either to elude the vigilance or to escape the power of the Buc caniers, were at a considerable loss how to transport that wealth with safety to the port of its destination, which had been so successful as to escape the pirates who now infested both land and sea. A company of Buccaniers were hired, with an enormous sum, to take charge of a ship which was richly laden, and to conduct her to the spot appointed. What could induce the Spaniards to place confidence in men whose lives were devoted to robbery, sometimes with a licence, and frequently without one, we know not. They were acquainted with their character, and yet trusted in their integrity. The bargain was made, and the Buccaniers took possession of the ship. In the progress of their voyage, one of the crew proposed to his companions a plan by which they might easily make their fortunes; and that was by running away with both ship and cargo, and disposing of them in a foreign market. The proposal was received with indignation, and resented by all. The captain, whose name was Montauban, well known in the days of Buccaniering triumph, no sooner heard the proposal, than he felt himself agitated with that sensation with which a proposal of treachery always inspires the brave. He requested to be put on shore, that he might desert the ship. His seamen, unwilling to lose a commander whom they loved, because he disapproved of an action which they themselves disliked, dissuaded him from his purpose. A council was immediately held on board; and it was determined, that he who had been guilty of the perfidious pro posal, should be thrown on shore on the first land that came in sight. A solemn oath was then taken by all, that the person thus to be abandoned to his fate, should never be again taken into service in any future expedition in which any of them might be led to engage.

Such an act of justice would have done honour to men engaged in more dignified pursuits, and would have been worthy of recording under the united exertions of discipline and law. But in its present situation its features are still more strongly marked. It casts a lustre over a night of robbery and devastation, and affords us another proof of the strange combination of features which forms the general character of these men. The grand traits, without doubt, are of a very singular nature. They hardly appear to have been actuated by those principles which in general guide mankind. Neither avarice, ambition, nor an enthusiastic love of glory, whether taken singularly or collectively, was capable of producing the effects which their history unfolds. Even their expeditions appear romantic, and their mode of life produces an astonishment, which can only be heightened by that strange success which uniformly

crowned their measures.. Pillage, and not conquest, was their aim. They had no conception of holding in possession even the richest territories in the world. Their conquests in Mexico would have baffled the power of Spain to have counteracted, had their designs been to settle in the country which they subdued. The terror which they excited when they entered Peru might with ease have been kept alive, till all South America had rewarded their valour with its power and its wealth.

But the preservation of conquered territories they viewed with contempt. This leaves us still enveloped in darkness as to the motives which impelled them to action. Avarice would have forbidden that profusion which marked their conduct; and real want, we might expect, would have confined them to those spots which would have yielded treasures through the labour of slaves. A patriotic attachment to their country would have produced a different mode of conduct than that which marked them in their whole career. They properly belonged to no country; they were a community to themselves, detached from mankind, and yet occasionally preying upon all. But it is much easier to point out the principles by which they were not impelled, than to discover those by which they were actuated.

Our admiration of their intrepidity and courage is too often checked by scenes of blood, which we cannot contemplate without horror. An instance of that brutal ferocity which occasionally marked their deeds occurs in the case of Lolonois, a celebrated Buccanier, acting as the commander of two canoes which contained twenty-two men. He attacked and conquered a Spanish frigate on the coast of Cuba. The wounded captives were put to death as soon as the engagement was over. This action was noticed by a slave on board the frigate, who, to save his own life, told Lolonois that the governor of the Hayannah, making sure of capturing the Buccaniers, had put him on board the frigate in the capacity of an executioner, as it had been previously determined that every one of them should be hanged. Lolonois, transported with rage at this intelligence, ordered all the Spanish prisoners before him, and deliberately cut off the head of each man; at the same time licking the blood which trickled from his sabre when he had given the fatal strokes.

Possessed of this frigate, Lolonois repaired to Port au Prince, where he found four ships which were fitted out on purpose to pursue him. He attacked them like a fury, and, making himself master of them, threw all the men on board alive into the sea, except one. Him he sent to the governor of the Havannah with a letter, in which he acquainted him with what he had done; at the same time assuring him, that every Spaniard who

should fall into his hands should be treated in a similar manner, and that not even the governor should escape, if the chances of war should favour him with so gratifying a prize.

From the strange association of ideas which the mind is obliged to form in contemplating the extraordinary characters of these adventurers, we feel much difficulty, as intimated before, in developing the causes which could give their actions birth. The general hatred which the cruelties of the Spaniards had excited in Europe, seems to have raised up some of these formidable enemies to revenge the cause of the injured Indians. It was their sufferings that determined Montbar, a gentleman of Languedoc, to engage in the Buccaniering expeditions. He felt himself urged by a powerful impulse to revenge the blood which in imagination he saw reeking from the wounds of what he termed murdered innocence. Agitated with these sensations, and impelled to vengeance, he joined himself to the Buccaniers, of whom he had heard some indistinct accounts, and performed prodigies of valour. In his first expedition, he boarded a Spanish ship with almost more than human fury; and having mowed down with his own sabre all who attempted to oppose him, till he had completely cleared the decks, he gave up all the booty to his seamen; and felt for himself the highest gratification, in contemplating the mangled bodies of the dead, and the agonies of the dying.

There is no doubt but many others were impelled by the same motives which actuated Montbar; and it must be confessed, that the instances of revenge which were taken on the Spaniards by these licensed and unlicensed robbers, may be considered as temporal retaliations, by the permission of Providence, for the inhumanities which had been practised by those destroyers of mankind. Thus the calamities which they inflicted upon the Indians, were requited by the Buccaniers; so that "with what measure they meted, it was measured to them again ;" and all the miseries of the Spaniards on this occasion may be considered as nothing more than the price of blood.

The strange adventurers who were collected from every nation, actuated by one common principle, and directing their views to one common object, differing only in subordinate particulars, seem to have been over-ruled by a power superior to their own. The military glory which they acquired was, without doubt, transcendently brilliant; but their adventurous spirits were incapable of a transfer. The age in which they lived and acted saw their exploits; but with their persons their influence vanished away. Their appearance was as astonishing to Europe as their power was invincible: they were the terror of the age in which they lived, and they still continue to be the

admiration of mankind. They form of themselves an important epoch in history; without competitors, and without examples, in the whole empire of enterprise and war; distinguished at once from the rest of mankind, by their mode of warfare, their intrepidity, their promptitude of action, their unparalleled success, and unexampled dissipation. It is difficult to class them with any other denomination either of warriors or robbers: they stand alone; and are best expressed by their own appellation, that of Buccaniers.

CHAP. VII.

HISTORY OF JAMAICA.

Internal government of the island-constitution and lars-supreme courts and administration of justice—calamities to which the island has been exposed-earthquake of 1692-description of that calamity part of the island ravaged by the French in 1694-desolation occasioned by that incursion--the island visited by a succession of hurricanes-symptoms of a hurricane-description of that which happened in 1712-history of the Maroons-origin of that people and their successive depredations-treaty with lord Trelawney-instances of treachery-occasion and particulars of the late war-their final overthrow, and exile from the island to Nova Scotia in 1796-reflections.

THE influx of inhabitants whom the convulsions of England had both allured and driven into this island, tended considerably to increase its population. The planters who had been introduced from Barbadoes, together with those labourers whom both Scotland and Ireland had yielded, had imported habits of industry, and the surface of the island began to wear a more cheerful aspect. The wise regulations which had been introduced into the system of government had just begun their operations, and the inhabitants felt their salutary effects.

The wealth which had been acquired by those Buccaniers who belonged to the English nation, was imported into this island by a train of circumstances which stood connected with the adventurers, and was circulated through the island by those secret avenues which link agriculture to commerce, and commerce to war. The wealth which had found an asylum in Jamaica soon made itself known at home, and drew to this distant market the merchandise and manufacturers of the parent state. that branch of the riches which Spain had gained by barbarous inhumanity, and lost by the ferocious impudence of the Buccaniers, found its way into our own country, without impoverishing the island in which it was first deposited.

Thus

Jamaica in the mean while, profiting by the different branches of commerce which occasionally touched her shores, acquired strength by imperceptible degrees. The transacting of business brought with it a facility of action, which coincided with industry, and was not easily repressed. The claims of one common