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Updated: May 21, 2025
Moreover, fearing that the buccaneers would take matters into their own hands, he had excluded them from the city while his officers gathered the plunder and carried it to the ships. On the repeated remonstrances of Ducasse, de Pointis finally announced that the share allotted to the men from Hispaniola was 40,000 crowns.
France was no sooner in possession of this important place, than the Spaniards became as eager for peace as they had been before averse to a negotiation. Their impatience was not a little inflamed by the success of Pointis in America, where he took Carthagena, in which he found a booty amounting to eight millions of crowns.
The place was supplied with men and provisions by convoys from Lisbon, until monsieur de Pointis put a stop to that communication, by entering the bay with a strong squadron; but he was obliged to retire at the approach of sir John Leake and admiral Vanderdussen; and the marquis de Villadarias, having made little or no progress on land, thought proper to abandon the enterprise.
They were busy in equipping an armament for the West Indies, under the command of M. Pointis, who actually sailed to the coast of New Spain and took the city of Carfehagena. Rooke had been ordered to intercept the Toulon squadron in its way to Brest; but his endeavours miscarried.
The buccaneers, finding themselves so miserably cheated, broke out into open mutiny, but were restrained by the influence of their leader and the presence of the king's frigates. De Pointis, meanwhile, seeing his own men decimated by sickness, put all the captured guns on board the fleet and made haste to get under sail for France.
Trouble soon broke out between de Pointis and the buccaneers, for the latter wanted the whole of the plunder to be divided equally among the men, as had always been their custom, and they expected, according to this arrangement, says de Pointis in his narrative, about a quarter of all the booty.
The freebooters rebelled under the haughtiness of their commander, and only Ducasse's influence was able to bring them to obedience. On 18th March the ships were all gathered at the rendezvous at Cape Tiburon, and on the 13th of the following month anchored two leagues to the east of Cartagena. De Pointis had under his command about 4000 men, half of them seamen, the rest soldiers.
The buccaneers, even before de Pointis sailed for France, had turned their ships back toward Cartagena to reimburse themselves by again plundering the city. De Pointis, indeed, was then very ill, and his officers were in no condition to oppose them.
Martial law was proclaimed in the colony and every means taken to put Port Royal in a state of defence. Governor Beeston, at the first news of de Pointis' fleet, sent advice to the governors of Porto Bello and Havana, against whom he suspected that the expedition was intended.
De Pointis, however, insisted upon the order which he had published before the expedition sailed from Petit Goave, that the buccaneers should be subject to the same rule in the division of the spoil as the sailors in the fleet, i.e., they should receive one-tenth of the first million and one-thirtieth of the rest.
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