Note (return) — Chapter VII

Cartagena, situated at the eastward end of a large double lagoon, was perhaps the strongest fortress in the Indies, and the Spaniards within opposed a courageous defence.525 After a fortnight of fighting and bombardment, however, on the last day of April the outworks were carried by a brilliant assault, and on 6th May the small Spanish garrison, followed by the Cabildo or municipal corporation, and by many of the citizens of the town, in all about 2800 persons, marched out with the honours of war. Although the Spaniards had been warned of the coming of the French, and before their arrival had succeeded in withdrawing the women and some of their riches to Mompos in the interior, the treasure which fell into the hands of the invaders was enormous, and has been variously estimated at from six million crowns to twenty millions sterling. Trouble soon broke out between de Pointis and the buccaneers, for the latter wanted the whole of the plunder to be divided equally among the men, as had always been their custom, and they expected, according to this arrangement, says de Pointis in his narrative, about a quarter of all the booty. De Pointis, however, insisted upon the order which he had published before the expedition sailed from Petit Goave, that the buccaneers should be subject to the same rule in the division of the spoil as the sailors in the fleet, i.e., they should receive one-tenth of the first million and one-thirtieth of the rest. Moreover, fearing that the buccaneers would take matters into their own hands, he had excluded them from the city while his officers gathered the plunder and carried it to the ships. On the repeated remonstrances of Ducasse, de Pointis finally announced that the share allotted to the men from Hispaniola was 40,000 crowns. The buccaneers, finding themselves so miserably cheated, broke out into open mutiny, but were restrained by the influence of their leader and the presence of the king's frigates. De Pointis, meanwhile, seeing his own men decimated by sickness, put all the captured guns on board the fleet and made haste to get under sail for France. South of Jamaica he fell in with the squadron of Admiral Nevill, to which in the meantime had been joined some eight Dutch men-of-war; but de Pointis, although inferior in numbers, outsailed the English ships and lost but one or two of his smaller vessels. He then manœuvred past Cape S. Antonio, round the north of Cuba and through the Bahama Channel to Newfoundland, where he stopped for fresh wood and water, and after a brush with a small English squadron under Commodore Norris, sailed into the harbour of Brest on 19th August 1697.526