Part 8 (1/2)
[Footnote 193: Rawl. MSS., A. 347, ff. 31 and 36; S.P. Spain, vol.
47:--Deposition of Sir Charles Lyttleton; Margry, _op. cit._, p. 281.]
[Footnote 194: Charlevoix, _op. cit._, liv. vii. p. 36; Vaissiere, _op.
cit._, p. 10.]
[Footnote 195: According to Dutertre, Deschamps' commission extended only to the French inhabitants upon Tortuga, the French and English living thereafter under separate governments as at St. Kitts. Dutertre, t. iii. p. 135.]
[Footnote 196: Rawl. MSS., A. 347, f. 36.
According to Dutertre's version, Watts had scarcely forsaken the island when Deschamps arrived in the Road, and found that the French inhabitants had already made themselves masters of the colony and had subst.i.tuted the French for the English standard. Dutertre, t. iii. p.
136.]
[Footnote 197: Rawl. MSS., A. 347, f. 36.]
[Footnote 198: C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 648.]
[Footnote 199: Dutertre, t. iii. p. 138; Vaissiere, _op. cit._, p. 11, note 2.]
[Footnote 200: C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, No. 233.]
[Footnote 201: Ibid., No. 364.]
[Footnote 202: Ibid., No. 390; _cf._ also No. 474 (1).]
[Footnote 203: Ibid., No. 475.]
[Footnote 204: Beeston's Journal, 1st March 1663.
According to Dutertre, some inhabitants of Tortuga ran away to Jamaica and persuaded the governor that they could no longer endure French domination, and that if an armed force was sent, it would find no obstacle in restoring the English king's authority. Accordingly Col.
Barry was despatched to receive their allegiance, with orders to use no violence but only to accept their voluntary submission. When Barry landed on Tortuga, however, with no other support than a proclamation and a harangue, the French inhabitants laughed in his face, and he returned to Jamaica in shame and confusion. Dutertre, t. iii. pp.
137-38.]
[Footnote 205: C.S.P. Colon., 1661-68, Nos. 817-21.]
CHAPTER V
PORTO BELLO AND PANAMA
On 4th January 1664, the king wrote to Sir Thomas Modyford in Barbadoes that he had chosen him governor of Jamaica.[206] Modyford, who had lived as a planter in Barbadoes since 1650, had taken a prominent share in the struggles between Parliamentarians and Royalists in the little island.
He was a member of the Council, and had been governor for a short time in 1660. His commission and instructions for Jamaica[207] were carried to the West Indies by Colonel Edward Morgan, who went as Modyford's deputy-governor and landed in Barbadoes on 21st April.[208] Modyford was instructed, among other things, to prohibit the granting of letters of marque, and particularly to encourage trade and maintain friendly relations with the Spanish dominions. Sir Richard Fanshaw had just been appointed to go to Spain and negotiate a treaty for wider commercial privileges in the Indies, and Charles saw that the daily complaints of violence and depredation done by Jamaican s.h.i.+ps on the King of Spain's subjects were scarcely calculated to increase the good-will and compliance of the Spanish Court. Nor had the attempt in the Indies to force a trade upon the Spaniards been brilliantly successful. It was soon evident that another course of action was demanded. Sir Thomas Modyford seems at first to have been sincerely anxious to suppress privateering and conciliate his Spanish neighbours. On receiving his commission and instructions he immediately prepared letters to the President of San Domingo, expressing his fair intentions and requesting the co-operation of the Spaniards.[209] Modyford himself arrived in Jamaica on 1st June,[210] proclaimed an entire cessation of hostilities,[211] and on the 16th sent the ”Swallow” ketch to Cartagena to acquaint the governor with what he had done. On almost the same day letters were forwarded from England and from Amba.s.sador Fanshaw in Madrid, strictly forbidding all violences in the future against the Spanish nation, and ordering Modyford to inflict condign punishment on every offender, and make entire rest.i.tution and satisfaction to the sufferers.[212]
The letters for San Domingo, which had been forwarded to Jamaica with Colonel Morgan and thence dispatched to Hispaniola before Modyford's arrival, received a favourable answer, but that was about as far as the matter ever got. The buccaneers, moreover, the princ.i.p.al grievance of the Spaniards, still remained at large. As Thomas Lynch wrote on 25th May, ”It is not in the power of the governor to have or suffer a commerce, nor will any necessity or advantage bring private Spaniards to Jamaica, for we and they have used too many mutual barbarisms to have a sudden correspondence. When the king was restored, the Spaniards thought the manners of the English nation changed too, and adventured twenty or thirty vessels to Jamaica for blacks, but the surprises and irruptions by C. Myngs, for whom the governor of San Domingo has upbraided the commissioners, made the Spaniards redouble their malice, and nothing but an order from Spain can give us admittance or trade.”[213] For a short time, however, a serious effort was made to recall the privateers.
Several prizes which were brought into Port Royal were seized and returned to their owners, while the captors had their commissions taken from them. Such was the experience of one Captain Searles, who in August brought in two Spanish vessels, both of which were restored to the Spaniards, and Searles deprived of his rudder and sails as security against his making further depredations upon the Dons.[214] In November Captain Morris Williams sent a note to Governor Modyford, offering to come in with a rich prize of logwood, indigo and silver, if security were given that it should be condemned to him for the payment of his debts in Jamaica; and although the governor refused to give any promises the prize was brought in eight days later. The goods were seized and sold in the interest of the Spanish owner.[215] Nevertheless, the effects of the proclamation were not at all encouraging. In the first month only three privateers came in with their commissions, and Modyford wrote to Secretary Bennet on 30th June that he feared the only effect of the proclamation would be to drive them to the French in Tortuga. He therefore thought it prudent, he continued, to dispense somewhat with the strictness of his instructions, ”doing by degrees and moderation what he had at first resolved to execute suddenly and severely.”[216]
Tortuga was really the crux of the whole difficulty. Back in 1662 Colonel Doyley, in his report to the Lord Chancellor after his return to England, had suggested the reduction of Tortuga to English obedience as the only effective way of dealing with the buccaneers;[217] and Modyford in 1664 also realized the necessity of this preliminary step.[218] The conquest of Tortuga, however, was no longer the simple task it might have been four or five years earlier. The inhabitants of the island were now almost entirely French, and with their companions on the coast of Hispaniola had no intention of submitting to English dictation. The buccaneers, who had become numerous and independent and made Tortuga one of their princ.i.p.al retreats, would throw all their strength in the balance against an expedition the avowed object of whose coming was to make their profession impossible. The colony, moreover, received an incalculable accession of strength in the arrival of Bertrand d'Ogeron, the governor sent out in 1665 by the new French West India Company.
D'Ogeron was one of the most remarkable figures in the West Indies in the second half of the seventeenth century. Of broad imagination and singular kindness of heart, with an indomitable will and a mind full of resource, he seems to have been an ideal man for the task, not only of reducing to some semblance of law and order a people who had never given obedience to any authority, but also of making palatable the _regime_ and exclusive privileges of a private trading company. D'Ogeron first established himself at Port Margot on the coast of Hispaniola opposite Tortuga in the early part of 1665; and here the adventurers at once gave him to understand that they would never submit to any mere company, much less suffer an interruption of their trade with the Dutch, who had supplied them with necessities at a time when it was not even known in France that there were Frenchmen in that region. D'Ogeron pretended to subscribe to these conditions, pa.s.sed over to Tortuga where he received the submission of la Place, and then to Pet.i.t-Goave and Leogane, in the _cul-de-sac_ of Hispaniola. There he made his headquarters, adopted every means to attract planters and _engages_, and firmly established his authority. He made advances from his own purse without interest to adventurers who wished to settle down to planting, bought two s.h.i.+ps to facilitate trade between the colony and France, and even contrived to have several lots of fifty women each brought over from France to be sold and distributed as wives amongst the colonists. The settlements soon put on a new air of prosperity, and really owed their existence as a permanent French colony to the efforts of this new governor.[219] It was under the administration of d'Ogeron that l'Olonnais,[220] Michel le Basque, and most of the French buccaneers flourished, whose exploits are celebrated in Exquemelin's history.
The conquest of Tortuga was not the only measure necessary for the effectual suppression of the buccaneers. Five or six swift cruisers were also required to pursue and bring to bay those corsairs who refused to come in with their commissions.[221] Since the Restoration the West Indies had been entirely denuded of English men-of-war; while the buccaneers, with the tacit consent or encouragement of Doyley, had at the same time increased both in numbers and boldness. Letters written from Jamaica in 1664 placed the number scattered abroad in privateering at from 1500 to 2000, sailing in fourteen or fifteen s.h.i.+ps.[222] They were desperate men, accustomed to living at sea, with no trade but burning and plundering, and unlikely to take orders from any but stronger and faster frigates. Nor was this condition of affairs surprising when we consider that, in the seventeenth century, there flowed from Europe to the West Indies adventurers from every cla.s.s of society; men doubtless often endowed with strong personalities, enterprising and intrepid; but often, too, of mediocre intelligence or little education, and usually without either money or scruples. They included many who had revolted from the narrow social laws of European countries, and were disinclined to live peaceably within the bounds of any organized society. Many, too, had belonged to rebellious political factions at home, men of the better cla.s.ses who were banished or who emigrated in order to keep their heads upon their shoulders. In France the total exhaustion of public and private fortune at the end of the religious wars disposed many to seek to recoup themselves out of the immense colonial riches of the Spaniards; while the disorders of the Rebellion and the Commonwealth in England caused successive emigrations of Puritans and Loyalists to the newer England beyond the seas. At the close of the Thirty Years' War, too, a host of French and English adventurers, who had fattened upon Germany and her misfortunes, were left without a livelihood, and doubtless many resorted to emigration as the sole means of continuing their life of freedom and even of licence.
Coming to the West Indies these men, so various in origin and character, hoped soon to acquire there the riches which they lost or coveted at home; and their expectations deceived, they often broke in a formal and absolute manner the bonds which attached them to their fellow humanity.
Jamaica especially suffered in this respect, for it had been colonized in the first instance by a discontented, refractory soldiery, and it was being recruited largely by transported criminals and vagabonds. In contrast with the policy of Spain, who placed the most careful restrictions upon the cla.s.s of emigrants sent to her American possessions, England from the very beginning used her colonies, and especially the West Indian islands, as a dumping-ground for her refuse population. Within a short time a regular trade sprang up for furnis.h.i.+ng the colonies with servile labour from the prisons of the mother country.