t
month only three privateers came in with their commissions, and Modyford
wrote to Secretary Bennet on 30th June that he feared the only effect of
the proclamation would be to drive them to the French in Tortuga. He
therefore thought it prudent, he continued, to dispense somewhat with
the strictness of his instructions, "doing by degrees and moderation
what he had at first resolved to execute suddenly and severely."[216]

Tortuga was really the crux of the whole difficulty. Back in 1662
Colonel Doyley, in his report to the Lord Chancellor after his return to
England, had suggested the reduction of Tortuga to English obedience as
the only effective way of dealing with the buccaneers;[217] and Modyford
in 1664 also realized the necessity of this preliminary step.[218] The
conquest of Tortuga, however, was no longer the simple task it might
have been four or five years earlier. The inhabitants of the island were
now almost entirely French, and with their companions on the coast of
Hispaniola had no intention of submitting to English dictation. The
buccaneers, who had become numerous and independent and made Tortuga one
of their principal retreats, would throw all their strength in the
balance against an expedition the avowed object of whose coming was to
make their profession impossible. The colony, moreover, received an
incalculable accession of strength in the arrival of Bertrand d'Ogeron,
the governor sent out in 1665 by the new French West India Company.
D'Ogeron was one of the most remarkable figures in the West Indies in
the second half of the seventeenth century. Of broad imagination and
singular kindness of heart, with an indomitable will and a mind full of
resource, he seems to have been an ideal man for the task, not only of
reducing to some semblance of law and order a people who had never given
obedience to any authority, but also of making palatable the _regime_
and exclusive privileges of a private trading company. D'Ogeron first
established himself at Port Margot on the coast of Hispaniola opposite
Tortuga in the early part of 1665; and here the adventurers at once gave
him to understand that they would never submit to any mere company, much
less suffer an interruption of their trade with the Dutch, who had
supplied them with necessities at a time when it was not even known in
France that there were Frenchmen in that region. D'Ogeron pretended to
subscribe to these conditions, passed over to Tortuga where he