ven years
before; Tortuga, off the coast of Hayti, was still the haunt of as
choice a lot of cutthroats as ever sailed blue water; and men who had
been plundering and killing with Pierre le Grande, Bartholomew Portugez
and Montbars the Exterminator, were still at their old trade afloat.
Mariners had not done talking about the exploit of L'Ollonais who had
found three hundred thousand dollars' worth of Spanish treasure hidden
on a key off the coast of Cuba. He it was who amused himself by
cutting out the hearts of live Spaniards and gnawing these morsels, or
slicing off the heads of a whole ship's crew and drinking their blood.
A rare one for hunting buried treasure was this fiend of a pirate.
When he took Maracaibo, as Esquemeling relates in the story of his own
experiences as a buccaneer, "L'Ollonais, who never used to make any
great amount of murdering, though in cold blood, ten or twelve
Spaniards, drew his cutlass and hacked one to pieces in the presence of
all the rest, saying: 'If you do not confess and declare where you have
hidden the rest of your goods, I will do the like to all your
companions.' At last, amongst these horrible cruelties and inhuman
threats, one was found who promised to conduct him and show the place
where the rest of the Spaniards were hidden. But those that were fled,
having intelligence that one discovered their lurking holes to the
Pirates, changed the place, and buried all the remnant of their riches
underground; insomuch that the Pirates could not find them out, unless
some other person of their own party should reveal them."

From this first voyage undertaken by Phips he escaped with his skin and
a certain amount of treasure, "what just served him a little to furnish
him for a voyage to England," says Mather. The important fact was that
he had found what he sought and knew where there was a vast deal more
of it. A large ship, well armed and manned, was needed to bring away
the booty, and Captain William Phips intended to find backing in London
for the adventure. He crossed the Atlantic in "a vessel not much
unlike that which the Dutchmen stamped on their first coin," and no
sooner had his stubby, high-pooped ark of a craft cast anchor in the
Thames than he was buzzing ashore with his tale of the treasure wreck.

It was no less a person than the king himself whom Phips was bent on
enlisting as a partner, and he was not to be driven from Whitehall by
lords or flunkies. With bulldo