Tortuga; the First Haven of the Buccaneers

     In the decades of the 1630's, 40's and into the 50's, robbing the Spanish became the principal activity of many Buccaneers.  They aggregated on the northwest tip of Hispaniola near the Windward Passage, where Spanish shipping passed, coming from and going to Europe.  Several miles off the north coast of this finger of land lay an island which the Buccaneers called ‘Tortuga’, for its resemblance to a huge sea turtle basking on the ocean’s surface.  The north coast of the island was pounded with rough surf and laced with treacherous reefs, which made landing difficult.  The southern side, while calm, was mostly dense mangrove jungle, except for a single natural harbor where a fair number of ships could be moored. 

     The Buccaneers needed a port to trade, disperse and sell their contraband and given that it was a stone's throw from the Windward Passage, Tortuga was a natural spot for such a port.  It was vulnerable, however, and the Spanish raided and burned it several times in the 1620’s and 30’s.  Since the largest portion of the Buccaneers were French in origin, the island of St. Christopher, then a peaceful French planting settlement, sent a civil engineer named Jean LeVasseur, to act as governor in 1649.  The idea was to establish some semblance of order in this otherwise lawless island. 

     LeVasseur was surprisingly successful at developing Tortuga, but not so much at "gentrifying" it.  He declared Tortuga to be a French protectorate and in doing so, he established a formal port and built a fortress on a rocky pinnacle overlooking the harbor.  He named it simply the ‘Rock Fort’ and it sported 24 cannons.  Having created infrastructure on the island, the land surrounding the fort became worthy plantation fields and LeVasseur sold the land to entrepreneurs.  With a port, plantations and a fort to protect them, LeVasseur recognized that one important element was missing from his budding community. 

     He wrote back to France and offered to take ‘undesirable ladies’ if the French prison system wished to empty their dungeons of female prostitutes, thieves and petty criminals.  LeVasseur hoped with the arrival of women that the Buccaneers might be enticed to settle down to a more manageable life of planting and family.  A few did, but most men held to the fast life of stealing from the Spanish.  That's not to say that LeVasseur was at all disappointed by this illicit activity.  Quite the contrary.  In a few years he came to be regarded as a kind of "pirate king."

     Having given into the riches of plunder, LeVasseur became a partner in many contraband businesses in Tortuga.  He named the harbor "Basse Terre," built a quayside warehouse to sell the contraband, and took his percentage from everything coming and going.  In only a matter of a few years the town of Cayone had grown up around his Rock Fort.  Cayone was a conflict of many styles of architecture, reflecting the nationality of the man who had built it, and taverns and inns abounded.  These were wild, lawless, rough and dirty places, full of ‘drunkenness and wickedness of the most varied forms’ as the historian Esquemeling tells us.  After a night of carousing and visiting houses of prostitution, men lay drunk in the unpaved streets or occasionally, slumped against buildings and bleeding to death.  Fights and grudges over a pittance were settled routinely with crossed swords, pistols, ambushes, knives, throat cutting and every other form of revenge.  Needless to say, the lifespan of these brigands, and even Jean LeVasseur himself, would be commensurate with his business.  In 1654, LeVasseur was killed, stabbed to death by one of his lieutenants, a conflict alleged to have something to do with a pair of young trollops. 

     Chevalier DeFontenay was the next governor of Tortuga, but he never had a chance to earn a reputation equal to LeVasseur.  In 1655, the Spanish brought five war galleons and a number of troop transport ships to Tortuga in a massive effort to destroy the pestilence dogging their shipping.  They bombarded their way into the harbor, chopped through the forest to a place above and behind the Rock Fort while the defenders hunkered down.  There, the Spanish garrisons blasted the fort to rubble, then spread out across the island, burning all the residences, taverns, baudy houses, and even the Huguenot Church.  All the crops being grown on the island, including the tobacco, were burned as well as all the ships for transport.  Many of the defenders were killed, others escaped across the channel to Hispaniola, but most of the indian and negro slaves were taken into Spanish custody. 

     This did not deter the Buccaneers from their profession though, for the Spanish abandoned the place as quickly as they had decimated it, and the Buccaneers washed back like the incoming tide.  Tortuga would still be a port of call for freebooters, privateers and pirates for a short time, but there was a new and much larger port in the making.  Very soon after the Spanish raid on Tortuga, Jamaica was taken by the British and officially declared a protectorate.  The Buccaneers flocked there, finding a new and better protected home for even bigger escapades against the Spanish Empire.  

     Next week we will be examining the Buccaneers "victim" of choice:  The Holy Spanish Empire, Undisputed Ruler of the New World.

For much more on the subject, you can also read my historical novel, The Brethren Prince, available as an e-book at the Amazon Kindle store, Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and other major e-book retailers.