64

From Baron de Pontis' _Relation de ce qui c'est fait la
prise de Carthagene_, Bruxelles, 1698.

THE BUCCANEERS IN THE
WEST INDIES IN THE
XVII CENTURY

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

I.--THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

At the time of the discovery of America the Spaniards, as M.
Leroy-Beaulieu has remarked, were perhaps less fitted than any other
nation of western Europe for the task of American colonization. Whatever
may have been the political _role_ thrust upon them in the sixteenth
century by the Hapsburg marriages, whatever certain historians may say
of the grandeur and nobility of the Spanish national character, Spain
was then neither rich nor populous, nor industrious. For centuries she
had been called upon to wage a continuous warfare with the Moors, and
during this time had not only found little leisure to cultivate the arts
of peace, but had acquired a disdain for manual work which helped to
mould her colonial administration and influenced all her subsequent
history. And when the termination of the last of these wars left her
mistress of a united Spain, and the exploitation of her own resources
seemed to require all the energies she could muster, an entire new
hemisphere was suddenly thrown open to her, and given into her hands by
a papal decree to possess and populate. Already weakened by the exile of
the most sober and industrious of her population, the Jews; drawn into a
foreign policy for which she had neither the means nor the inclination;
instituting at home an economic policy which was almost epileptic in its
consequences, she found her strength dissipated, and gradually sank into
a condition of economic and political impotence.

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor in the service of the Castilian
Crown, wishing to find a western route by sea to India and especially to
Zipangu (Japan), the magic land described by the Venetian traveller,
Marco Polo, landed on 12th October 1492, on "Guanahani," one of the
Bahama Islands. From "Guanahani" he passed on to other islands of the
same group, and thence to Hispaniola, Tortuga and Cuba. Returning to
Spain in March 1493, he sailed again in September of the same year with
seventeen vessels and 1500 persons, and this time keeping farther to the
south, sighted Porto Rico and some of the Lesser Antilles, founded a
colony on Hispaniola, and discovered Jamaica in 1494. On a third voyage
in 1498 he discovered Trinidad, and coasted along the shores