Tortuga and the buccaneers

What is a buccaneer?

The first buccaneers were hunters, not sailors. When Spanish settlers left the western and northern parts of Hispaniola in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the cattle and pigs they left behind ran wild. From about 1620, French, English and other men lived rough in the woods there, killing the animals for their hides and meat and selling them to passing ships, especially Dutch traders.

They smoked the meat on a wooden frame called a boucan, a word that came from the Arawak (Taíno) people of the Caribbean. The French called the hunters boucaniers, and in English this became “buccaneers”. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, who sailed with them, hunters often worked as sworn partners who shared everything they owned. Their groups mixed many backgrounds, including runaway servants and Africans who had escaped slavery.

Spain tried to drive the hunters out, and the Spanish ships sailing past were a temptation. Many hunters took to the sea as raiders, and rival European governments often gave them commissions, official licences to attack Spain.

Was Tortuga a real pirate island?

Yes, though its pirate years were shorter than legend suggests. Only the island’s south side, around the harbour of Cayona, was settled. From about 1630 English tobacco planters from St Kitts joined French hunters there, and in 1631 a London company made it an English colony it called “Association”.

Spain saw the settlers as intruders. In January 1635 (some records say December 1634) a Spanish force, helped by an Irish defector who had lived on the island, burned the settlement. Spain raided again in 1638. After the 1638 raid the Spanish left no garrison, and settlers crept back. English and French quarrelled over the island until 1640, when the French took control.

Who ruled Tortuga?

In 1640 the French governor at St Kitts sent a Protestant soldier and engineer, Jean Le Vasseur, to take the island. Le Vasseur built a fort on a rock above the harbour. Exquemelin describes it as reachable only by a ladder, with a spring of water inside. Le Vasseur ran the island much as he pleased, until two of his own officers killed him in 1652 or 1653 (sources differ).

In early 1654 a Spanish expedition from Santo Domingo besieged the fort and forced the French governor, the Chevalier de Fontenay, to surrender. Spain then pulled out once more. An Englishman, Elias Watts, held the island briefly from 1655, and around 1659–1660 the French took it back for good. So Tortuga almost always had a governor. It was a rough place, but not a land without rulers.

How did France tame the buccaneers?

In 1664 Louis XIV gave Tortuga and western Hispaniola to the French West India Company. Its governor from 1665 to 1675 was Bertrand d’Ogeron, himself a former buccaneer and planter. He wanted farmers, not raiders. He encouraged tobacco growing and brought in settlers from Martinique, Guadeloupe and the ports of western France.

Yet d’Ogeron also kept handing out commissions against Spain, so raiding carried on. In 1670 he founded Cap-Français (today Cap-Haïtien) on the mainland, and soon afterwards the buccaneers rose in revolt against him.

Why did Tortuga fade?

Its job was done. Tortuga was a springboard for the French on Hispaniola, and once towns grew on the mainland, at Petit-Goâve (1659), Léogâne (1663) and Cap-Français (1670), the little island mattered less. The governors moved to Port-de-Paix, across the channel. From the 1670s the buccaneers’ main base was Petit-Goâve on the south-west coast. A US Library of Congress study says the “freewheeling society of Tortuga” described in romantic stories had faded into legend by the end of the seventeenth century.

The Peace of Ryswick in 1697 ended the war between France and Spain, and Spain accepted France’s hold on western Hispaniola, which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. The buccaneers’ licensed raids against Spain ended with it. After 1700 Saint-Domingue grew rich on sugar, produced by the forced labour of enslaved Africans brought there in rising numbers.

What was Tortuga like in 1715?

By the time Silver & Sails begins, Tortuga was a quiet backwater of Saint-Domingue, known for its healthy climate. It was not empty, and it was not lawless. In 1713 the French authorities banned piracy there and assigned a small company of artillerymen to the island. No count of its people at this date has been found, so it is safest to call it a thinly settled outpost.

Pirates of the time did still pass along this coast. According to A General History of the Pyrates (1724), John “Calico Jack” Rackham’s crew raided the French coast of Hispaniola in 1720, taking cattle and seizing some of the French hog-hunters. That book never names Tortuga itself.

Tortuga or Nassau: where did Golden Age pirates live?

Nassau. From about 1713 to 1718 the main pirate base was Nassau on New Providence in the Bahamas, used by Benjamin Hornigold, Blackbeard, Sam Bellamy, Charles Vane and Calico Jack. Those pirates attacked ships of any nation, while the old buccaneers had mostly attacked Spain, often with a licence. The buccaneers of Tortuga belong to the generations before, the age of raiders like Henry Morgan, whose attack on Portobelo in 1668 Exquemelin also wrote about.