The principal facts about the exploits of the English and French buccaneers of the seventeenth century in the West Indies are sufficiently well known to modern readers. The French Jesuit historians of the Antilles have left us many interesting details of their mode of life, and Exquemelin's history of the freebooters has been reprinted numerous times both in France and in England. Based upon these old, contemporary narratives, modern accounts are issued from the press with astonishing regularity

At the time of the discovery of America the Spaniards, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has remarked, were perhaps less fitted than any other nation of western Europe for the task of American colonization. Whatever may have been the political rôle thrust upon them in the sixteenth century by the Hapsburg marriages, whatever certain historians may say of the grandeur and nobility of the Spanish national character, Spain was then neither rich nor populous, nor industrious. For centuries she had been called up

It was the French chronologist, Scaliger, who in the sixteenth century asserted, "nulli melius piraticam exercent quam Angli"; and although he had no need to cross the Channel to find men proficient in this primitive calling, the remark applies to the England of his time with a force which we to-day scarcely realise. Certainly the inveterate hostility with which the Englishman learned to regard the Spaniard in the latter half of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries found its mo

In the second half of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries, strangers who visited the great Spanish islands of Hispaniola, Jamaica or Porto Rico, usually remarked the extraordinary number of wild cattle and boars found roaming upon them. These herds were in every case sprung from domestic animals originally brought from Spain. For as the aborigines in the Greater Antilles decreased in numbers under the heavy yoke of their conquerors, and as the Spaniards themselves turne

The capture of Jamaica by the expedition sent out by Cromwell in 1655 was the blundering beginning of a new era in West Indian history. It was the first permanent annexation by another European power of an integral part of Spanish America. Before 1655 the island had already been twice visited by English forces. The first occasion was in January 1597, when Sir Anthony Shirley, with little opposition, took and plundered St. Jago de la Vega. The second was in 1643, when William Jackson repeated the

When the Chevalier de Fontenay was driven from Tortuga in January 1654, the Spaniards left a small garrison to occupy the fort and prevent further settlements of French and English buccaneers. These troops possessed the island for about eighteen months, but on the approach of the expedition under Penn and Venables were ordered by the Conde de Penalva, President of S. Domingo, to demolish the fort, bury the artillery and other arms, and retire to his aid in Hispaniola. 189 Some six months later a

On 4th January 1664, the king wrote to Sir Thomas Modyford in Barbadoes that he had chosen him governor of Jamaica. 206 Modyford, who had lived as a planter in Barbadoes since 1650, had taken a prominent share in the struggles between Parliamentarians and Royalists in the little island. He was a member of the Council, and had been governor for a short time in 1660. His commission and instructions for Jamaica 207 were carried to the West Indies by Colonel Edward Morgan, who went as Modyford's dep

The new Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch, brought with him instructions to publish and carefully observe the articles of 1670 with Spain, and at the same time to revoke all commissions issued by his predecessor "to the prejudice of the King of Spain or any of his subjects." When he proclaimed the peace he was likewise to publish a general pardon to privateers who came in and submitted within a reasonable time, of all offences committed since June 1660, assuring to them the posses

On 25th May 1682, Sir Thomas Lynch returned to Jamaica as governor of the colony. 424 Of the four acting governors since 1671, Lynch stood apart as the one who had endeavoured with singleness and tenacity of purpose to clear away the evils of buccaneering. Lord Vaughan had displayed little sympathy for the corsairs, but he was hampered by an irascible temper, and according to some reports by an avarice which dimmed the lustre of his name. The Earl of Carlisle, if he did not directly encourage th

An account of the English buccaneers belonging to Jamaica and Tortuga in 1663, found among the Rawlinson MSS., makes the number of privateering ships fifteen, and the men engaged in the business nearly a thousand. The list is as follows:— There were four more belonging to Jamaica, of which no account was available. The crews were mixed of English, French and Dutch....

List of filibusters and their vessels on the coasts of French San Domingo in 1684:— (Paris, Archives Coloniales, Corresp. gén. de St. Dom., vol. i.—Mémoire sur l'estat de Saint Domingue à M. de Seignelay par M. de Cussy.)...

Manuscript Sources in England Public Record Office: State Papers. Foreign. Spain. Vols. 34-72. (Abbreviated in the footnotes as S.P. Spain.) British Museum: Additional MSS. Vols. 11,268; 11,410-11; 12,410; 12,423; 12,429-30; 13,964; 13,975; 13,977; 13,992; 18,273; 22,676; 36,314-53. Egerton MSS. Vol. 2395. Sloane MSS. Vols. 793 or 894; 2724; 2752; 4020. Stowe MSS. Vols. 305f; 205b. Bodleian Library: Rawlinson MSS. Vols. a. 26, 31, 32, 175, 347. Tanner MSS. Vols. xlvii.; li. Manuscript Sources in