the very main stream of travel.
The pioneer Frenchmen were not slow to discover the double advantage to
be reaped from the wild cattle that cost them nothing to procure, and a
market for the flesh ready found for them. So down upon Hispaniola they
came by boatloads and shiploads, gathering like a swarm of mosquitoes,
and overrunning the whole western end of the island. There they
established themselves, spending the time alternately in hunting the
wild cattle and buccanning(1) the meat, and squandering their hardly
earned gains in wild debauchery, the opportunities for which were never
lacking in the Spanish West Indies.

(1) Buccanning, by which the "buccaneers" gained their name,
was of process of curing thin strips of meat by salting,
smoking, and drying in the sun.

At first the Spaniards thought nothing of the few travel-worn Frenchmen
who dragged their longboats and hoys up on the beach, and shot a wild
bullock or two to keep body and soul together; but when the few grew to
dozens, and the dozens to scores, and the scores to hundreds, it was a
very different matter, and wrathful grumblings and mutterings began to
be heard among the original settlers.

But of this the careless buccaneers thought never a whit, the only thing
that troubled them being the lack of a more convenient shipping point
than the main island afforded them.

This lack was at last filled by a party of hunters who ventured across
the narrow channel that separated the main island from Tortuga. Here
they found exactly what they needed--a good harbor, just at the junction
of the Windward Channel with the old Bahama Channel--a spot where
four-fifths of the Spanish-Indian trade would pass by their very
wharves.

There were a few Spaniards upon the island, but they were a quiet folk,
and well disposed to make friends with the strangers; but when more
Frenchmen and still more Frenchmen crossed the narrow channel, until
they overran the Tortuga and turned it into one great curing house for
the beef which they shot upon the neighboring island, the Spaniards grew
restive over the matter, just as they had done upon the larger island.

Accordingly, one fine day there came half a dozen great boatloads
of armed Spaniards, who landed upon the Turtle's Back and sent the
Frenchmen flying to the woods and fastnesses of rocks as the chaff flies
before the thunder gust. That night the Spaniards drank themselves
mad and shouted themselves hoars