shipwrecked there, and spend the remainder of my days dressed in goatskins, rambling about the cliffs and hunting wild goats." Which harmless ambition could not have been so very difficult of attainment; but it appears the versatile Browne preferred after all to go as United States minister to China.

In conclusion I may say that all this about a Crusoe Island in the Pacific, regarded as a myth of some two hundred years standing, is very interesting, but like many other myths, if scrutinized too closely, it vanishes. Says William Lee in his biography of Defoe, "It is evident he acquired some incidents from Selkirk, who lived four years on Juan Fernandez, but the ever-varying events, the useful and improving moralities, and the fascinating style are all his own;" while the author of Robinson Crusoe himself says, " In the gulf or mouth of the mighty river Oroonooko our island lay, which I perceived to the west and northwest was the great Island Trinidad, on the north point of the mouth of that river. I asked Friday a thousand questions about the country, its inhabitants, the sea, the coast, and what nations were there, but could get no other name but Caribs, from whence I easily understood that these were the Caribbees." Thus is clearly shown that the true island of Crusoe is Tobago, information concerning which Defoe easily obtained from pirates and others, and on which were likewise goats, which indeed were common to most of the islands on either side of South America.

CHAPTER XXVIII

LEAVES FROM THE LOG BOOKS OF THE PIRATES

THERE are various kinds of pirates, sea pirates and land pirates, sea robbers or rovers, buccaneers, privateers, filibusters, and freebooters. Those of whom I speak had their happy hunting-ground in the West Indies during parts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with occasional expeditions into the South sea, both by way of the Panamá isthmus and around Cape Horn. There were the Dutch English Portuguese Italians and French, preying on each other, and all preying on the Spaniards, because the possessions of the Spaniards in those days were the broadest and richest of them all, and because the Spaniards were always at war with some one or more of the other nations, which served as an excuse for buccaneering, though all were quite as ready for highway robbery without an excuse.

The cruelties of the Spaniards in forcing beyond their strength and habits the natives of Española and Cuba to labor in the mines and on the plantations led to their extermination, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century these islands were well nigh depopulated, and the cattle, introduced from Europe, increased until immense herds covered the valleys, so that hunting them for the hides and tallow became a profitable occupation. Settlements and plantations of a new and peculiar kind followed, to which English and French sailors, with their contraband goods, were always welcome.

Among the other industries here fostered was that of preserving the flesh of the wild cattle by smoking and drying it; the places where this was done were called boucans, the operation boucanning, and the operatives boucanneers; so that when all these people in a greater or less degree took to searoving, smuggling, and pirating, they were thrown into the one category of buccaneers. Thus there arose a fraternity of freebooters, or filibusters as they were also called, with

Spain as their common enemy, though, as I said before, they had small scruples to take a prize of any nationality, or even to fight each other.

A colony of buccaneers on the island of St Christopher, to which the governments of France and England had both contributed, was in 1629 surprised and scattered by a Spanish fleet of thirty-nine sail, but quickly regained its position upon the departure of the enemy. The buccaneers then established a store-house on the island of Tortuga, more secure from attack than St Christopher, with business headquarters at Santo Domingo. In 1638, while most of the occupants of the island were absent, the Spaniards attacked Tortuga, and killed every man there, but their places were quickly filled by others. At intervals the crown of France claimed possession of the piratical islands, and control of the fraternity, and drove out the English, only to be driven out themselves alternately by the English and Spaniards.

The buccaneers had their common law and code of ethics. Women were seldom a part of the fraternity, household duties being performed by men. Courage and fidelity were the cardinal virtues, and as death was the penalty if captured, quarter was seldom asked or given. Association was voluntary; engagement was only for the cruise, and any member might quit the brotherhood at pleasure. All fighting men might attend councils; commanders were chosen for their ability and bravery, and those who made the leaders could unmake them. Duels were frequently resorted to for the settlement of individual quarrels; an offence against the society was punished by death, abandonment on a deserted island, or it might be simply expulsion.

The rules applied in privateering generally governed in the division of spoils. The captain carpenter sail-maker and surgeon were first considered, the captain receiving five shares and his mate two shares, fighting men one share, boys half a share. Then wounds were examined and paid for, a right arm being valued at 600 pieces of eight, or six slaves; an eye or a finger 100 pieces of eight, or one slave. Food was held in common, and on a cruise consisted largely of pork, with dried beef and salted turtle, cassada maize and potatoes, but no bread. There were two regular meals each day, but any member might help himself to food at pleasure.

Piety was part of the freebooters stock in trade, though not quite in the same degree as was the case with the conquerors. The former desired God's blessing on his enterprise, and prayed for it, saying mass now and then, even carrying a priest sometimes for that purpose, as Francis Drake carried a chaplain; but they did not trouble themselves about saving souls, other than their own, and they never allowed religion to interfere with business, robbing churches being all the same to them as robbing ships.

It is not my purpose to give here a history of the buccaneers, but only to give them brief mention in connection with their doings in the Pacific. The West Indies was their home, where they lived and labored for a good round century, doing other things than acts of pure piracy. The English buccaneers assisted the English in the conquest of Jamaica in 1655. The French buccaneers, under Pierre Legrand, rose at one stroke to fame and fortune by the capture of a richly laden galleon of the annual Spanish fleet, in command of the vice-admiral, the pirates climbing on board from a small boat at night, and surprising the officers at cards in the admiral's cabin.

This achievement made wild with envy the planters of Tortuga and other isles, who with one accord rushed to sea in small boats in search of Spaniards, and soon equipped themselves in better form from their captured prizes. Another Frenchman, Pierre François, captured the vice-admiral of the pearl fleet, while Bartholomew Portugues, with a boat carrying but four guns and thirty men, successfully fought a Spanish war vessel of twenty large guns and seventy

men.

Land-piracy came on apace; Lewis Scot stormed and carried Compeache, securing large ransom; Mansvelt and John Davies followed the bright examples of their predecessors on sea and land. Lolonnois and Montbar, Frenchmen and monsters of cruelty and crime, were long a terror to the Spanish main. Lolonnois began his career with the capture with twenty-two men in two canoes on the coast of Cuba of a Spanish frigate. His prisoners he would throw overboard or burn in their ship; it is said that he once struck off the heads of eighty captives with his own sword by way of amusement. With Michael de Basco and 650 men in eight ships he stormed

Gibraltar and Maracaibo, plundering and burning other towns, killing seamen, sinking ships, and strewing the ocean with horror. It is unnecessary to speak of the treatment of women by fiends like these, or of the freebooter's universal love of drink and gambling. Lolonnois finally met a fate in keeping with his life; he was torn limb from limb by the natives of Darien, the body burned, and the ashes scattered to the wind.

Another of those human hyenas, the French buccaneer, was Montbar, the Exterminator as his comrades called him, native of Languedoc, who from his youth up studied brutality as a fine art, to be practised on the Spaniards as opportunity should offer. He learned lessons in treachery and ferocity from the Spaniards themselves, in their treatment of the natives, islanders Mexicans and Peruvians, which he put into practice with delight. Blood thirstiness was a passion with him, the gratification of which was more to him than gold. The cries of agony arising from his divers tortures and butcheries were as sweetest music to his ear; he revelled in the sanguinary for its own sake.

Not far behind this French fiend was the Welchman, Sir Henry Morgan, whose sordid and brutal nature was fed by cunning and cruelty. With twelve sail and 700 fighting men he swept the seas and terrorized the islands and mainland, plundering the cities of Cuba, and carrying even Portobello, on the Isthmus, with a handful of determined men, afterward huddling his prisoners into the castle and blowing it up with powder, darkening the sky with the mangled bodies of his victims. Fifteen days of fiendish revels followed, among the pastimes being the violation of women, and the torture of prisoners for the disclosure of treasure which they did not possess. News thereof crossing the Isthmus, the governor of Panamá sent Sir Morgan 100,000 pieces of eight to be exempt from destruction for this one time. When the messenger who brought Morgan the money returned to Panamá and told the governor with how small a force the Welchman had taken the Spanish stronghold of Portobello, he was amazed, and bade the messenger return and ask the pirate by what means he was able to accomplish such great results with so small a force. Whereupon Morgan sent the governor a pistol with bullets, saying, "Keep this a twelvemonth and I will