Howard Pyle\'s Book of Pirates

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HOWARD PYLE'S BOOK OF PIRATES




Fiction, Fact & Fancy concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the
Spanish Main: From the writing & Pictures of Howard Pyle:


Compiled by Merle Johnson




CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY MERLE JOHNSON

PREFACE

I. BUCCANEERS AND MAROONERS OF THE SPANISH MAIN
II. THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN BRAND
III. WITH THE BUCCANEERS
IV. TOM CHIST AND THE TREASURE BOX
V. JACK BALLISTER'S FORTUNES
VI. BLUESKIN THE PIRATE
VII. CAPTAIN SCARFIELD




FOREWORD

PIRATES, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea wolves
who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in present-day conceptions
in great degree as drawn by the pen and pencil of Howard Pyle.

Pyle, artist-author, living in the latter half of the nineteenth
century and the first decade of the twentieth, had the fine faculty of
transposing himself into any chosen period of history and making
its people flesh and blood again--not just historical puppets. His
characters were sketched with both words and picture; with both words
and picture he ranks as a master, with a rich personality which makes
his work individual and attractive in either medium.

He was one of the founders of present-day American illustration, and his
pupils and grand-pupils pervade that field to-day. While he bore no
such important part in the world of letters, his stories are modern in
treatment, and yet widely read. His range included historical treatises
concerning his favorite Pirates (Quaker though he was); fiction, with
the same Pirates as principals; Americanized version of Old World fairy
tales; boy stories of the Middle Ages, still best sellers to growing
lads; stories of the occult, such as In Tenebras and To the Soil of the
Earth, which, if newly published, would be hailed as contributions to
our latest cult.

In all these fields Pyle's work may be equaled, surpassed, save in one.
It is improbable that anyone else will ever bring his combination of
interest and talent to the depiction of these old-time Pirates, any more
than there could be a second Remington to paint the now extinct Indians
and gun-fighters of the Great West.

Important and interesting to the student of history, the
adventure-lover, and the artist, as they are, these Pirate stories and
pictures have been scattered through many magazines and books. Here, in
this volume, they are gathered together for the first time, perhaps
not just as Mr. Pyle would have done, but with a completeness and
appreciation of the real value of the material which the author's
modesty might not have permitted. MERLE JOHNSON.




PREFACE

WHY is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly
titillating twang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to
make up the pudding of our modern civilization? And pertinent to this
question another--Why is it that the pirate has, and always has had,
a certain lurid glamour of the heroical enveloping him round about? Is
there, deep under the accumulated debris of culture, a hidden groundwork
of the old-time savage? Is there even in these well-regulated times an
unsubdued nature in the respectable mental household of every one of us
that still kicks against the pricks of law and order? To make my meaning
more clear, would not every boy, for instance--that is, every boy of any
account--rather be a pirate captain than a Member of Parliament? And
we ourselves--would we not rather read such a story as that of Captain
Avery's capture of the East Indian treasure ship, with its beautiful
princess and load of jewels (which gems he sold by the handful, history
sayeth, to a Bristol merchant), than, say, one of Bishop Atterbury's
sermons, or the goodly Master Robert Boyle's religious romance of
"Theodora and Didymus"? It is to be apprehended that to the unregenerate
nature of most of us there can be but one answer to such a query.

In the pleasurable warmth the heart feels in answer to tales of
derring-do Nelson's battles are all mightily interesting, but, even in
spite of their romance of splendid courage, I fancy that the majority of
us would rather turn back over the leaves of history to read how Drake
captured the Spanish treasure ship in the South Sea, and of how he
divided such a quantity of booty in the Island of Plate (so named
because of the tremendous dividend there declared) that it had to be
measured in quart bowls, being too considerable to be counted.

Courage and daring, no matter how mad and ungodly, have always a
redundancy of vim and life to recommend them to the nether man that lies
within us, and no doubt his desperate courage, his battle against the
tremendous odds of all the civilized world of law and order, have had
much to do in making a popular hero of our friend of the black flag. But
it is not altogether courage and daring that endear him to our hearts.
There is another and perhaps a greater kinship in that lust for wealth
that makes one's fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the
division of treasure in the pirate's island retreat, the hiding of his
godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to
remain hidden until the time should come to rake the doubloons up
again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most
thrilling tales of his wonderful escapes from commissioned cruisers
through tortuous channels between the coral reefs.

And what a life of adventure is his, to be sure! A life of constant
alertness, constant danger, constant escape! An ocean Ishmaelite, he
wanders forever aimlessly, homelessly; now unheard of for months, now
careening his boat on some lonely uninhabited shore, now appearing
suddenly to swoop down on some merchant vessel with rattle of musketry,
shouting, yells, and a hell of unbridled passions let loose to rend and
tear. What a Carlislean hero! What a setting of blood and lust and flame
and rapine for such a hero!

Piracy, such as was practiced in the flower of its days--that is, during
the early eighteenth century--was no sudden growth. It was an evolution,
from the semi-lawful buccaneering of the sixteenth century, just as
buccaneering was upon its part, in a certain sense, an evolution from
the unorganized, unauthorized warfare of the Tudor period.

For there was a deal of piratical smack in the anti-Spanish ventures
of Elizabethan days. Many of the adventurers--of the Sir Francis Drake
school, for instance--actually overstepped again and again the bounds
of international law, entering into the realms of de facto piracy.
Nevertheless, while their doings were not recognized officially by the
government, the perpetrators were neither punished nor reprimanded for
their excursions against Spanish commerce at home or in the West Indies;
rather were they commended, and it was considered not altogether a
discreditable thing for men to get rich upon the spoils taken from
Spanish galleons in times of nominal peace. Many of the most reputable
citizens and merchants of London, when they felt that the queen failed
in her duty of pushing the fight against the great Catholic Power,
fitted out fleets upon their own account and sent them to levy good
Protestant war of a private nature upon the Pope's anointed.

Some of the treasures captured in such ventures were immense,
stupendous, unbelievable. For an example, one can hardly credit the
truth of the "purchase" gained by Drake in the famous capture of the
plate ship in the South Sea.

One of the old buccaneer writers of a century later says: "The Spaniards
affirm to this day that he took at that time twelvescore tons of
plate and sixteen bowls of coined money a man (his number being then
forty-five men in all), insomuch that they were forced to heave much of
it overboard, because his ship could not carry it all."

Maybe this was a very greatly exaggerated statement put by the author
and his Spanish authorities, nevertheless there was enough truth in it
to prove very conclusively to the bold minds of the age that tremendous
profits--"purchases" they called them--were to be made from piracy. The
Western World is filled with the names of daring mariners of those old
days, who came flitting across the great trackless ocean in their little
tublike boats of a few hundred tons burden, partly to explore unknown
seas, partly--largely, perhaps--in pursuit of Spanish treasure:
Frobisher, Davis, Drake, and a score of others.

In this left-handed war against Catholic Spain many of the adventurers
were, no doubt, stirred and incited by a grim, Calvinistic, puritanical
zeal for Protestantism. But equally beyond doubt the gold and silver and
plate of the "Scarlet Woman" had much to do with the persistent energy
with which these hardy mariners braved the mysterious, unknown terrors
of the great unknown ocean that stretched away to the sunset, there in
faraway waters to attack the huge, unwieldy, treasure-laden galleons
that sailed up and down the Caribbean Sea and through the Bahama
Channel.

Of all ghastly and terrible things old-time religious war was the most
ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous
cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that
capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the
Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows.
When the English captured a Spanish vessel the prisoners were tortured,
either for the sake of revenge or to compel them to disclose where
treasure lay hidden. Cruelty begat cruelty, and it would be hard to
say whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin showed himself to be most
proficient in torturing his victim.

When Cobham, for instance, captured the Spanish ship in the Bay of
Biscay, after all resistance was over and the heat of the battle had
cooled, he ordered his crew to bind the captain and all of the crew and
every Spaniard aboard--whether in arms or not--to sew them up in the
mainsail and to fling them overboard. There were some twenty dead bodies
in the sail when a few days later it was washed up on the shore.

Of course such acts were not likely to go unavenged, and many an
innocent life was sacrificed to pay the debt of Cobham's cruelty.

Nothing could be more piratical than all this. Nevertheless, as was
said, it was winked at, condoned, if not sanctioned, by the law; and it
was not beneath people of family and respectability to take part in it.
But by and by Protestantism and Catholicism began to be at somewhat less
deadly enmity with each other; religious wars were still far enough from
being ended, but the scabbard of the sword was no longer flung away
when the blade was drawn. And so followed a time of nominal peace, and a
generation arose with whom it was no longer respectable and worthy--one
might say a matter of duty--to fight a country with which one's own
land was not at war. Nevertheless, the seed had been sown; it had been
demonstrated that it was feasible to practice piracy against Spain and
not to suffer therefor. Blood had been shed and cruelty practiced, and,
once indulged, no lust seems stronger than that of shedding blood and
practicing cruelty.

Though Spain might be ever so well grounded in peace at home, in the
West Indies she was always at war with the whole world--English, French,
Dutch. It was almost a matter of life or death with her to keep her hold
upon the New World. At home she was bankrupt and, upon the earthquake
of the Reformation, her power was already beginning to totter and to
crumble to pieces. America was her treasure house, and from it alone
could she hope to keep her leaking purse full of gold and silver. So it
was that she strove strenuously, desperately, to keep out the world from
her American possessions--a bootless task, for the old order upon which
her power rested was broken and crumbled forever. But still she strove,
fighting against fate, and so it was that in the tropical America it was
one continual war between her and all the world. Thus it came that,
long after piracy ceased to be allowed at home, it continued in those
far-away seas with unabated vigor, recruiting to its service all that
lawless malign element which gathers together in every newly opened
country where the only law is lawlessness, where might is right and
where a living is to be gained with no more trouble than cutting a
throat. {signature Howard Pyle His Mark}




HOWARD PILE'S BOOK OF PIRATES




Chapter I. BUCCANEERS AND MAROONERS OF THE SPANISH MAIN

JUST above the northwestern shore of the old island of Hispaniola--the
Santo Domingo of our day--and separated from it only by a narrow channel
of some five or six miles in width, lies a queer little hunch of an
island, known, because of a distant resemblance to that animal, as
the Tortuga de Mar, or sea turtle. It is not more than twenty miles in
length by perhaps seven or eight in breadth; it is only a little spot of
land, and as you look at it upon the map a pin's head would almost cover
it; yet from that spot, as from a center of inflammation, a burning fire
of human wickedness and ruthlessness and lust overran the world, and
spread terror and death throughout the Spanish West Indies, from St.
Augustine to the island of Trinidad, and from Panama to the coasts of
Peru.

About the middle of the seventeenth century certain French adventurers
set out from the fortified island of St. Christopher in longboats and
hoys, directing their course to the westward, there to discover new
islands. Sighting Hispaniola "with abundance of joy," they landed, and
went into the country, where they found great quantities of wild cattle,
horses, and swine.

Now vessels on the return voyage to Europe from the West Indies needed
revictualing, and food, especially flesh, was at a premium in the
islands of the Spanish Main; wherefore a great profit was to be turned
in preserving beef and pork, and selling the flesh to homeward-bound
vessels.

The northwestern shore of Hispaniola, lying as it does at the eastern
outlet of the old Bahama Channel, running between the island of Cuba and
the great Bahama Banks, lay almost in the very main stream of travel.
The pioneer Frenchmen were not slow to discover the double advantage to
be reaped from the wild cattle that cost them nothing to procure, and a
market for the flesh ready found for them. So down upon Hispaniola they
came by boatloads and shiploads, gathering like a swarm of mosquitoes,
and overrunning the whole western end of the island. There they
established themselves, spending the time alternately in hunting the
wild cattle and buccanning(1) the meat, and squandering their hardly
earned gains in wild debauchery, the opportunities for which were never
lacking in the Spanish West Indies.

(1) Buccanning, by which the "buccaneers" gained their name,
was of process of curing thin strips of meat by salting,
smoking, and drying in the sun.

At first the Spaniards thought nothing of the few travel-worn Frenchmen
who dragged their longboats and hoys up on the beach, and shot a wild
bullock or two to keep body and soul together; but when the few grew to
dozens, and the dozens to scores, and the scores to hundreds, it was a
very different matter, and wrathful grumblings and mutterings began to
be heard among the original settlers.

But of this the careless buccaneers thought never a whit, the only thing
that troubled them being the lack of a more convenient shipping point
than the main island afforded them.

This lack was at last filled by a party of hunters who ventured across
the narrow channel that separated the main island from Tortuga. Here
they found exactly what they needed--a good harbor, just at the junction
of the Windward Channel with the old Bahama Channel--a spot where
four-fifths of the Spanish-Indian trade would pass by their very
wharves.

There were a few Spaniards upon the island, but they were a quiet folk,
and well disposed to make friends with the strangers; but when more
Frenchmen and still more Frenchmen crossed the narrow channel, until
they overran the Tortuga and turned it into one great curing house for
the beef which they shot upon the neighboring island, the Spaniards grew
restive over the matter, just as they had done upon the larger island.

Accordingly, one fine day there came half a dozen great boatloads
of armed Spaniards, who landed upon the Turtle's Back and sent the
Frenchmen flying to the woods and fastnesses of rocks as the chaff flies
before the thunder gust. That night the Spaniards drank themselves
mad and shouted themselves hoarse over their victory, while the beaten
Frenchmen sullenly paddled their canoes back to the main island again,
and the Sea Turtle was Spanish once more.

But the Spaniards were not contented with such a petty triumph as that
of sweeping the island of Tortuga free from the obnoxious strangers,
down upon Hispaniola they came, flushed with their easy victory, and
determined to root out every Frenchman, until not one single buccaneer
remained. For a time they had an easy thing of it, for each French
hunter roamed the woods by himself, with no better company than his
half-wild dogs, so that when two or three Spaniards would meet such a
one, he seldom if ever came out of the woods again, for even his resting
place was lost.

But the very success of the Spaniards brought their ruin along with it,
for the buccaneers began to combine together for self-protection,
and out of that combination arose a strange union of lawless man with
lawless man, so near, so close, that it can scarce be compared to
any other than that of husband and wife. When two entered upon this
comradeship, articles were drawn up and signed by both parties, a common
stock was made of all their possessions, and out into the woods they
went to seek their fortunes; thenceforth they were as one man; they
lived together by day, they slept together by night; what one suffered,
the other suffered; what one gained, the other gained. The only
separation that came betwixt them was death, and then the survivor
inherited all that the other left. And now it was another thing with
Spanish buccaneer hunting, for two buccaneers, reckless of life, quick
of eye, and true of aim, were worth any half dozen of Spanish islanders.

By and by, as the French became more strongly organized for mutual
self-protection, they assumed the offensive. Then down they came upon
Tortuga, and now it was the turn of the Spanish to be hunted off the
island like vermin, and the turn of the French to shout their victory.

Having firmly established themselves, a governor was sent to the French
of Tortuga, one M. le Passeur, from the island of St. Christopher; the
Sea Turtle was fortified, and colonists, consisting of men of doubtful
character and women of whose character there could be no doubt whatever,
began pouring in upon the island, for it was said that the buccaneers
thought no more of a doubloon than of a Lima bean, so that this was the
place for the brothel and the brandy shop to reap their golden harvest,
and the island remained French.

Hitherto the Tortugans had been content to gain as much as possible from
the homeward-bound vessels through the orderly channels of legitimate
trade. It was reserved for Pierre le Grand to introduce piracy as a
quicker and more easy road to wealth than the semi-honest exchange they
had been used to practice.

Gathering together eight-and-twenty other spirits as hardy and reckless
as himself, he put boldly out to sea in a boat hardly large enough to
hold his crew, and running down the Windward Channel and out into the
Caribbean Sea, he lay in wait for such a prize as might be worth the
risks of winning.

For a while their luck was steadily against them; their provisions and
water began to fail, and they saw nothing before them but starvation
or a humiliating return. In this extremity they sighted a Spanish ship
belonging to a "flota" which had become separated from her consorts.

The boat in which the buccaneers sailed might, perhaps, have served for
the great ship's longboat; the Spaniards out-numbered them three to
one, and Pierre and his men were armed only with pistols and cutlasses;
nevertheless this was their one and their only chance, and they
determined to take the Spanish ship or to die in the attempt. Down upon
the Spaniard they bore through the dusk of the night, and giving orders
to the "chirurgeon" to scuttle their craft under them as they were
leaving it, they swarmed up the side of the unsuspecting ship and upon
its decks in a torrent--pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other. A
part of them ran to the gun room and secured the arms and ammunition,
pistoling or cutting down all such as stood in their way or offered
opposition; the other party burst into the great cabin at the heels of
Pierre le Grand, found the captain and a party of his friends at cards,
set a pistol to his breast, and demanded him to deliver up the ship.
Nothing remained for the Spaniard but to yield, for there was no
alternative between surrender and death. And so the great prize was won.

It was not long before the news of this great exploit and of the vast
treasure gained reached the ears of the buccaneers of Tortuga and
Hispaniola. Then what a hubbub and an uproar and a tumult there was!
Hunting wild cattle and buccanning the meat was at a discount, and the
one and only thing to do was to go a-pirating; for where one such prize
had been won, others were to be had.

In a short time freebooting assumed all of the routine of a regular
business. Articles were drawn up betwixt captain and crew, compacts were
sealed, and agreements entered into by the one party and the other.

In all professions there are those who make their mark, those who
succeed only moderately well, and those who fail more or less entirely.
Nor did pirating differ from this general rule, for in it were men who
rose to distinction, men whose names, something tarnished and rusted by
the lapse of years, have come down even to us of the present day.

Pierre Francois, who, with his boatload of six-and-twenty desperadoes,
ran boldly into the midst of the pearl fleet off the coast of
South America, attacked the vice admiral under the very guns of two
men-of-war, captured his ship, though she was armed with eight guns and
manned with threescore men, and would have got her safely away, only
that having to put on sail, their mainmast went by the board, whereupon
the men-of-war came up with them, and the prize was lost.

But even though there were two men-of-war against all that remained of
six-and-twenty buccaneers, the Spaniards were glad enough to make terms
with them for the surrender of the vessel, whereby Pierre Francois and
his men came off scot-free.

Bartholomew Portuguese was a worthy of even more note. In a boat manned
with thirty fellow adventurers he fell upon a great ship off Cape
Corrientes, manned with threescore and ten men, all told.

Her he assaulted again and again, beaten off with the very pressure of
numbers only to renew the assault, until the Spaniards who survived,
some fifty in all, surrendered to twenty living pirates, who poured upon
their decks like a score of blood-stained, powder-grimed devils.

They lost their vessel by recapture, and Bartholomew Portuguese
barely escaped with his life through a series of almost unbelievable
adventures. But no sooner had he fairly escaped from the clutches of the
Spaniards than, gathering together another band of adventurers, he fell
upon the very same vessel in the gloom of the night, recaptured her when
she rode at anchor in the harbor of Campeche under the guns of the fort,
slipped the cable, and was away without the loss of a single man. He
lost her in a hurricane soon afterward, just off the Isle of Pines; but
the deed was none the less daring for all that.

Another notable no less famous than these two worthies was Roch
Braziliano, the truculent Dutchman who came up from the coast of Brazil
to the Spanish Main with a name ready-made for him. Upon the very first
adventure which he undertook he captured a plate ship of fabulous value,
and brought her safely into Jamaica; and when at last captured by the
Spaniards, he fairly frightened them into letting him go by truculent
threats of vengeance from his followers.

Such were three of the pirate buccaneers who infested the Spanish
Main. There were hundreds no less desperate, no less reckless, no less
insatiate in their lust for plunder, than they.

The effects of this freebooting soon became apparent. The risks to be
assumed by the owners of vessels and the shippers of merchandise became
so enormous that Spanish commerce was practically swept away from these
waters. No vessel dared to venture out of port excepting under escort
of powerful men-of-war, and even then they were not always secure from
molestation. Exports from Central and South America were sent to Europe
by way of the Strait of Magellan, and little or none went through the
passes between the Bahamas and the Caribbees.