flected a curious blend of the old-time life of Seville and
Madrid with the picturesque and turbulent elements of the adventurer
and buccaneer. The spirit of the West has always been synonymous with
a larger sense of freedom, a shaking off of prejudice and tradition
and the trammels of convention. The sixteenth century towns of the New
World were no exception, and their streets and _plazas_ early
exhibited a multicolored panorama, wherein freely mingled knight and
predaceous priest, swashbuckler and staid _hidalgo_, timid Indian and
veiled _doncella_--a potpourri of merchant, prelate, negro, thief, the
broken in fortune and the blackened in character--all poured into the
melting pot of the new West, and there steaming and straining,
scheming and plotting, attuned to any pitch of venturesome project, so
be it that gold and fame were the promised emoluments thereof.

And gold, and fame of a certain kind, were always to be had by those
whose ethical code permitted of a little straining. For the great
ships which carried the vast wealth of this new land of magic back to
the perennially empty coffers of Old Spain constituted a temptation
far more readily recognized than resisted. These huge, slow-moving
galleons, gilded and carved, crawling lazily over the surface of the
bright tropical sea, and often so heavily freighted with treasure as
to be unsafe in rough weather, came to be regarded as special
dispensations of Providence by the cattle thieves and driers of beef
who dwelt in the pirates' paradise of Tortuga and Hispaniola, and
little was required in way of soul-alchemy to transform the
_boucanier_ into the lawless and sanguinary, though picturesque,
corsair of that romantic age. The buccaneer was but a natural
evolution from the peculiar conditions then obtaining. Where human
society in the process of formation has not yet arrived at the
necessity of law to restrain the lust and greed of its members; and
where at the same time untold wealth is to be had at the slight cost
of a few lives; and, too, where even the children are taught that
whosoever aids in the destruction of Spanish ships and Spanish lives
renders a service to the Almighty, the buccaneer must be regarded as
the logical result. He multiplied with astonishing rapidity in these
warm, southern waters, and not a ship that sailed the Caribbean was
safe from his sudden depredations. So extensive and thorough was his
work that the bed of the Spanish Main is dotte