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heal a wound, teaches us where to find unfailing balms. Some grew reckless to blows, or learned to ingratiate themselves with their masters by their increasing daring or sturdy industry. An apprentice whose bullet never flew false, or who could run down the wild ox on the plain, acquired a fame greater than that of his master. They knew that in time they themselves would be Buccaneers, and could inflict the very cruelties from which they now suffered. There were instances where acts of service to the island, or feats of unusual bravery, raised an engagé of a single year to the full rank of hunter. An apprentice who could bring in more hides than even his master, must have been too valuable an acquisition to have been lost by a moment of spleen. That horrible cases of cruelty did occur, there can be no doubt. There were no courts of justice in the forest, no stronger arm or wiser head to which to appeal. But there are always remedies for despair. The loaded gun was at hand, the knife in the belt, and the poison berries grew by the hut. There was the unsubdued passion still at liberty in the heart—there was the will to seize the weapon and the hand to use it. Providence is fruitful in her remedies of evils, and preserves a balance which no sovereignty can long disturb. No tyrant can shut up the volcano, or chain the earthquake. There were always the mountains or the Spaniards to take refuge amongst, though famine and death dwelt in the den of the wild beasts, and, if they fled to the Spaniards, they were often butchered as mere runaway slaves before they could explain, in an unknown language, that they were not spies. But still the very impossibility of preventing such escapes must have tended to temper the severity of the masters. A Flibustier, anxious for a crew, must have sometimes carried off discontented engagés both from the plantations and the ajoupas. The following story illustrates the social relations of the Buccaneer master and his servant.

      A Buccaneer one day, seeing that his apprentice, newly arrived from France, could not keep up with him, turned round and struck him over the head with the lock of his musket. The youth fell, stunned, to the ground; and the hunter, thinking he was dead, stripped him of his arms, and left his body where it had fallen and weltering in the blood flowing from the wound. On his return to his hut, afraid to disclose the truth, he told his companions that the lad, who had always skulked work, had at last marooned (a Spanish word applied to runaway negroes). A few curses were heaped upon him, and no more was thought about his disappearance.

      Soon after the master was out of sight the lad had recovered his senses, arisen, pale and weak, and attempted to return to the tents. Unaccustomed to the woods, he lost his way, got off the right track, and finally gave himself up as doomed to certain death. For some days he remained wandering round and round the same spot, without either recovering the path or being able to reach the shore. Hunger did not at first press him, for he ate the meat with which his master had loaded him, and ate it raw, not knowing the Indian manner of procuring fire, and his knives being taken from his belt. Ignorant of what fruits were safe to eat, where animals fit for food were to be found, and not knowing how to kill them unarmed, he prepared his mind for the dreadful and lingering torture of starvation. But he seems to have been of an ingenious and persevering disposition, and hope did not altogether forsake him. He had too a companion, for one of his master's dogs, which had grown fond of his playmate, had remained behind with his body, licking the hand that had so often fed him.

      At first he spent whole days vainly searching for a path. Very often he climbed up a hill, from which he could see the great, blue, level sea, stretching out boundless to the horizon, and this renewed his hope. He looked up, and knew that God's sky was above him, and felt that he might be still saved. At night he was startled by the screams of the monkeys, the bellowing of the wild cattle in the distant savannah, or the unearthly cry of some solitary and unknown bird. Superstition filled him with fears, and he felt deserted by man, but tormented by the things of evil. The tracks of the wild cattle led him far astray. Long ere this his faithful dog, driven by hunger, had procured food for both. Sometimes beneath the spreading boughs of the river-loving yaco-tree, they would surprise a basking sow, surrounded by a wandering brood of voracious sucklings. The dog would cling to the sow, while the boy aided him in the pursuit of the errant progeny. When they had killed their prey, they would lie down and share their meal together. The boy learned to like the raw meat, and the dog had acquired his appetite long before. Experience soon taught them where to capture their prey in the quickest and surest manner. He caught the puppies of a wild dog, and trained them in the chase; and he even taught a young wild boar that he had caught alive to join in the capture of his own species. After having led this life for nearly a year, he one day suddenly came upon the long-lost path, which soon brought him to the sea-shore. His master's tents were gone, and, from various appearances, seemed to have been long struck.

      The lad, now grown accustomed to his wild life, resigned himself to his condition, feeling sure that, sooner or later, he should meet with a party of Buccaneers. His deliverance was not long delayed. After about twelve months' life in the bush, he fell in with a troop of skinners, to whom he related his story. They were at first distrustful and alarmed, as his master had told them that he had marooned, and had joined the Indians. His appearance soon convinced them that his story was true, and that he was neither a maroon nor a deserter, for he was clothed in the rags of his engagé's shirt and drawers, and had a strip of raw meat hanging from his girdle. Two tame boars and three dogs followed at his heels, and refused to leave him. He at once joined his deliverers, who freed him from all obligations to his master, and gave him arms, powder, and lead to hunt for himself, and he soon became one of the most renowned Buccaneers on that coast. It was a long time before he could eat roasted meat, which not only was distasteful, but made him ill. Long after, when flaying a wild boar, he was frequently unable to restrain himself from eating the flesh raw.

      When an apprentice had served three years, his master was expected to give him as a reward a musket, a pound of powder, six pounds of lead, two shirts, two pairs of drawers, and a cap. The valets, as the French called them, then became comerades, and ceased to be mere engagés. They took their own matelots, and became, in their turn, Buccaneers. When they had obtained a sufficient quantity of hides, they either sent or took them to Tortuga, and brought from thence a young apprentice to treat him as they themselves had been treated.

      The planters' engagés led a life more dreadful than that of their wilder brethren. They were decoyed from France under the same pretences that once filled our streets with the peasants' sons of Savoy, and the peasants' daughters from Frankfort, or that now lure children from the pleasant borders of Como, to pine away in a London den. The want of sufficient negroes led men to resort to all artifices to obtain assistance in cultivating the sugar-cane and the tobacco plant. In the French Antilles they were sold for three years, but often resold in the interim. Amongst the English they were bound for seven years, and being occasionally sold again at their own request, before the expiration of this term, they sometimes served fifteen or twenty years before they could obtain their freedom. At Jamaica, if a man could not pay even a small debt at a tavern, he was sold for six or eight months. The planters had agents in France, England, and other countries, who sent out these apprentices. They were worked much harder than the slaves, because their lives, after the expiration of the three years, were of no consequence to the masters. They were often the victims of a disease called "coma," the effect of hard usage and climate, and which ended in idiotcy. Père Labat remarks the quantity of idiots in the West Indies, many of whom were dangerous, although allowed to go at liberty. Many of these worse than slaves were of good birth, tender education, and weak constitutions, unable to endure even the debilitating climate, and much less hard labour. Esquemeling, himself originally an engagé, gives a most piteous description of their sufferings. Insufficient food and rest, he says, were the smallest of their sufferings. They were frequently beaten, and often fell dead at their masters' feet. The men thus treated died fast: some became dropsical, and others scorbutic. A man named Bettesea, a merchant of St. Christopher's, was said to have killed more than a hundred apprentices with blows and stripes. "This inhumanity," says Esquemeling, "I have often seen with great grief." The following anecdote of human suffering equals the cruelty of the Virginian slave owner who threw one slave into the vat of boiling molasses, and baked another in an oven:—

      "A certain planter (of St. Domingo) exercised such cruelty towards one of his servants as caused him to run away. Having absconded for some days in the woods, he was at last taken, and brought back to the wicked Pharaoh. No sooner had he got him but he commanded