Note (return) — Chapter VII

In Jamaica Lieutenant-Governor Molesworth continued in the policy and spirit of his predecessor. He sent a frigate to the Bay of Darien to visit Golden Isle and the Isle of Pines (where the buccaneers were accustomed to make their rendezvous when they crossed over to the South Seas), with orders to destroy any piratical craft in that vicinity, and he made every exertion to prevent recruits from leaving Jamaica.482 The stragglers who returned from the South Seas he arrested and executed, and he dealt severely with those who received and entertained them.483 By virtue of the king's proclamation of 1684, he had the property in Port Royal belonging to men then in the South Seas forfeited to the crown.484 A Captain Bannister, who in June 1684 had run away from Port Royal on a privateering venture with a ship of thirty guns, had been caught and brought back by the frigate "Ruby," but when put on trial for piracy was released by the grand jury on a technicality. Six months later Bannister managed to elude the forts a second time, and for two years kept dodging the frigates which Molesworth sent in pursuit of him. Finally, in January 1687, Captain Spragge sailed into Port Royal with the buccaneer and three of his companions hanging at the yard-arms, "a spectacle of great satisfaction to all good people, and of terror to the favourers of pirates."485 It was during the government of Molesworth that the "Biscayners" began to appear in American waters. These privateers from the Bay of Biscay seem to have been taken into the King of Spain's service to hunt pirates, but they interrupted English trade more than the pirates did. They captured and plundered English merchantmen right and left, and carried them to Cartagena, Vera Cruz, San Domingo and other Spanish ports, where the governors took charge of their prisoners and allowed them to dispose of their captured goods. They held their commissions, it seems, directly from the Crown, and so pretended to be outside the pale of the authority of the Spanish governors. The latter, at any rate, declared that they could give no redress, and themselves complained to the authorities in Jamaica of the independence of these marauders.486 In December 1688 the king issued a warrant to the Governor of Jamaica authorizing him to suppress the Biscayans with the royal frigates.487