Chap. XI.— B. S.] APPREHENSION OP ISTHMENIANS. 169 
Panama. But a fatal disease broke out among the 
soldiers and sailors, and this also deprived them of the 
services of their chief surgeon. When many of his 
men and three of his captains had died, the hardy 
Drake himself fell sick, and after struggling some 
twenty days with his malady and the grief occasioned 
by his failure, he expired on the 28th of December, 
1595. On the same day the fleet anchored off Porto- 
belo, and in sight of the place which he had formerly 
taken and plundered, his body received a sailor’s fu¬ 
neral. 
The bold attempts of Oxenham and Drake filled the 
Isthmenians with apprehension, and prompted them 
to adopt a more regular system of defence than their 
fancied security hitherto seemed to demand. Little 
did they anticipate that these events were only the 
prelude to a fearful tragedy, of which their country 
was to become the theatre. The principal actors in 
this tragedy, whose names for nearly a century were 
the terror of the coast and the scourge of the sea, were 
the Buccaneers, an association equally singular and 
formidable, and called into existence by the despotic 
administration of the Spanish colonies. The Spaniards 
themselves felt oppressed by the restrictions placed on 
trade, and gave stealthy encouragement to foreign in¬ 
terlopers, who supplied them at an easier rate with 
articles which could not be legally procured without 
paying enormous exactions. English traders soon 
made their appearance ) and, as on the one hand the 
authorities treated them as enemies, or even as pirates, 
while on the other they were invited by the profits of 
