ed of French colonists, whose ranks had from time to time
been enlarged by liberal contributions from the slums and alleys of more
than one European city and town. These people went dressed in shirts and
pantaloons of coarse linen cloth, which they steeped in the blood of the
animals they slaughtered. They wore round caps, boots of hogskin drawn
over their naked feet, and belts of raw hide, in which they stuck their
sabres and knives. They also armed themselves with firelocks, which threw
a couple of balls, each weighing two ounces. The places where they dried
and salted their meat were called _boucans_, and from this term they came
to be styled bucaniers, or buccaneers, as we spell it. They were hunters
by trade, and savages in their habits. They chased and slaughtered horned
cattle and trafficked with the flesh, and their favourite food was raw
marrow from the bones of the beasts which they shot. They ate and slept on
the ground, their table was a stone, their bolster the trunk of a tree,
and their roof the hot and sparkling heavens of the Antilles."

The Spaniards, who were jealous of any other nation than their own having
a foothold in America, determined to get rid of these wild but hitherto
harmless buccaneers. This they accomplished, and in time drove the
cattle-hunters out of Hispaniola; and to make sure that the unwelcome
visitors should not return, they exterminated all the wild cattle. This
was the worst mistake the Spaniards could have made, for these wild men
had to look for other means of supporting themselves, and they joined the
freebooters and thus began the great period of piracy which was the cause
of the ultimate breaking-up of the Spanish power in the West Indies.

Of the life on board buccaneer and pirate ships a somewhat hazy and
incomplete picture reaches us. The crews were usually large compared with
the number of men carried in other ships, and a state of crowded
discomfort must have been the result, especially in some crazy old vessel
cruising in the tropics or rounding the Horn in winter. Of the
relationship between the sea-rovers and the fair sex it would be best,
perhaps, to draw a discreet veil. The pirates and the buccaneers looked
upon women simply as the spoils of war, and were as profligate with these
as with the rest of their plunder. I do not know if I am disclosing a
secret when I mention that my friend Mr. Hyatt Verrill, who is an
authority on the subject of the lives of the pirates