had
lost their profession of hunting very early, for with the coming of
Levasseur the French had gradually elbowed them out of the island, and
compelled them either to retire to the Lesser Antilles or to prey upon
their Spanish neighbours. But the French themselves were within the next
twenty years driven to the same expedient. The Spanish colonists on
Hispaniola, unable to keep the French from the island, at last foolishly
resolved, according to Charlevoix's account, to remove the principal
attraction by destroying all the wild cattle. If the trade with French
vessels and the barter of hides for brandy could be arrested, the
hunters would be driven from the woods by starvation. This policy,
together with the wasteful methods pursued by the hunters, caused a
rapid decrease in the number of cattle. The Spaniards, however, did not
dream of the consequences of their action. Many of the French, forced to
seek another occupation, naturally fell into the way of buccaneering.
The hunters of cattle became hunters of Spaniards, and the sea became
the savanna on which they sought their game. Exquemelin tells us that
when he arrived at the island there were scarcely three hundred engaged
in hunting, and even these found their livelihood precarious. It was
from this time forward to the end of the century that the buccaneers
played so important a _role_ on the stage of West Indian history.

Another source of recruits for the freebooters were the indentured
servants or _engages_. We hear a great deal of the barbarity with which
West Indian planters and hunters in the seventeenth century treated
their servants, and we may well believe that many of the latter, finding
their situation unendurable, ran away from their plantations or ajoupas
to join the crew of a chance corsair hovering in the neighbourhood. The
hunters' life, as we have seen, was not one of revelry and ease. On the
one side were all the insidious dangers lurking in a wild, tropical
forest; on the other, the relentless hostility of the Spaniards. The
environment of the hunters made them rough and cruel, and for many an
_engage_ his three years of servitude must have been a veritable
purgatory. The servants of the planters were in no better position.
Decoyed from Norman and Breton towns and villages by the loud-sounding
promises of sea-captains and West Indian agents, they came to seek an El
Dorado, and often found only despair and death. The want of sufficient
negroes le