flourishing career. T h e y owed their success for a
long time to the fact that their attacks were made
upon Spanish trade and Spanish settlements, and
they had the connivance, if not the countenance, of
the English and French authorities. T h e y sometimes
even carried letters of marque.
While the buccaneers’ headquarters were still on
Tortuga, with their piratical fleet they maintained
outposts in the Virgin Islands, in the Southern
Bahamas, and in the Bay of Campeachy, where they
waylaid Spanish traders and watched for the swag-
bellied galleons from the treasure cities of Mexico
and “ the Main,” and where they often hid their
booty in caves. Their first great leader was a
Frenchman named Montbar, whom they called
Pierre le Grand, or Peter the Great. It is related
of him that while lying off the Caicos for vessels
passing the old Bahama Channel, he captured the
ship of a Spanish vice-admiral. Another Frenchman,
a native of Sables d ’Olonne, and known as
François l ’Olonnois, who had come out to the
West Indies as a common sailor, became a formidable
commander of buccaneers. He captured a
Spanish frigate which was sent from Havana to put
down the freebooters, with a negro executioner on
board who was to hang to the yard-arm every man
caught ; and he is said to have struck off the heads
of the Spanish crew, ranged in a row convenient for
the purpose, licking his sword after each blow. But
the chief exploits of L ’Olonnois, or Lolonois, as he
is commonly called, were plundering settlements on
the coast, especially the cities of the mainland.
When the headquarters of the buccaneers were
established in Jamaica, Captain Henry Morgan, a
Welshman by birth, rose to be a famous leader
among them, and his depredations were also committed
chiefly on the mainland, though his plunder
was brought to Port Royal, which became the resort
of desperate and vicious characters and grew rich
and wicked from the profits of freebooting. These
profits were gathered mostly from attacks upon
Cartagena, Porto Bello, and other cities of the
Spanish Main, which were either sacked or forced
to pay heavy ransom. Spanish trade on the water
had been already ruined, and attacks upon it had become
unprofitable. T he days had gone by when
the rakish craft of the buccaneer could lurk among
the islands and conceal themselves in shady coves,
to sally forth in the moonlight and seize a passing
galleon or a Spanish fighting vessel, cutting the
throats of captain and crew and carrying bags and
buckets of treasure to T o rtu ga and St. Thomas.
T h e end of hostilities between England and Spain
about 1670 virtually put a stop to legalised or tolerated
piracy in the Caribbean Sea, and after Morgan’s
great exploit of burning the c ity of Panama in 1671,
buccaneering took to the Pacific, ravaged the west
coast of South America, and wandered over seas,
though much of the plunder was still brought to
Jamaica by way of Cape Horn, and a general rendezvous
was kept up among the islands. Morgan
finally “ squared himself ” with the authorities, and
settled down at Port Royal. He was twice A c tin g
Governor of Jamaica, was knighted by Charles I I .,