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There were, moreover, the Dutch freebooters, such as Van Noorte, de Werte, Spilsbergen, and others, as Jaques l'Ermite, François l'Ollonais, and Bartolomew Portugues, who ransacked and burned every town which failed to resist their fierce onslaughts, from the Gulf of Darien in the north all round the coast to the Pacific Ocean on the west.
His ships could not proceed far on account of the shallowness of the water, but by placing his men in the canoas he penetrated to the end of the Gulf. On the way he sacked Maracaibo, a town which had been sacked on two previous occasions the last time by L'Ollonais only a couple of years before.
So what but a nest of villains and pirates could one fancy it to be: a downright Tortuga, swarming with "Brethren of the coast," such as Montbars, L'Ollonais, Bartolomeo, Peter of Dieppe, and desperadoes of that kidney. But not so. The men of Ohonoo were as honest as any in Mardi. They had a suspicious appellative for their island, true; but not thus seemed it to them.
A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed with that monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploits bore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. I doubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren of the Coast than this Levasseur.
Ye're a bold man, Don Francisco, to come to me with such a tale to tell me that ye know where the ransom's to be raised, and yet to refuse to say. D'ye think now that with a match between your fingers ye'd grow more communicative?" If Don Francisco grew a shade paler, yet again he shook his head. "That was the way of Morgan and L'Ollonais and other pirates. But it is not the way of Captain Blood.
The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander capable of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who knew that no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness of Spanish soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or L'Ollonais ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these Castilian gentlemen were capable.
The situation was analogous, but whereas Morgan, Scott, L'Ollonais, and others terrorised only such forces as Spain possessed in far-distant colonies, the corsairs were a terror to all the great nations of the world.
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