In the wake of the buccaneers

When Morgan sent his pistol and his bullets to the viceroy of Panama with word that he would call for them in person within the twelvemonth, it is doubtful if he dreamed of doin...

St. Croix, or—to use its more euphonious Spanish name—Santa Cruz, seems an island fashioned from green plush. If ever there was a true Emerald Isle, it is this island of the Hol...

From Anegada to St. Martin is, in the vernacular of the buccaneers, a “passinge longe sayle,” a run of nearly one hundred miles across the heaving Atlantic rollers surging in th...

North of St. John and so close to it as to appear, from a short distance, but a continuation, lies Tortola, the British isle which played so prominent a part in St. John’s early...

Kingston, the successor of Port Royal, is so well known and has so often been described that little need be said of it. It is not particularly attractive; it has no outstanding...

It was due to peculiar circumstances that the Virgin Islands and their harbors became neutral ground—or, rather, neutral waters—wherein the corsairs could be sure of safety, and...

Sam had assured me that there were many relics of buccaneer days on St. John, and in St. Thomas his statements had been confirmed by several persons. Moreover, the names of many...

Although Morgan rose to fame in Jamaica, yet in the island he is unhonored and unsung; and it was across leagues of heaving sea and along the shores of the Spanish Main that his...

No story of the West Indies in their relation to the buccaneers would be complete without some mention of Bartholomew Sharp and his marvelous cruise, which even Ringrose, his sa...

So marvelously rich was Panama, so vast were the quantities of gold wrested from the Indians and from the mines, that the Spaniards called the isthmus Castillo del Oro or Golden...

I had started forth on a novel journey, a trip I had long wanted to take—a cruise in the wake of the buccaneers. Many a time I had traversed the Caribbean, steaming from port to...

Against the soft azure of the tropic sky Jamaica lifts its lofty peaks, crowned with a diadem of clouds, above a sapphire sea. Faint and phantasmal as a vision it hangs above th...

The Panama which Sharp and his men approached in their bobbing little canoes after that memorable trip across Darien, was the same city which still looks forth across the Pacifi...

Although from the time that handful of refugees took Tortuga from the Spaniards the island was nominally French, yet it was ever, to all intents and purposes, buccaneer. Even th...

No one can say when the buccaneers first selected St. John as a refuge, but no doubt it was long before the Danes or the Dutch first settled there. Pirates haunted the Virgin Is...

St. Thomas is very beautiful when seen from a distance, with its gray-green mountains rising above the sea, mottled with soft mauves of shadow and dazzling silvery sunlight—a ma...

Despite all their interest, neither Statia nor Saba held aught that linked them with the buccaneers,—indeed, I doubt if these adventurers ever visited either,—and so, dipping ou...

Sailing along the shores of Santo Domingo, one realizes the aptness of the graphic illustration of the island’s appearance with which, tradition says, Columbus answered Queen Is...

One must search far and wide to find a more beautiful stretch of water than the Bay of Samana. Blue as the azure dome above it, the vast, lake-like expanse cuts into the very he...

Having seen all that was to be seen at Tortuga, even clambering up the rocky heights to the ruins of that first ancient buccaneers’ fort overlooking the harbor, we boarded the V...