r vessels could be
careened and the hulls scraped of barnacles and weeds. The greatest
stronghold of the buccaneers was at Tortuga, or Turtle Island, a small
island lying off the west coast of Hispaniola. Here in their most piping
days flourished a buccaneer republic, where the seamen made their own laws
and cultivated the land for sugar-cane and yams. Occasionally the
Spaniards or the French, without any warning, would swoop down on the
settlement and break up the small republic, but sooner or later the
buccaneers would be back once again in possession.

The favourite and most flourishing headquarters of the West India pirates
was at New Providence Island in the Bahama Islands, occupied to-day by the
flourishing town of Nassau, now the headquarters of those worthy
descendants of the pirates, the bootleggers, who from the old port carry
on their exciting and profitable smuggling of whisky into the United
States.

The numerous bays and islands lying off the coast of South Carolina were
very popular with the free booters in the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries; while Port Royal, in Jamaica, was noted from early
days as the port from which the most famous buccaneers sailed for the
Spanish Main, and to which they returned with their plunder.

The French filibusters and pirates mostly used the Virgin Islands, while
the Dutch patronized their own islands of Curacao, Saba, and St.
Eustatius. But the buccaneers did not allow the chance of nationality to
divide them, for Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Dutchmen, all "brethren of the
coast," sailed together and plundered the Spaniard in open and equal
friendship.

An entirely different group of pirates arose in the South Seas, with their
headquarters in Madagascar. Here the pirates went farther towards forming
a permanent society than at any other time during their history, with the
exception of the Barbary corsairs, who had their strongly fortified
settlements for many years at Algiers, Tunis, and Sallee.

The origin of the buccaneers is interesting, and I cannot do better than
quote the opening chapter of Clark Russell's "Life of William Dampier," in
the English Men of Action Series, published by Messrs. Macmillan in 1889.
He writes:

"In or about the middle of the seventeenth century, the Island of San
Domingo, or Hispaniola as it was then called, was haunted and overrun by a
singular community of savage, surly, fierce, and filthy men. They were
chiefly compos