had excluded them from the city while his officers gathered the plunder
and carried it to the ships. On the repeated remonstrances of Ducasse,
de Pointis finally announced that the share allotted to the men from
Hispaniola was 40,000 crowns. The buccaneers, finding themselves so
miserably cheated, broke out into open mutiny, but were restrained by
the influence of their leader and the presence of the king's frigates.
De Pointis, meanwhile, seeing his own men decimated by sickness, put all
the captured guns on board the fleet and made haste to get under sail
for France. South of Jamaica he fell in with the squadron of Admiral
Nevill, to which in the meantime had been joined some eight Dutch
men-of-war; but de Pointis, although inferior in numbers, outsailed the
English ships and lost but one or two of his smaller vessels. He then
man[oe]uvred past Cape S. Antonio, round the north of Cuba and through
the Bahama Channel to Newfoundland, where he stopped for fresh wood and
water, and after a brush with a small English squadron under Commodore
Norris, sailed into the harbour of Brest on 19th August 1697.[526]

The buccaneers, even before de Pointis sailed for France, had turned
their ships back toward Cartagena to reimburse themselves by again
plundering the city. De Pointis, indeed, was then very ill, and his
officers were in no condition to oppose them. After the fleet had
departed the freebooters re-entered Cartagena, and for four days put it
to the sack, extorting from the unfortunate citizens, and from the
churches and monasteries, several million more in gold and silver.
Embarking for the Isle la Vache, they had covered but thirty leagues
when they met with the same allied fleet which had pursued de Pointis.
Of the nine buccaneer vessels, the two which carried most of the booty
were captured, two more were driven ashore, and the rest succeeded in
escaping to Hispaniola. Ducasse, who had returned to Petit Goave when de
Pointis sailed for France, sent one of his lieutenants on a mission to
the French Court to complain of the ill-treatment he had received from
de Pointis, and to demand his own recall; but the king pacified him by
making him a Chevalier of St. Louis, and allotting 1,400,000 francs to
the French colonists who had aided in the expedition. The money,
however, was slow in reaching the hands of those to whom it was due, and
much was lost through the malversations of the men charged with its
distribution.[527]