in which king and priest had bound them.

To the Spaniards, Drake and his comrades were _corsarios_, robbers,
enemies of the human race, to be treated to a short shrift whenever
found and caught. British seamen who fell into their hands were carried
before the Inquisition at Lima or Carthagena and burnt at the stake as
heretics. Four of Drake's crew were unfortunately taken once at Vera
Cruz. Drake sent a message to the governor-general that if a hair of
their heads was singed he would hang ten Spaniards for each one of them.
(This curious note is at Simancas, where I saw it.) So great an object
of terror at Madrid was El Draque that he was looked on as an
incarnation of the old serpent, and when he failed in his last
enterprise and news came that he was dead, Lope de Vega sang a hymn of
triumph in an epic poem which he called the 'Dragontea.'

When Elizabeth died and peace was made with Spain, the adventurers lost
something of the indirect countenance which had so far been extended to
them; the execution of Raleigh being one among other marks of the change
of mind. But they continued under other names, and no active effort was
made to suppress them. The Spanish Government did in 1627 agree to leave
England in possession of Barbadoes, but the pretensions to an exclusive
right to trade continued to be maintained, and the English and French
refused to recognise it. The French privateers seized Tortuga, an island
off St. Domingo, and they and their English friends swarmed in the
Caribbean Sea as buccaneers or flibustiers. They exchanged names,
perhaps as a symbol of their alliance. 'Flibustier' was English and a
corruption of freebooter. 'Buccaneer' came from the boucan, or dried
beef, of the wild cattle which the French hunters shot in Espanola, and
which formed the chief of their sea stores. Boucan became a French verb,
and, according to Labat, was itself the Carib name for the cashew nut.

War breaking out again in Cromwell's time, Penn and Venables took
Jamaica. The flibustiers from the Tortugas drove the Spaniards out of
Hayti, which was annexed to the French crown. The comradeship in
religious enthusiasm which had originally drawn the two nations together
cooled by degrees, as French Catholics as well as Protestants took to
the trade. Port Royal became the headquarters of the English
buccaneers--the last and greatest of them being Henry Morgan, who took
and plundered Panama, was knighted for his services, and was a