d men to resort to any artifice in order to obtain assistance
in cultivating the sugar-cane and tobacco. The apprentices sent from
Europe were generally bound out in the French Antilles for eighteen
months or three years, among the English for seven years. They were
often resold in the interim, and sometimes served ten or twelve years
before they regained their freedom. They were veritable convicts, often
more ill-treated than the slaves with whom they worked side by side, for
their lives, after the expiration of their term of service, were of no
consequence to their masters. Many of these apprentices, of good birth
and tender education, were unable to endure the debilitating climate and
hard labour, let alone the cruelty of their employers. Exquemelin,
himself originally an _engage_, gives a most piteous description of
their sufferings. He was sold to the Lieutenant-Governor of Tortuga, who
treated him with great severity and refused to take less than 300 pieces
of eight for his freedom. Falling ill through vexation and despair, he
passed into the hands of a surgeon, who proved kind to him and finally
gave him his liberty for 100 pieces of eight, to be paid after his first
buccaneering voyage.[112]

We left Levasseur governor in Tortuga after the abortive Spanish attack
of 1643. Finding his personal ascendancy so complete over the rude
natures about him, Levasseur, like many a greater man in similar
circumstances, lost his sense of the rights of others. His character
changed, he became suspicious and intolerant, and the settlers
complained bitterly of his cruelty and overbearing temper. Having come
as the leader of a band of Huguenots, he forbade the Roman Catholics to
hold services on the island, burnt their chapel and turned out their
priest. He placed heavy imposts on trade, and soon amassed a
considerable fortune.[113] In his eyrie upon the rock fortress, he is
said to have kept for his enemies a cage of iron, in which the prisoner
could neither stand nor lie down, and which Levasseur, with grim humour,
called his "little hell." A dungeon in his castle he termed in like
fashion his "purgatory." All these stories, however, are reported by the
Jesuits, his natural foes, and must be taken with a grain of salt. De
Poincy, who himself ruled with despotic authority and was guilty of
similar cruelties, would have turned a deaf ear to the denunciations
against his lieutenant, had not his jealousy been aroused by the
suspic