ng them was a Frenchman, a native of Sables
d'Olonne, hence called l'Olonais. He had been a prisoner of the
Spaniards, and the treatment he received at their hands had filled his
soul with such deadly hatred, that when he regained his liberty he
swore a solemn oath to live henceforth for revenge alone. And he did.
He never spared sex or age, and took a hellish pleasure in torturing
his victims. He made several descents on the coast of this island,
burned Maracaibo, Puerto Cabello, Veragua, and other places, and was
killed at last by the Indians of Darien.

Sir Henry Morgan, a Welsh aristocrat turned pirate, was another famous
scourge of the Spanish colonies. His inhuman treatment of the
inhabitants of Puerto Principe, in 1668, is a matter of history. He
plundered Porto Bello, Chagres, Panama, and extended his depredations
to the coast of Costa Rica. He used to subject his victims to torture
to make them declare where they had hidden their valuables, and many a
poor wretch who had no valuables to hide was ruthlessly tortured to
death.

Pierre Legrand was another Frenchman who, after committing all kinds
of outrages in the West Indies, passed with his robber crew to the
Pacific and scoured the coasts as far as California.

The atrocities committed by a certain Montbras, of Languedoc, earned
him the name of "the Exterminator."

* * * * *

When the first buccaneers made their appearance in the Antilles
(1520), the Windward Islands were still occupied by the Caribs. Here
they formed temporary settlements, which, by degrees, grew into
permanent pirates' nests. In some of these islands they found large
herds of cattle, the progeny of the first few heads introduced by the
early Spanish colonists, who afterward abandoned them. In 1625 a party
of English and French occupied the island San Cristobal. Four years
later Puerto Rico, being well garrisoned at the time, the governor,
Enrique Henriquez, fitted out an expedition to dislodge them, in which
he succeeded only to make them take up new quarters in Antigua.

The next year the French and English buccaneers who occupied the small
island of Tortuga made a descent upon the western part of la Espanola,
called Haiti by the natives (mountainous land), and maintained
themselves there till that part of the island was ceded to France by
the treaty of Ryswyk, in 1697.

Spain equipped a fleet to clear the West Indies from pirates in 1630,
and placed