The Lost Fleet Read Free Page A

buccaneers tended to operate in small groups, coming together for the purpose of a raiding voyage. They elected their leaders, agreed on the terms of their confederation before setting out, and divided their take evenly.
    Despite the antisocial core of the buccaneers’ worldview, they were capable of organizing in large numbers. By the time of d’Estrées’ attack on Curaçao, a number of leaders had emerged who were able to organize the buccaneers into a sizable force for as long as it took to sack some Spanish town of their choosing.
    One of the most successful, and vicious, of the leaders to emerge from the buccaneer community at Tortuga was Francis L’Ollonais. L’Ollonais was a former indentured servant and later a hunter and bou-canier of Hispaniola who, like many, turned pirate. In 1667 he organized and led an army of seven hundred Tortuga pirates on an attack on Maracaibo in Venezuela.
    L’Ollonais also had the distinction of being one of the cruelest and most psychotic of the buccaneers. His fellow pirate Alexandre Exquemelin describes how, frustrated by uncooperative Spanish captives, “L’Ollonais…drew out his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and, pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth.” 1
    It was not long after that event that many of L’Ollonais’s followers took leave of him. Even for pirates, that was a bit over the top.
    The most successful of the buccaneer leaders was Henry Morgan. Morgan was a Welshman who first came to the Caribbean as an English soldier but stayed for a life of piracy. By 1678 he had already coordinated several of these buccaneer armies. In 1668, under Morgan, seven hundred filibusters—that is, freebooters, or pirates—had sailed in a great flotilla and plundered Puerto del Principe in Cuba and Puerto Bello, Panama, in orgies of brutality.
    In 1670, Morgan organized a raid on Panama City, collecting together an unprecedented two thousand buccaneers on forty ships. Fighting their way through the rivers and jungles of Panama, they fell on and took the city after defeating a superior number of defenders in a great land battle. Morgan set the standard for the large, organizedbuccaneer raid. He also set the standard for playing the political game, seldom operating without the tacit approval of government authority. Despite his outrageous behavior, Morgan was a favorite in England. He was ultimately knighted and made lieutenant governor of Jamaica.
    By the time d’Estrées was ready to attack Curaçao, the precedent of bringing together the buccaneers of Tortuga as a large, amphibious fighting force was well established. The buccaneers, when properly organized, were an effective and devastating weapon. These were the men whom d’Estrées wanted with him.
    A N A RMY FOR H IRE
    Early in the year 1678, d’Estrées dispatched two frigates to Tortuga with orders from Louis XIV to the governor, Jacques Nepveu, Sieur de Pouançay, to raise an ad hoc buccaneer army to join in the attack on Curaçao.
    De Pouançay was able to rally a significant force—between twelve and fourteen hundred buccaneers—no doubt with promises of pay and suggestions of the booty from sacking the Dutch city. The buccaneers brought to the expedition more than a dozen of their own pirate ships, most of which they had captured by staging attacks in smaller vessels. With their fleet they joined the French at Cap François.
    None of the buccaneer vessels were close to the size and power of the massive French warships. Still, they were fast and nimble. Their companies, eager and experienced fighting men, were far more effective in battle than the average enlisted soldier or sailor of any nation’s regular armed forces. As it happened, the smaller size of the filibusters’ ships would be the very thing that would save them.
    The fleet of