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During the battle they lay "in a small hollow," "in great consternation" at "the noise of the guns." Though the buccaneers had taken the place easily, they had little cause for rejoicing. The town was "a little pitiful Place," with a few thatched huts, or "wild houses made of Cane," and "but one Church in it."
He asserted that the conquest of Hispaniola and Cuba would be a matter of no difficulty, and that even Central America was too weak to oppose a long resistance. All this was true, and had Cromwell but sent a respectable force under an efficient leader the result would have been different. The exploits of the buccaneers a few years later proved it.
The buccaneers of the West Indies and South America had grown to be a most formidable body of reckless freebooters. From merely capturing Spanish ships, laden with the treasures taken from the natives of the new world, they had grown strong enough to attack Spanish towns and cities.
But an engagement took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains, with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons, served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans off their island.
At any rate, long as those ruins of seats on Barrington remain, the most singular monuments are furnished to the fact, that all of the Buccaneers were not unmitigated monsters. "But during my ramble on the isle I was not long in discovering other tokens, of things quite in accordance with those wild traits, popularly, and no doubt truly enough, imputed to the freebooters at large.
In November, moreover, the governor told Albemarle that most of the buccaneers were turning to trade, hunting or planting, and that he hoped soon to reduce all to peaceful pursuits. The Spanish Council of State, in the meantime, had determined upon a course of active reprisal.
Some of them, who returned to Port Royal, were brought before the magistrate, and hanged as pirates. Their old captain, Henry Morgan, left his former way of life, and soon afterwards become Governor of Jamaica. He was so very zealous in "discouraging" the buccaneers that the profession gradually lost its standing.
They cleared away the scrub on that side, in order to give their gunners a clear view of the attacking force when the sun set. They posted sentries, and stood to their arms, expecting to be attacked. As soon as night had fallen the buccaneers weighed anchor. A bright moon was shining, and by the moonlight the ships steered seaward under bare poles.
An' whar'd yer cum frum?" "I am an English seaman," I answered shortly, "and how I came aboard makes no difference. Right now I am the only navigator on the Namur." "What's happened ter Estada?" "He's dead knifed last night by one of the buccaneers. Manuel Estevan had a hand in the business, and he's safely locked in a stateroom aft.
It was very much as if a lion, hearing the approach of probable prey, had sprung from the thicket where he had been concealed, and had beheld before him, not a fine, fat deer, but an immense and scrawny elephant. But the twenty-nine buccaneers in the crew were very hungry.
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