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So soon as we are in case to put to sea again, we steer a course for Tortuga to take you home to your father. And pray do not consider that I have bought you, as your brother has just said. All that I have done has been to provide the ransom necessary to bribe a gang of scoundrels to depart from obedience to the arch-scoundrel who commanded them, and so deliver you from all peril.
Petit-Goave had been frequented by buccaneers since 1659, and after d'Ogeron succeeded du Rausset as governor for the French in those regions, it became with Tortuga one of their chief resorts. In the latter part of 1664 we find Langford in England petitioning the king for a commission as governor of Tortuga and the coast of Hispaniola, and for two ships to go and seize the smaller island.
The best of its members took to logwood cutting or to planting; the worst kept the seas, like water-Ishmaelites, plundering the ships of all nations save their own. They haunted Tortuga, the keys of Cuba, the creeks and inlets of the coast, and the bays at the western end of Jamaica.
He therefore thought it prudent, he continued, to dispense somewhat with the strictness of his instructions, "doing by degrees and moderation what he had at first resolved to execute suddenly and severely." Tortuga was really the crux of the whole difficulty.
Falling ill through vexation and despair, he passed into the hands of a surgeon, who proved kind to him and finally gave him his liberty for 100 pieces of eight, to be paid after his first buccaneering voyage. We left Levasseur governor in Tortuga after the abortive Spanish attack of 1643.
Peter the Great Very prominent among the early regular buccaneers was a Frenchman who came to be called Peter the Great. Some of them made a rough sort of settlement on the island of Tortuga, and then it was that Peter the Great seems to have come into prominence.
When Barry landed on Tortuga, however, with no other support than a proclamation and a harangue, the French inhabitants laughed in his face, and he returned to Jamaica in shame and confusion. On 4th January 1664, the king wrote to Sir Thomas Modyford in Barbadoes that he had chosen him governor of Jamaica.
For a time he found it so, while all the five were stooping over the maps, and his father was explaining the nature of the localities, and the interests of the inhabitants, and while words dropped from General Brunet which gave an insight into that object of Denis's strong curiosity the French encampment on Tortuga.
Back in 1662 Colonel Doyley, in his report to the Lord Chancellor after his return to England, had suggested the reduction of Tortuga to English obedience as the only effective way of dealing with the buccaneers; and Modyford in 1664 also realized the necessity of this preliminary step. The conquest of Tortuga, however, was no longer the simple task it might have been four or five years earlier.
Then Lolonois called a council of war, and told them, he intended for Guatemala: hereupon they divided into several sentiments, some liking the proposal, and others disliking it, especially a party of them who were but raw in those exercises, and who imagined at their setting forth from Tortuga that pieces of eight were gathered as easy as pears from a tree; but finding most things contrary to their expectation, they quitted the fleet, and returned; others affirmed they had rather starve than return home without a great deal of money.
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