer adventurers are drawn literally from only three books. The first of these is _Oexmelin's Histoire des Aventuriers_.

12mo. Paris, 1688. Oexmelin was a Frenchman, who went out to St. Domingo as a planter's apprentice or _engage_, and eventually became surgeon in the Buccaneer fleet--knew Lolonnois, and accompanied Sir Henry Morgan to Panama.

The second is _Esquemeling's Zee Roovers_. Amsterdam. 4to. 1684.--A book constantly mistaken by booksellers and in catalogues for Oexmelin.

Esquemeling was a Dutch _engage_ at St. Domingo, and his book is an English translation from the Dutch. The writer appears of humbler birth than Oexmelin, but served also at Panama.

The third is _Ringrose's History of the Cruises of Sharpe, &c._ This man, who served with Dampier, seems to have been an ignorant sailor, and a mere log-keeper.

The fourth is _Ravenau de Lussan's Narrative_. De Lussan was a young French officer of fortune, who served in some of Ringrose's cruises.

This is a book written by a vivacious and keen observer, but is less complete than Oexmelin's, but equally full of anecdote, and very amusing.

For secondary authorities we come to the French Jesuit historians of the West Indian Islands, diffuse Rochefort, the gossiping _bon vivant_ Labat; Tertre, dry and prejudiced; Charlevoix, careful, condensed, and entertaining; and Raynal, polished, cla.s.sical, second-hand, and declamatory.

The English secondaries are, Dampier, with his companions, Wafer and Cowley. Several old pamphlets contain quaint versions of Morgan's conquest of Panama; and in 1817, Burney, in his "History of Discoveries in the South Sea," devotes many chapters to a dry but very imperfect abridgment of Buccaneer adventure, omitting carefully everything that gives either life or colour. Captain Southey, in his "History of the West Indies," supplies many odd sc.r.a.ps of old voyages, and presents many scattered figures, but attempts no picture.

Nor has modern fiction, however short of material, discovered these new and virgin mines. Mrs. Hall has a novel, it is true, called _The Buccaneer_, the scene of which is, however, laid in England; and Angus B. Reach has skimmed the same subject, but has evidently not even read half the three existing authorities. Dana, the American poet, has a poem called the Buccaneer, but this is merely a collection of lines on the sea. Sir Walter Scott's Bertram, although he had been a Buccaneer, is a mere ruffian, who would do for any age, and Scott himself places Morgan's conquest of Panama in the reign of Charles I., when it actually took place in that of Charles II., fifty years later.

Defoe himself, little conscious of the rich region he was treading, sketched a Buccaneer sailor when he re-christened Alexander Selkirk Robinson Crusoe, and condensed all the spirit of Dampier into a book still read as eagerly by the man as by the boy.

When I find a writer of Scott's profundity of reading and depth of research placing the great event of Buccaneer history fifty years before its time, booksellers mistaking a Dutch for a French writer, and living historians confounding the Flibustiers of Tortuga, who attacked only the Spaniards, with their degraded successors the pirates of New Providence, who robbed all nations and even their own without mercy, I think I have proved that my book is not a superfluity.

It is seldom that an author can invite the whole reading world to peruse the self-rewarding labour of his student life. Mine is no book for a sect, a clique, a profession, or a trade. It brings new scenes and new creations to the novel reader, jaded with worn-out types of conventional existence. It supplies the historian with a page of English, French, and Spanish history that the capricious muse of history has. .h.i.therto kept in MS. It traces the foundation of our colonial empire. To the psychologist it furnishes deep matter for thought, while the philosopher may see in these pages humanity in a new aspect, and man's soul exposed to new temptations.

What Dampier has described and Defoe drawn materials from, no man can dare to a.s.sert is wanting in interest. The readers to whom these books are new will be astonished to find the adventures of Xenophon paralleled in De Lussan's retreat over the Isthmus, and Swift forestalled in his conception of some of the oddest customs of Lilliput. Oexmelin, I may boldly a.s.sert, is a much more amusing writer than half our historians, a keen and enlightened observer, who looked upon Buccaneering as a chivalrous life, in which the sea knight got equally hard knocks as the land hero, but more money.

If my characters are not so grand as those of history, I can present to my reader men as greedy of gold, ambitious and sagacious as Pizarro or Cortes, and as reckless as Alexander, and as cruel as Caesar. If the Buccaneers were but insects, bred from the putrefactions of a decaying empire, their plans were at least gigantic, and their courage unprecedented.

Anomalous beings, hunters by land and sea, scaring whole fleets with a few canoes, sacking cities with a few grenadiers, devastating every coast from California to Cape Horn, they only needed a common principle of union to have founded an aggressive republic, as wealthy as Venice and as warlike as Carthage. One great mind and the New World had been their own.

But from the first Providence sowed amongst them the seeds of discord--difference of religion and difference of race. Never settling, their race had its ranks renewed, not by descendants, but by fresh recruits, men with new interests and lower aims. In less than a century the Brotherhood had pa.s.sed away, their virtues were forgotten and their vices alone remembered.

The Buccaneers were robbers, yet they sought something beyond gold.

Mansvelt took the island of St. Catherine, and planned a republic, and Morgan contemplated the destruction of the Bravo Indians. They were outlaws, and yet religious robbers, yet generous and regardful of the minutest delicacies of honour; lovers of freedom, yet obeying the sternest discipline; cruel, yet tender to their friends.

All the light and shade of the darkest fiction look poor beside the adventures of these men. Catholics, Protestants, Puritans, gallants, officers, common seamen, farmers' sons, men of rank, hunters, sailors, planters, murderers, fanatics, Creoles, Spaniards, negroes, astrologers, monks, pilots, guides, merchants--all pa.s.s before us in a motley and ever-changing masquerade. The backgrounds to these scenes are the wooded sh.o.r.es of the West Indian Islands, woods sparkling at night with fire-flies, broad savannahs dark with wild cattle, the volcanic islands peopled by marooned sailors, stormy promontories, the lonely sand "keys"

of Jamaica, and the rocky fastnesses of Tortuga.

MONARCHS OF THE MAIN.

CHAPTER I.

HISTORY OF TORTUGA.

The precursors of the Buccaneers--Description of Tortuga--Origin of the Buccaneers--Conquest of Tortuga by the French--The hunters, planters, and corsairs--Le Basque takes Maracaibo--War in Hispaniola--French West Indian Company buy Tortuga--The Governor, M.

D'Ogeron.

Drake, Cavendish, and Oxenham, indeed all the naval heroes of Elizabeth's reign, were the precursors of the Buccaneers. The captains of those "tall s.h.i.+ps" that sailed from Plymouth Sound, and the green nooks of the sunny coast of Devon, to capture stately carracks laden deep with silks, spices, pearls, and precious stones, the treasure of Potosi and Peru, were but Buccaneers under another name, agreeing with them in the great principle of making war on none but Spaniards, but on Spaniards unceasingly. "No peace beyond the line" was the motto on the flag of both Drake and Morgan.

Sir John Hawkins, who began the slave trade, and who was Drake's earliest patron, took the town of Rio de la Hacha, and struggled desperately with the galleons in the port of St. Juan d'Ulloa. Drake sacked Nombre de Dios, and, pa.s.sing across the isthmus, stormed Vera Cruz. He destroyed St. Domingo and Carthagena, burnt La Rancheria, and attacked Porto Rico. But still more truly a Buccaneer was John Oxenham, one of Drake's followers, who, cruising about Panama, captured several bullion vessels; but was at last slain, with all his men, having fallen in love with a Spanish captive, and liberated her son, who surprised him with reinforcements from Nombre de Dios. Then came Raleigh, more chivalrous than them all--looser in principle, but wiser in head. He planned an attack on Panama, and ravaged St. Thomas's.

The first Buccaneers were poor French hunters, who, driven by the Spaniards out of Hispaniola, fled to the neighbouring island of Tortuga, and there settled as planters.

This Buccaneer colony of Tortuga arose rather by accident than by the design of any one ambitious mind. The French had established a colony in the almost deserted island of St. Christopher's, which had begun to flourish when the Spaniards, alarmed at a hostile power's vicinity to their mines, to which their thoughts then alone tended, put a stop to the prosperity of the French settlements by frequent attacks made by their fleets on their way to New Spain. From the just hatred excited by these unprovoked forays sprang the first impulse of retaliation. These injuries provoked the French, as they had done the Dutch, to fit out privateers. But a still more powerful motive soon became paramount. A spirit of cupidity arose, which was stimulated by the heated imaginations of men poor and angry. Before them lay regions of gold, timidly guarded by a vindictive but feeble enemy; and Spain became to these pioneer settlers what a bedridden miser is to the dreams of a needy bravo.

The report of the Dutch successes spread through all the ports of France. Sailors were the ready bearers of wild tales they had themselves half invented. Some hardy adventurers of Dieppe fitted out vessels to carry on a warfare that retaliation had now rendered just, war made legal, and chance rendered profitable. The sailor who was to-day munching his onion on the quays of Ma.r.s.eilles might, a few weeks hence, be lord of Carthagena, or rolling in the treasures of a Manilla galleon, clothed in Eastern silks, and delighted with the perfumes of India.

Finding their enterprise successful, but St. Kitt's too distant to form a convenient depot for their booty, they began to look about for some nearer locality. At first they found their return voyages to the West Indian islands frequently occupying three months, which seemed years to men hurrying to store up old plunder, and to sally forth for new. In search of an asylum, these privateersmen touched at Hispaniola, hoping to find some lonely island near its sh.o.r.es; but as soon as they had landed, and saw the great forests full of game, and broad savannahs alive with wild cattle, and finding it abandoned by the Spaniards, and the Indians nearly all dead or emigrated, they determined to settle at a place so full of advantages, where they could revictual their s.h.i.+ps, and remain secure and un.o.bserved. The sight of Tortuga, a small neighbouring island, rocky, and yet not without a harbour, convinced them that nature had constructed for their growing empire at once a magazine, a citadel, and a fortress. They had now a sanctuary and a haven, shelter for their booty, and food for their men.

The Spaniards, although not occupying the island, were anxious that it should not be occupied by others. They had long had a foreboding that this island would become a resort for pirates, and had just garrisoned it with an alfarez and twenty-five men. The French had, however, little difficulty in getting rid of this small force, the soldiers being enraged at finding themselves left by their countrymen, without provisions or reinforcements, upon a barren rock.

Once masters of the heap of stones, the French began to deliberate by what means they could retain it. The sight of buildings already begun, and the prospect of more food than they could get at St. Christopher's, determined these restless men to settle on the spot they had won. Part of them returned to Hispaniola to kill oxen and boars, and to salt the flesh for those who would remain to plant; and those men who determined to build a.s.sured the sailors that stores of dry meat should always be ready to revictual their s.h.i.+ps.

The adventurers, having a nucleus for their operations, began to widen their operations. They became now divided into three distinct cla.s.ses, always intermingling, and never very definitely divided, but still for the main part separate: the _sea rovers_, or flibustiers; the _planters_, or habitans; and the _hunters_, or buccaneers. For the first cla.s.s, there were many names: the English, following an Indian word, called them Buccaneers, from the Indian term _boucan_ (dried meat); the Dutch denominated them Zee Roovers, and the French Flibustiers, or Aventuriers. A fourth cla.s.s, growing by degrees either into the Buccaneers or the planters, were the apprentices, or _engages_.

A few French planters could not have retained the island had not their numbers been swelled by the addition of many English. In a short time, French vessels touched at the island, to trade for the booty that now arrived more frequently, unintermittingly, and in greater quant.i.ties.

The trade grew less speculative and uncertain. French captains found it profitable to barter not only for hides and meat with the Buccaneers, but with the Flibustiers for silver-plate and pieces of eight. The high prices paid for wine and brandy soon rendered the commerce with Bordeaux a matter worthy the attention of the French Government. In a few days of Buccaneer excess more was spent in barter than could have been realised in months of average traffic with the more cautious.

The Spaniards, fully alive to the danger of this planter settlement, determined to destroy it at a single blow. The design was easy of accomplishment, for the Buccaneers had grown careless from long impunity, and had long since crowned themselves undisputed kings of Hispaniola and its dependencies. Taking advantage of a time when the English corsairs were at sea and the French Buccaneers hunting on the mainland, the Spanish General of the Indian Fleet landed with a handful of soldiers and retook the island in an hour. The few planters were overpowered before they could run together, the hunters before they could seize their arms. Some were at once put to the sword, and others hung on the nearest trees. The larger portion, however, taking advantage of well-known lurking places, waited for the night, and then escaped to the mainland in their canoes. The Spaniards, satisfied with the terror they had struck, left the island un-garrisoned, and returned exultingly to St. Domingo. Hearing, however, that there were a great many Buccaneers still settled as hunters in Hispaniola, and that the wild cattle were diminis.h.i.+ng by their ravages, the general levied some troops to put them down. To these men, who were known as the Spanish _Fifties_, we shall hereafter advert.

The Spanish fleet was scarcely well out of sight before the Buccaneers, angry but unintimidated, flocked back to their now desolated island, full of rage at the sight of the bodies of their companions and the ashes of their ruined houses. The English returned headed by a Buccaneer named Willis, who gave an English character to the new colony. The French adventurers, jealous of English interference, and fearful that the island would fall into the possession of England, left Tortuga, and, going to St. Christopher's, informed the Governor, the Chevalier de Poncy, of the ease with which it could be conquered. De Poncy, alive to the scheme and jealous for French honour, fitted out an expedition, and intrusted the command to M. Le Va.s.seur, a brave soldier and good engineer, just arrived from France, who levied a force of forty French Protestants, and agreed to conquer the island for De Poncy and to govern in his name, as well as to pay half the expenses of the conquest. In a few days he dropped anchor in Port Margot, on the north side of Hispaniola, about seven leagues from Tortuga. He instantly collected a force of forty French Buccaneers from the woods and the savannahs, and, having arranged his plans, made a descent upon the island in the month of April, 1640. As soon as he had landed, he sent a message to the English Governor to say that he had come to avenge the insults received by the French flag, and to warn him that if he did not leave the island with all those of his nation in twenty-four hours, he should lay waste every plantation with fire and sword. The English, feeling their position untenable, instantly embarked in a vessel lying in the road, without (as Oexmelin, a French writer, says) striking a blow in self-defence. The French population of the island then, rising in arms, welcomed the invaders as friends.

Le Va.s.seur, the bloodless conqueror of this new Barataria, was received with shouts and acclamations. He at once visited every nook of the island that needed defence, and prepared to insure it against reconquest either by the Spaniards or the English. He found it inaccessible on three sides; and on the unprotected quarter built a fort, on a peak of impregnable rock, rising 600 feet above the narrow path which it commanded. The summit of this rock was about thirty feet square, and could only be ascended by steps cut in the stone or by a moveable iron ladder. The fort held four guns. A spring of water completed the advantages of the spot, which was surrounded with walls and fenced in with hedges, woods, precipices, and every aid that art or nature could furnish. The only approach to this steep was a narrow avenue in which no more than three men could march abreast.

The Buccaneers now flocked to Tortuga in greater numbers than before, some to congratulate the new governor on his victory, and others to enrol themselves as his subjects: all who came he received with promises of support and protection. The Spaniards, in the meanwhile, determined to crush this wasp's nest, fitted out at St. Domingo a new armament of six vessels, having on board 500 or 600 men. They at first anch.o.r.ed before the fort, but, receiving a volley, moored two leagues lower down, and landed their troops. In attempting to storm the fort by a _coup de main_, they were beaten off with the loss of 200 men, the garrison sallying out and driving them back to their s.h.i.+ps.

The now doubly victorious governor was hailed as the defender and saviour of Tortuga. The news of victory soon reached the ears of M. de Poncy, at St. Christopher's, who, at first rejoiced at the success, became soon afraid of the ambition of his new ally. Fearing that he would repudiate the contract, and declare himself an independent sovereign, he took the precaution of testing his sincerity. He sent two of his relations to Tortuga to request land as settlers, but really to act as spies. Le Va.s.seur, subtle and penetrating, at once detected their object. He received the young men with great civility, but took care to secure their speedy return to St. Christopher's. Having now attained the summit of his wishes, he became, as many greater men have been, intoxicated with power. His temper changed, and he grew severe, suspicious, intolerant, and despotic. He not only bound his subjects in chains, but delighted to clank the fetters, and remind them of their slavery. He ill-used the planters, loaded the merchants with taxes, punished the most venial faults, and grew as much hated as he had been once beloved. He went so far in his tyranny as to forbid the exercise of the Catholic religion, to burn the churches and expel the priests. The murder of such a persecutor has always been held a sin easily forgiven by the confessor, and l.u.s.t and superst.i.tion soon gave birth to murder.

Charlevoix relates an amusing instance of the governor's contumacy. De Poncy, informed that his vessels had taken a silver idol (a Virgin Mary) from some Spanish cathedral, wrote to demand its surrender. Le Va.s.seur returned a wooden image by the messenger, desiring him to say, that for religious purposes, wood or silver was equally good. One of his most cruel inventions Le Va.s.seur called his "h.e.l.l." It seems to have resembled the portable iron cages in which Louis XI. used to confine his state prisoners.

M. de Poncy, informed of the extraordinary change in the character of Le Va.s.seur, endeavoured to beguile him by promises, threats, and entreaties. Justice gave him now a pretext of enforcing what self-interest had long meditated. The toils were growing closer round the doomed man, but Heaven sent a speedier punishment. Le Va.s.seur, still waiving all openings for formal complaint, was exulting in all the glory of a small satrapy, when two nephews conspired against his life.

Cupidity inspired the crime, and they easily persuaded themselves that G.o.d and man alike demanded the expiation. One writer calls them simply captains, "companions of fortune," and another, the nephews of Le Va.s.seur.

These ungrateful men had already been declared his heirs, but they had quarrelled with him about a mistress he had taken from them, and one fault in a friend obliterates the remembrance of many virtues. They believed that the inhabitants, rejoiced at deliverance from such tyranny, would appoint them joint governors in the first outburst of their grat.i.tude. They shot him from an ambush as he was descending from the rock fort to the sh.o.r.e, but, only wounding him slightly, were obliged to complete the murder with a poignard. The wounded man called for a priest, and declared himself, with his last breath, a steadfast Catholic. He seems to have been a dark, wily man, of strong pa.s.sions, tenacious ambition, and ungovernable will.