the losses of the
Spaniards at the hands of the buccaneers since the accession of Charles
II. to be sixty million crowns; and these figures covered merely the
destruction of towns and treasure, without including the loss of more
than 250 merchant ships and frigates.[528] If the losses and suffering
of the Spaniards had been terrible, the advantages accruing to the
invaders, or to the colonies which received and supported them, scarcely
compensated for the effort it cost them. Buccaneering had denuded
Jamaica of its bravest men, lowered the moral tone of the island, and
retarded the development of its natural resources. It was estimated that
there were lost to the island between 1668 and 1671, in the designs
against Tobago, Curacao, Porto Bello, Granada and Panama, about 2600
men,[529] which was a large number for a new and very weak colony
surrounded by powerful foes. Says the same writer later on: "People have
not married, built or settled as they would in time of peace--some for
fear of being destroyed, others have got much suddenly by privateers
bargains and are gone. War carries away all freemen, labourers and
planters of provisions, which makes work and victuals dear and scarce.
Privateering encourages all manner of disorder and dissoluteness; and if
it succeed, does but enrich the worst sort of people and provoke and
alarm the Spaniards."[530]

The privateers, moreover, really injured English trade as much as they
injured Spanish navigation; and if the English in the second half of the
seventeenth century had given the Spaniards as little cause for enmity
in the West Indies as the Dutch had done, they perhaps rather than the
Dutch would have been the convoys and sharers in the rich Flotas. The
Spaniards, moreover, if not in the court at home, at least in the
colonies, would have readily lent themselves to a trade, illicit though
it be, with the English islands, a trade, moreover, which it was the
constant aim of English diplomacy to encourage and maintain, had they
been able to assure themselves that their English neighbours were their
friends. But when outrage succeeded upon outrage, and the English
Governors seemed, in spite of their protestations of innocence, to make
no progress toward stopping them, the Spaniards naturally concluded that
the English government was the best of liars and the worst of friends.
From another point of view, too, the activity of the buccaneers was
directly opposed to the commercial