from L70 to L100 a ton in the European markets. The wood is very
dense, and so heavy that it sinks in water. The work of cutting it, and
bringing it to the ships, in the rough Campeachy country, where there
were no roads, was very hard. The logwood cutters were, therefore, men
of muscle, fond of violent work. Nearly all of them in Dampier's time
were buccaneers who had lost their old trade. They were "sturdy, strong
Fellows," able to carry "Burthens of three or four hundred Weight," and
"contented to labour very hard." Their hands and arms were always dyed a
fine scarlet with the continuous rubbing of the wood, and their clothes
always smelt of the little yellow logwood flowers, which smell very
sweet and strong, at most seasons of the year. The life lived by the
lumbermen was wild, rough, and merry. They had each of them a tent, or a
strongly thatched hut, to live in, and most of them had an Indian woman
or a negress to cook their food. Some of them had white wives, which
they bought at Jamaica for about thirty pounds apiece, or five pounds
more than the cost of a black woman. As a rule, they lived close to the
lips of the creeks, "for the benefit of the Sea-Breezes," in little
villages of twenty or thirty together. They slept in hammocks, or in
Indian cots, raised some three or four feet from the ground, to allow
for any sudden flood which the heavy rains might raise. They cooked
their food on a sort of barbecue strewn with earth. For chairs they used
logs of wood or stout rails supported on crutches. On the Saturday in
each week they left their saws and axes and tramped out into the woods
to kill beef for the following week. In the wet seasons, when the
savannahs were flooded, they hunted the cattle in canoas by rowing near
to the higher grass-lands where the beasts were at graze. Sometimes a
wounded steer would charge the canoa, and spill the huntsmen in the
water, where the alligators nipped them. In the dry months, the hunters
went on foot. When they killed a steer they cut the body into four,
flung away the bones, and cut a big hole in each quarter. Each of the
four men of the hunting party then thrust his head through the hole in
one of the quarters, and put "it on like a Frock," and so trudged home.
If the sun were hot, and the beef heavy, the wearer cut some off, and
flung it away. This weekly hunting was "a Diversion pleasant enough"
after the five days' hacking at the red wood near the lagoon-banks. The
meat,