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.

[Footnote 1: Buccanning, by which the "buccaneers" gained their name,
was a 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 hoarse over their v