238 THE OCEAN RIVER 



his men: ''Instead of mattocks, wenches pappies; for labor, 

 pleasure; for hunger, abundance; for weariness and watching, 

 sleep and quietness/' 



Combination among the buccaneers made a kind of Carib- 

 bean sea militia that the British, and sometimes the French, 

 used in the seventeenth century. After 1655 the buccaneers 

 generally sailed under commissions from the governor of 

 Jamaica or Tortuga, and set aside a tithe or ten percent for 

 the governor. Later in the centry this kind of freebooting had 

 become such a native growth in these waters that Labat, a 

 Dominican friar, could write of them as follows: ''We were 

 busy this morning confessing a crew of filibusters who had 

 arrived with prizes captured from the English. The Mass of 

 the Virgin was celebrated with all solemnity and I blessed 

 three large loaves which were presented by the captain and 

 his officers, who arrived at church accompanied by the drums 

 and trumpets of their corvette. At the beginning of the Mass 

 the corvette fired a salute with all her cannons. At the eleva- 

 tion of the Holy Sacrament she fired another salvo, at the 

 Benediction, a third, and finally a fourth, when we sang the 

 Te Deum. All the filibusters contributed thirty sols to the 

 sacristy, and did so with much piety and modesty." 



Pere Labat was very much a man of the world. He could 

 look with pleasant objectivity on the pirates, and even joined 

 heartily in the social pastime of the islands, called "cochon 

 boucane'' — a kind of pirate picnic. "We forgathered,'' he 

 recounts, "in a forest of poplars and all pretend to be buc- 

 caneers. Much rum is consumed and no water is allowed in 

 the wine or spirits. I do not think it necessary to inform the 

 reader that one of the essential things in a boucan is to drink 

 frequently. The law compels it, (law du pic-nic) the sauce 

 invites one to do so, and few err in this respect." 



Although the English and the French and Dutch occa- 

 sionally fought each other, the main prey was Spain with 



