The Buccaneers of America

Exquemelin left France in 1666 under indenture to the West India Company. On Tortuga, he says, a first master reduced him to severe illness before selling him to a surgeon. His second service placed him close to colonial medical work and may help explain the book’s attention to wounds, sickness, hunger, and injury compensation. After gaining freedom, he entered a buccaneering company.

The biography opens the book within colonial labour. Hunters, planters, merchants, taverns, shipowners, and buccaneers on Tortuga exchanged credit, hides, meat, weapons, and labour. Raiding at sea depended upon a land-based colonial economy.

The prefatory promise of eyewitness ventures does not preserve a continuous log for every episode. Exquemelin writes some companies at close range and relays other lives and reports. His position supplies proximity, while memory, interest, and later editorial work remain visible layers.

Early chapters spend substantial space on wild cattle and pigs in Hispaniola, smoked meat and hides, French settlement, and the Tortuga base. These materials explain where a company found provisions, firearms, vessels, and recruits.

Hunters delivered meat and hides to port merchants; merchants advanced powder, cloth, alcohol, and credit; commanders recruited against expected prizes. Returns from one attack entered taverns, shops, and plantations, while debt and consumption fed another departure. The common stock had a colonial material base.

That economy also relied on coerced labour, enslaved people, and captives. The injury schedule values silver and enslaved people side by side, exposing the unequal human cost beneath port prosperity and collective insurance.

Before sailing, a company put investment, rewards for commander and carpenter, injury payments, and residual shares into writing. ‘No prey, no pay’ meant that crew contributed labour and bodily risk for an uncertain return, while providers of ship, ammunition, and food took agreed claims first.

The compensation schedule assigns separate prices to arms, legs, eyes, and fingers. It operates as mutual insurance against permanent disability. The same table exposes the venture’s violent economy, because payments came from seizure and enslaved people could substitute for coin.

Members swore not to hide prizes, and searches or penalties protected the common account. The final accusation that Morgan reserved the best jewels therefore measures a commander against a rule acknowledged by ordinary members.

A raid required more than guns. Companies needed shallows, river mouths, garrisons, roads, stores, and wealthy households, so they repeatedly seized sailors, residents, and enslaved people as pilots, interpreters, and guides. Threat and torture extracted information; ransom extended detention into negotiation.

Puerto Bello, Maracaibo, and Panama present violence as a sequence: concealed approach, seizure of forts, blocked exits, searches, concentrated captives, negotiation, provisioning, and withdrawal with ransom. City and countryside endured separate phases of one operation.

Exquemelin’s details reconstruct logistics through an attacker’s field of view. African-descended people, Indigenous communities, free residents, enslaved people, soldiers, and civilians within Spanish settlements did not form one uniform population. Local archives and archaeology disaggregate the book’s broad labels.

The 1670–1671 campaign first captured San Lorenzo at the mouth of the Chagres and then crossed the isthmus by river and land. Boats could not carry all supplies forward. Mud, heat, and hunger consumed the force; villages, maize, and livestock determined whether it could continue.

Panama burned after the battle. Accounts have long disputed who began the fire: Exquemelin assigns an order to Morgan, while other explanations point to combat, a defensive scorched-earth policy, or uncontrolled ignition. Fire, searching, detention, and ransom imposed sustained losses on residents.

On return, ordinary shares fell far below expectation and members suspected Morgan of withholding jewels. The conflict completes the book’s contractual theme: a commander capable of assembling a fleet could use custody and information to weaken its common account.

Scholarship generally treats the lost manuscript as probably French. Jan ten Hoorn heavily adapted it for the Dutch edition of 1678, followed by German in 1679, Spanish in 1681, rival English editions in 1684, and French in 1686. Every market changed vocabulary, narrative, and emphasis.

The 1684 Bucaniers of America moved chiefly through Spanish, making language about Morgan especially sensitive. Morgan sued publisher Thomas Malthus in 1685, while William Crooke settled separately. The surviving plea roll records reputation and commerce but no completed trial deciding whether contested statements were true.

The English second volume contains Basil Ringrose’s journal and does not belong to Exquemelin’s three-part original. This dossier separates that later attachment from the book and identifies its quoted early English as one branch that reached London through Spanish.