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THE MONARCHS OF THE MAIN;

Or,

Adventures of the Buccaneers.

by

GEORGE W. THORNBURY, ESQ.

"One foot on sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never."
                MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

In Three Volumes.

VOL. I.







London:
Hurst and Blackett, Publishers,
Successors to Henry Colburn,
13, Great Marlborough Street.
1855.

London: Sercombe and Jack, 16 Great Windmill Street.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.--THE PRECURSORS OF THE BUCCANEERS.

History of Tortuga--Description of the island--Origin of the
Buccaneers--Conquest of Tortuga by the French and English--Hunters,
planters, and corsairs--Le Basque takes Maracaibo--War with the
Spaniards of Hispaniola--The French West Indian Company buy
Tortuga--Their various governors                                      1

CHAPTER II.--MANNERS OF THE HUNTERS.

Indian derivation of the word Buccaneer--Flibustier--The three
classes--Dress of the hunters--West Indian scenery--Method of
hunting--Wild dogs--Anecdotes--Wild oxen--Wild boars and wild
horses--Buccaneer dainties--Cow-killing, English, French, and Spanish
methods--Amusements--Duels--Adventures--Conflicts with the Fifties, or
Spanish militia--The hunters driven to sea--Turn corsairs--The hunters'
_engages_, or apprentices--Hide curing--Hardships of the bush life--The
planters' _engages_--Cruelties of planters--The _matelotage_--Huts,
manners, and food                                                    35

CHAPTER III.--THE FLIBUSTIERS, OR SEA ROVERS.

Originated in the Spanish persecution of French hunters--Customs--"No
peace beyond the line"--"No prey, no pay"--Pay and pensions--Their
helots the Mosquito Indians--Lewis Scott, an Englishman, the first
Corsair--John Davis takes St. Francis in Campeachy--Their
debauchery--Gambling--Religion--Classes from which they sprang--Equality
at sea--Mode of fighting--Food--Dress                               111

CHAPTER IV.--PIERRE-LE-GRAND, THE FIRST BUCCANEER.

Plunder of Segovia--Pierre-le-Grand--Peter Francis--Captures of Spanish
vessels--Mode of capture--Barthelemy Portugese--His escapes and
victories--Roche the Brazilian--Fanatical hatred of the Spaniards--His
wrecks and adventures                                               152

CHAPTER V.--LOLONNOIS THE CRUEL.

Lolonnois' stratagems--His cruelty--His partner, Michael le
Basque--Takes Maracaibo--Tortures the citizens--Sacks the town--Takes
Gibraltar--Attempt on Merida--Famine and pestilence--Retreat--Division
of spoil--Ransom--Takes St. Pedro--Burns Veragua--Wrecked in the Gulf of
Honduras--Attacked by Indians--Killed and eaten by the savages      188

CHAPTER VI.--ALEXANDRE BRAS DE FER, AND MONTBARS THE EXTERMINATOR.

Bras de Fer compared by French writers to Alexander the Great--His
exploits and stratagems--Montbars--Anecdote of his childhood--Goes to
sea--His first naval engagement--Joins the Buccaneers--Defeats the
Spanish Fifties--His uncle killed--His revenge--Anecdote of the <DW64>
vessel--Adam and Anne le Roux plunder Santiago                      267




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 hitherto 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, classical, 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 scraps 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 hitherto 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 assert 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 assert, 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 passed 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, <DW64>s, astrologers,
monks, pilots, guides, merchants--all pass before us in a motley and
ever-changing masquerade. The backgrounds to these scenes are the wooded
shores 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 ships" 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, passing 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 Marseilles 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 shores; 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 ships, and
remain secure and unobserved. 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