THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE BUCCANEERS
Sailing along the shores of Santo Domingo, one realizes the aptness of
the graphic illustration of the island’s appearance with which,
tradition says, Columbus answered Queen Isabella’s queries. The great
discoverer, according to the story, seized a sheet of parchment,
crumpled it in his hands, and, dropping it on the table before his
queen, exclaimed, “That is like Hispaniola!”
And nothing could be more like a crumpled piece of parchment than the
tumbled, serrated mass of ridges, hills, mountains, and peaks of this
great island. Wild, forest-covered, sublime in their grandeur, the
mountains of Santo Domingo rise in endless succession, and one marvels
that the old Dons, a mere handful of men, could ever have penetrated
its fastnesses and subdued and exterminated the Indians. But the
Spaniards with all their faults were made of stern stuff,—real “he
men,”—and fired with the zeal of conquest, the fanatical determination
to spread their faith among the heathen, and an insatiable lust for
gold, they accomplished marvels and performed deeds which seem
well-nigh impossible. Let anyone to-day, equipped with every device and
convenience and in the lightest clothing, step ashore on the coast of
Santo Domingo and penetrate to the interior through the unbroken
jungle, and he will feel, when he reaches his journey’s end,—if,
indeed, he ever does,—that he has performed a mighty feat. Climbing
precipitous mountain sides, swimming rivers, fording streams, crawling
up dry watercourses, hewing his way an inch at a time through the
tangled vegetation; beset by biting insects, drenched with rain, torn
by thorns and razor-grass, and exhausted with the steaming heat, he
finds such a trip enough to try the stoutest nerves and the strongest
muscles. But imagine undertaking such an expedition when clad in armor!
Think of attempting the journey weighted down with mail, carrying a
clumsy match-lock or a massive cross-bow, a heavy sword, a pike or
halberd, and harassed by hostile Indians at every step. But the old
Dons did it, did it and won out, though literally living off the
country, knowing not what might meet them at their journey’s end, and
completely cut off from civilization and their fellows.
Of course they achieved their object at the cost of a tremendous loss
of life. If one hundred men set forth and a dozen won safely through,
it was doing well, and rarely did more than ten per cent. of their
number return in safety from their expeditions into the untrod jungles
of the New World. But to them the lives of men-at-arms, of the common
soldier or adventurer, were nothing; and the more that fell by the way,
the more loot there would be to divide among the survivors. We must
bear this in mind when thinking of the early days of the West Indies
and the Spanish Main, for it was this utter disregard of life that
enabled both Dons and buccaneers to perform deeds which, were they not
incontrovertible historical facts, we should consider absolutely
impossible.
Here, on the northern shores of Hispaniola, the Spaniards landed and
marched inland to the vast interior Vega Real or Royal Plain and the
Cibao district with its golden sands; and there on the high interior
plains they founded and built the cities of La Vega, Moca, and Santiago
de los Caballeros, cities which still stand. In these cities are many
lineal descendants of the conquistadors, and in their dwellings one may
still find weapons and pieces of armor which have been handed down
through the centuries. Indeed, in the ruins of La Vega la Antigua,
which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1564, one may yet dig up
ancient Spanish coins, old Toledo blades, and other relics; and
throughout the island one sees the natives armed with home-made
machetes fashioned from old swords they have salvaged from the ruins of
this once rich and famous town.
To-day, however, one travels from the coast to the Cibao by railway,
and takes the train at Puerto Plata, a delightfully situated port which
the Vigilant passed the second day after leaving the Mona Passage and
heading westward along the coast. Puerto Plata is beautiful from the
sea, with its red-roofed buildings half hidden by palms at the base of
the towering green cone of Plata Mountain; and in reality the town is
by far the cleanest and most attractive in the republic. Its harbor is
excellent, being almost landlocked, but the water shoals so gradually
that despite a long pier jutting from the waterfront of the town into
the bay the drays and trucks are compelled to drive out until the mules
and horses are belly-deep in the water, in order to load or unload the
boats.
It was off Puerto Plata that a vast treasure in bullion was recovered
many years ago—one of the few authentic cases of the actual finding of
ancient treasure in the West Indies. This happened in the latter part
of the eighteenth century when Captain William Phipps of Salem,—a
worthy mariner with a love of romance and one-time governor of
Massachusetts,—became imbued with the idea of recovering treasure-trove
from a galleon which, in endeavoring to escape from the buccaneers, had
been sunk off Puerto Plata. In those days, even as to-day, sunken
treasure appealed to many otherwise hard-headed and practical men, and
Captain Phipps found backers who provided the ships and wherewithal for
his expedition. Apparently his information as to the location of the
old wreck was somewhat hazy, and after a deal of search he had about
given up in despair when one of his divers brought up a lump of coral
growing upon an oddly squarish and heavy object. Knocking off the
incrustation, the captain found an ingot of silver, and ere tempestuous
weather came on several tons of bullion, together with gold and
jewels,—in all amounting to over one and a half million dollars,—had
been dragged from the depths of the sea and safely stowed under
hatches.
Had the worthy Phipps been content with a comfortable fortune, he could
have spent his declining years in a snug little home in Salem, where,
surrounded by his grandchildren, he might have spun many a yarn of his
treasure-hunt. But he was too avaricious, and, anxious to secure the
last bit of treasure that might still lie among the corals of Silver
Shoals, he spent his share of the salvaged bullion in outfitting
another expedition. Unfortunately a storm came up, his ship was
wrecked, and Phipps barely escaped with his life and came home as poor
as when he had first started treasure-seeking.
A few miles beyond Puerto Plata, completely hidden in the interminable
green jungle and with nothing to distinguish it from any other of the
thousands of little coves that indent the coast, is the site of the
first European settlement in the New World. Isabella, Columbus named it
in honor of the queen who made his discoveries possible, and here in
December, 1493, he built, on his second voyage to the New World, a tiny
fort, erected a few houses, and left a handful of men. Near here the
Dons found the first gold they had seen in a natural state in the lands
they had discovered, the flakes of precious metal adhering with sand to
the water-casks which the sailors filled at a near-by stream. This,
with the Indians’ information that they obtained all their gold from
inland, convinced Columbus that untold wealth was to be had for the
asking, so to speak; and, planting his little town of Isabella, he
sailed away, expecting to return the following year to find the
settlers surrounded with chests and bags full of the yellow metal.
Instead, when he returned, he found most of them dead and buried, the
settlement destroyed, and no gold. Maltreatment of the natives had
brought swift vengeance upon the Spaniards; fever and the climate had
aided the red men, and Isabella had passed out of existence. It was
never rebuilt, and all that remains of this first town in America are a
few crumbling, jungle-grown walls.
Beyond Isabella the green and luxuriant verdure gives way to barren
hills and cactus-covered plains, until the frowning, red-cliffed
headland of El Morro is passed, with the miserable, mosquito-infested
mud-hole of a town known as Monte Cristo. Just beyond this God-forsaken
spot we left the waters of the Dominican Republic behind, and, entering
the territorial waters of Haiti, rushed westward toward the great bulk
of Tortuga, the birthplace of the buccaneers.
Larger than any of the Lesser Antilles, Tortuga stretches its mass of
wooded hills and mountains for nearly twenty-five miles, with a width
of three miles. It is an impenetrable jungle for the most part, almost
uninhabited, but it was once the greatest of all the resorts of the
buccaneers and the home of the most notorious pirates of history.
Separated from the mainland of Santo Domingo by only a narrow strait,
Tortuga was an ideal spot for the sea-rovers, and for many a year they
held it, having their own governors, their own laws, their own forts,
and brazenly defying the world to dislodge them. Here their ships rode
to anchor under the protecting guns of their fort; from here they
fitted out fleets of heavily armed vessels manned by thousands of the
most reckless, daring, ruthless men who ever lived; and from this
stronghold—right in the Dons’ dooryard, as we might say—the buccaneers
ravaged Spanish cities and destroyed Spanish ships throughout the
length and breadth of the Caribbean and beyond.
In the well-protected harbor where once the fleets of Lolonais, Morgan,
Montbars, and many another corsair had swung to their moorings, the
little Vigilant dropped her anchor. Although to-day the port is
scarcely worthy the name of town, yet in the heyday of the buccaneers
Cayona, as it was called, had a teeming population. It was divided into
four sections, known as the Lowland or Basseterre, comprising the
coastal land and the port proper; the Middle Plantation, which was a
district mainly devoted to tobacco-culture; the Ringot, and Le Mont or
The Mountain, which consisted of the oldest settlement on the slopes of
the towering hills behind the port. Beyond these the island was
uninhabited, as it is to-day. It is extremely mountainous and rocky,
although heavily wooded, a fact which aroused the interest of
Esquemelling and caused him to comment upon it. He says:
Yet notwithstanding hugely thick of lofty trees that cease not to
grow upon the hardest of these rocks without partaking of softer
soil. Hence it comes that their roots for the greatest part, are
seen all over, entangled among the rocks, not unlike the branching
of ivy against our walls.
This is an excellent description, and one which will give a vivid idea
of the difficulties to be encountered in penetrating the interior of
the island. Moreover, the northern coast is forbidding, with
precipitous cliffs along the shore and with no harbors or
landing-places, so that the island was virtually inaccessible except on
the southwestern end where the port was established. This natural
formation of the island, which rendered it very easy to fortify, was no
doubt one of the chief reasons why it was selected by the buccaneers as
their headquarters. But there were other reasons, of perhaps even
greater importance, to understand which we must look into the origin
and history of the sea-rovers.
Tortuga had its beginning in a handful of refugees from St. Kitts,
Frenchmen who had settled on that isle and had been driven off by the
Spaniards in 1629. Fleeing from the Dons, they made their way in little
dugout canoes to Hispaniola. To their wave-weary eyes this vast,
heavily wooded, luxuriant land must have seemed a veritable paradise,
and when, upon landing and penetrating a short distance into the
interior, they found it teeming with wild cattle, wild hogs, and wild
horses, they realized that fortune had indeed favored them. But the
herds of wild cattle, horses, and swine were not the only denizens of
Hispaniola, for the Spaniards had long been established there, and the
refugees from St. Kitts knew that as soon as they were discovered by
the Dons they would meet with a summary end. Near at hand, however, was
the promising island of Tortuga, with barely a dozen Spaniards dwelling
upon it, and, again taking to the miniature craft which had served them
so well, the Frenchmen sailed across the strait, determined to do or
die.
There was no occasion for bloodshed, however, for the handful of
settlers upon Tortuga were peaceable and friendly folk, and instead of
resisting the Kittefonians they welcomed them, and aided them in every
way. Thus for six months the French and Spanish dwelt together on the
best of terms in Tortuga. But this state of affairs did not endure for
long. The French, finding Tortuga an agreeable spot, well stocked with
game as well as wild hogs and cattle, crossed and recrossed the sea to
French settlements and brought scores of their countrymen to the new
land, until the Dons, feeling that the place would soon become wholly
French, repented of their former friendliness and sent word of the
newcomers’ presence to the Spanish at Santo Domingo.
As a result, a strong force of Spanish troops was despatched to
Tortuga, and the French, realizing the futility of resistance, promptly
took to the woods and later secretly made their way in their canoes to
the neighboring island of Hispaniola. Here they lived in the jungle and
carried on a guerrilla warfare against the Dons, who were ever seeking
to eliminate their unwelcome guests. Finding no French at Tortuga, the
Spanish soon withdrew the bulk of the troops, to use them to better
advantage on the larger island, whereupon the tactful French hied
themselves once more to Tortuga, massacred the few Spaniards left
there, and, taking possession, threw up hastily constructed
fortifications. Then, aware that they could not hope to resist the
mighty power of Spain for long, they despatched a boat to St. Kitts,
begging the French governor of that island to send aid.
Being only too glad to add to the possessions of France, the governor
immediately responded by sending over a good-sized ship with a large
complement of men, a plentiful store of arms, cannon and ammunition,
and a quantity of supplies. The new arrivals at once began constructing
a fort upon the summit of a rocky hill which overlooked the harbor, and
which was so situated that it could be reached only by means of a
defile barely wide enough to permit the passage of two persons abreast.
Here a battery of two guns was erected, a house was built, and a
natural cavern was transformed into a magazine, and, as a finishing
touch, the natural passway was destroyed and the fort rendered
accessible only by means of ladders.
Feeling that they were now quite secure, the French colonists set
diligently to work, cultivating tobacco and other crops, fishing,
hunting the wild cattle and swine, and, most lucrative of all, robbing
the Spanish settlements on the coasts of the near-by Spanish islands.
At that time one of the principal articles of food and of export was
the smoke-dried flesh of cattle and hogs, a product peculiar to
Hispaniola and the neighboring islands and known by the Carib name of
boucan or bucan. Tortuga, with limited agricultural resources but
innumerable wild animals, was particularly well adapted to the
bucanning industry, and a very large proportion of the settlers devoted
virtually all their time to hunting and curing meat. As a result, the
inhabitants soon became known as boucaniers, bucaneers or buccaneers, a
name which was to become famed throughout the world. The original
significance of “buccaneer” was wholly lost and, becoming synonymous
with “pirate,” it was destined to carry terror to the hearts of the
Spaniards far and near. To Tortuga, the home of the buccaneers, flocked
malcontents, adventurers, real pirates, seamen, and all sorts of wild
rovers of the sea and land, until the island became headquarters for
the most lawless of French and British wanderers and outlaws. But all
were bound together by a common hatred of the Spaniards; all were
willing to enter into any wild enterprise that promised loot; all were
absolutely fearless, unprincipled, ruthless, and daring; and all took
unto themselves the common name of buccaneers.
Do not imagine, however, that the Dons upon the neighboring island
stood idly by and saw Tortuga fall into the buccaneers’ hands without
making any effort to prevent it. On the contrary, they did their best
to recover the island, though without success. Upon a hill overlooking
the French fort they established a battery of their own, and were about
to make matters very uncomfortable for the buccaneers when the latter
surprised them at midnight and took their fort by storm, slaughtering
the defenders without mercy and throwing the survivors over the
beetling cliffs. After this the buccaneers had it pretty much their own
way for about thirty years, or until 1664, when the French West India
Company was granted a royal charter to Tortuga, by the French crown.
But the West India Company soon found that to be granted a charter to
the headquarters of the buccaneers was one thing and to secure their
rights and privileges and bend the lawless rascals to their will was
quite a different matter. Sending out their own factors and employees,
the company established stores and plantations, but this effort was a
failure; for no nation dared trade with Tortuga, so close to Spanish
territory, and even the company’s own ships were often seized and lost.
Then the company sought to carry on trade with the buccaneers
themselves, agreeing to supply them with goods and necessities on
credit, the buccaneers to pay as they could from the fruits of their
forays. But the company’s factors soon discovered that the buccaneers
were as inclined to questionable methods when dealing with their own
country as when dealing with the Dons; and they received merely rude
jests and laughter, or even blows at times, in place of money, when
they sought to collect their accounts. Even when armed men were sent
out to enforce a settlement, the buccaneers flatly refused to pay; and
those of the guards who did not desert and throw in their lot with the
freebooters cast aside their weapons and left the company at the first
opportunity.
At last, convinced that these were far from desirable customers or
neighbors, the French West India Company made the best of a bad bargain
and, disposing of their few remaining possessions for what they would
bring, withdrew from Tortuga and left it in undisputed control of the
buccaneers.
This, then, was the beginning of that vast, all but unconquerable,
incredibly valiant, and unspeakably cruel and unprincipled organization
known as the “Brethren of the Main.” Here in Tortuga the buccaneers
came into existence; from a handful of despoiled Frenchmen from St.
Kitts the band grew to thousands; from robbing Spanish corrals and
chicken roosts along the shores of Hispaniola they progressed to the
destruction of Spanish fleets, the sacking of towns, the capture of
fortresses, and to unparalleled feats of bravery. From Tortuga they
spread far and near, and the dugouts in which they were wont to make
their first raids gave place to swift ships bristling with cannon and
manned by hundreds of well-armed men; while from the harmless and
peaceful occupation of drying meat, which gave them their name, they
turned to bloodshed and piracy.