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worse for it? Who minded except Spain? Surely England and France and Holland took little heed of it. Sometimes they provided the pirates with commissions against Aragon and Castile, so that you might come on a man who, ten years before, had been sent out in a prison ship, carrying the style of “Captain by the grace of the King.”

France had the good of her wayward children at heart, for she sent out twelve hundred women to Tortuga to be the wives of buccaneers. The whole twelve hundred turned to a business more profitable than wifehood immediately they landed, but France could not help that.

They had got their name, these buccaneers, of a time when they were nothing more than cattle-hunters. There was a way of smoking meat by burning small bits of fat and flesh in the fire. This made the meat more savory than usual. It was called the boucan process, and from it the pirates were named.

But after a time these hunters came out of the woods in little, careful groups; then bands formed, and then whole fleets of eight or ten vessels. And finally thousands assembled in Tortuga, and from that spot of safety buzzed about the flanks of Spain.

And Spain could not combat them. Did she hang ten, a hundred joined their ranks; so she fortified her towns and sent her treasures on the sea under the protection of warships filled with soldiers. The numberless vessels of the Spanish colonies were nearly all driven from the sea by the