under a burning sun. Little food was taken, as the invaders expected
to live on the country; but the inhabitants fled before the advancing
column, destroying every thing eatable. Soon starvation stared the
desperadoes in the face. They fed upon berries, roots, and leaves. As
the days passed, and no food was to be found, they sliced up and
devoured coarse leather bags. For a time, it seemed that they would
never escape alive from the jungle; but at last, weak, weary, and
emaciated, they came out upon a grassy plain before the city of
Panama. Here, a few days later, a great battle was fought. The
Spaniards outnumbered the invaders, and were better provided with
munitions of war; yet the pirates, fighting with the bravery of
desperate men, were victorious, and the city fell into their hands.
Then followed days of murder, plunder, and debauchery. Morgan saw his
followers, maddened by liquor, scoff at the idea of discipline and
obedience. Fearing that while his men were helplessly drunk the
Spaniards would rally and cut them to pieces, he set fire to the city,
that the stores of rum might be destroyed. After sacking the town, the
vandals packed their plunder on the backs of mules, and retraced their
steps to the seaboard. Their booty amounted to over two millions of
dollars. Over the division of this enormous sum great dissensions
arose, and Morgan saw the mutinous spirit spreading rapidly among his
men. With a few accomplices, therefore, he loaded a ship with the
plunder, and secretly set sail; leaving over half of his band, without
food or shelter, in a hostile country. Many of the abandoned
buccaneers starved, some were shot or hanged by the enraged Spaniards;
but the leader of the rapacious gang reached Jamaica with a huge
fortune, and was appointed governor of the island, and made a baronet
by the reigning king of England, Charles the Second.

Such were some of the exploits of some of the more notorious of the
buccaneers. It may be readily imagined, that, with hordes of
desperadoes such as these infesting the waters of the West Indies,
there was little opportunity for the American Colonies to build up any
maritime interests in that direction. And as the merchantmen became
scarce on the Spanish Main, such of the buccaneers as did not turn
landward in search of booty put out to sea, and ravaged the ocean
pathways between the Colonies and England. It was against these
pirates, that the earliest naval operations of the Co