Note (return) — Chapter II

Another source of recruits for the freebooters were the indentured servants or engagés. We hear a great deal of the barbarity with which West Indian planters and hunters in the seventeenth century treated their servants, and we may well believe that many of the latter, finding their situation unendurable, ran away from their plantations or ajoupas to join the crew of a chance corsair hovering in the neighbourhood. The hunters' life, as we have seen, was not one of revelry and ease. On the one side were all the insidious dangers lurking in a wild, tropical forest; on the other, the relentless hostility of the Spaniards. The environment of the hunters made them rough and cruel, and for many an engagé his three years of servitude must have been a veritable purgatory. The servants of the planters were in no better position. Decoyed from Norman and Breton towns and villages by the loud-sounding promises of sea-captains and West Indian agents, they came to seek an El Dorado, and often found only despair and death. The want of sufficient negroes led men to resort to any artifice in order to obtain assistance in cultivating the sugar-cane and tobacco. The apprentices sent from Europe were generally bound out in the French Antilles for eighteen months or three years, among the English for seven years. They were often resold in the interim, and sometimes served ten or twelve years before they regained their freedom. They were veritable convicts, often more ill-treated than the slaves with whom they worked side by side, for their lives, after the expiration of their term of service, were of no consequence to their masters. Many of these apprentices, of good birth and tender education, were unable to endure the debilitating climate and hard labour, let alone the cruelty of their employers. Exquemelin, himself originally an engagé, gives a most piteous description of their sufferings. He was sold to the Lieutenant-Governor of Tortuga, who treated him with great severity and refused to take less than 300 pieces of eight for his freedom. Falling ill through vexation and despair, he passed into the hands of a surgeon, who proved kind to him and finally gave him his liberty for 100 pieces of eight, to be paid after his first buccaneering voyage.112