o dispossess Esmit, but he did
not arrive in the West Indies until October 1684, when with the
assistance of an armed sloop which Sir William Stapleton had been
ordered by the English Council to lend him, he took possession of St.
Thomas and its pirate governor.[435]

A second difficulty encountered by Sir Thomas Lynch, in the first year
of his return, was the privateering activity of Robert Clarke, Governor
of New Providence, one of the Bahama Islands. Governor Clarke, on the
plea of retaliating Spanish outrages, gave letters of marque to several
privateers, including Coxon, the same famous chief who in 1680 had led
the buccaneers into the South Seas. Coxon carried his commission to
Jamaica and showed it to Governor Lynch, who was greatly incensed and
wrote to Clarke a vigorous note of reproof.[436] To grant such letters
of marque was, of course, contrary to the Treaty of Madrid, and by
giving the pirates only another excuse for their actions, greatly
complicated the task of the Governor of Jamaica. Lynch forwarded Coxon's
commission to England, where in August 1682 the proprietors of the
Bahama Islands were ordered to attend the council and answer for the
misdeeds of their governor.[437] The proprietors, however, had already
acted on their own initiative, for on 29th July they issued instructions
to a new governor, Robert Lilburne, to arrest Clarke and keep him in
custody till he should give security to answer accusations in England,
and to recall all commissions against the Spaniards.[438] The whole
trouble, it seems, had arisen over the wreck of a Spanish galleon in the
Bahamas, to which Spaniards from St. Augustine and Havana were
accustomed to resort to fish for ingots of silver, and from which they
had been driven away by the governor and inhabitants of New Providence.
The Spaniards had retaliated by robbing vessels sailing to and from the
Bahamas, whereupon Clarke, without considering the illegality of his
action, had issued commissions of war to privateers.

The Bahamas, however, were a favourite resort for pirates and other men
of desperate character, and Lilburne soon discovered that his place was
no sinecure. He found it difficult moreover to refrain from hostilities
against a neighbour who used every opportunity to harm and plunder his
colony. In March 1683, a former privateer named Thomas Pain[439] had
entered into a conspiracy with four other captains, who were then
fishing for silver at the wreck, to se