* * * * *

With the capture of Cartagena in 1697 the history of the buccaneers may
be said to end. More and more during the previous twenty years they had
degenerated into mere pirates, or had left their libertine life for more
civilised pursuits. Since 1671 the English government had been
consistent in its policy of suppressing the freebooters, and with few
exceptions the governors sent to Jamaica had done their best to uphold
and enforce the will of the councils at home. Ten years or more had to
elapse before the French Court saw the situation in a similar light, and
even then the exigencies of war and defence in French Hispaniola
prevented the governors from taking any effective measures toward
suppression. The problem, indeed, had not been an easy one. The
buccaneers, whatever their origin, were intrepid men, not without a
sense of honour among themselves, wedded to a life of constant danger
which they met and overcame with surprising hardiness. When an
expedition was projected against their traditional foes, the Spaniards,
they calculated the chances of profit, and taking little account of the
perils to be run, or indeed of the flag under which they sailed,
English, French and Dutch alike became brothers under a chief whose
courage they perfectly recognised and whom they servilely obeyed. They
lived at a time when they were in no danger of being overhauled by
ubiquitous cruisers with rifled guns, and so long as they confined
themselves to His Catholic Majesty's ships and settlements, they had
trusted in the immunity arising from the traditional hostility existing
between the English and the Spaniards of that era. And for the Spaniards
the record of the buccaneers had been a terrible one. Between the years
1655 and 1671 alone, the corsairs had sacked eighteen cities, four towns
and more than thirty-five villages--Cumana once, Cumanagote twice,
Maracaibo and Gibraltar twice, Rio de la Hacha five times, Santa Marta
three times, Tolu eight times, Porto Bello once, Chagre twice, Panama
once, Santa Catalina twice, Granada in Nicaragua twice, Campeache three
times, St. Jago de Cuba once, and other towns and villages in Cuba and
Hispaniola for thirty leagues inland innumerable times. And this fearful
tale of robbery and outrage does not embrace the various expeditions
against Porto Bello, Campeache, Cartagena and other Spanish ports made
after 1670. The Marquis de Barinas in 1685 estimated