part 10,000.

D'Esnambuc was invested with the supreme command.

Among the claims stipulated in his commission there is one which we must quote, owing to its strangeness, for it imposed on white men in America a temporary slavery harsher even than that of the Negro.

This is the clause, whose sinister consequences we shall see developed during the course of this story.

"No labourer intended for the colony will be allowed to embark, unless he engages to remain for three years in the service of the company, which will have the right to employ him on any task it thinks proper, without granting him the right to complain or break the contract entered into by him."

These labourers were called Engagés or "thirty-six monthers," a polite way of getting rid of the word slave.

Captain Warner, who had been more highly favoured, returned with a large body of colonists. Still the good understanding was kept up for some time between the two nations; but the English took advantage of the weakness of the French, who could not oppose their usurpations, to encroach on their rights, and formed a fresh settlement at Nevis, the next island to St. Kitts.

Still d'Esnambuc did not despair of the fate of the colony. He proceeded again to France, and solicited of the Cardinal help in men and money, to repulse the undertakings of his troublesome neighbours.

Richelieu granted his request.

By his orders, Rear Admiral de Cussac arrived at St. Kitts, with six heavily armed ships; he surprised ten English vessels in the roads, captured three, sank three others, and put the rest to flight.

The English made no further attempts to leave their boundaries, and peace was re-established.

M. de Cussac, after supplying the colony with rum and provisions, set sail, and went to found a settlement on St. Eustache, an island four leagues N. W. of St. Kitts.

The Spaniards, however, who, since the appearance of the filibusters in American waters, had suffered so greatly from their depredations, saw them with great alarm settling permanently on the West India islands.

They understood of what importance it was to them not to allow fixed settlements in these regions, unless they wished to see their colonies destroyed and their commerce ruined.

They consequently resolved to act vigorously against those fellows whom they regarded as pirates, and to utterly destroy their lurking places, which had already acquired formidable proportions.

In consequence Admiral don Fernando de Toledo, whom the court of Madrid had placed at the head of a powerful fleet, sent in 1630 to Brazil to fight the Dutch, received orders to destroy in passing, the viper's nest formed by the filibusters at St. Kitts.

The sudden apparition of this immense force off the island filled the inhabitants with stupor. The united resources of the English and French adventurers and their desperate courage were not sufficient to avert the danger that menaced them, and repulse so formidable an attack.

After a desperate fight, in which a great number of filibusters, especially Frenchmen, were killed, the others got into their light canoes and fled to the adjacent isles of St. Bartholomew, Antigua, St. Martin, and Montserrat, or to any place in short where they hoped to find a temporary refuge.

The English, we are unfortunately compelled to state, shamefully fled at the beginning of the action, and eventually asked leave to capitulate.

One half of them were sent to England on board Spanish ships, while the rest engaged to evacuate the island as soon as possible,--a promise which was forgotten immediately after the departure of the Spanish fleet.

This expedition was the only one that Spain seriously attempted against the filibusters.

The French soon left the islands where they had sought refuge, and returned to St. Kitts, where they re-established themselves, though not without a quarrel with the English, who had taken advantage of the opportunity to seize their land, but whom they forced again beyond their old borders.

It is a singular fact, which proves that the filibusters were not bandits and nameless men, as attempts have been made to brand them, that the inhabitants of St. Kitts were remarkable beyond all the other colonists for the gentleness and urbanity of their manners; the traditions of politeness left by the first Frenchmen who settled there, have been maintained even to the present day; in the eighteenth century it was called the Gentle Island, and there is a proverb in the Antilles to the effect, that "the nobility were at St. Kitts, the citizens at Guadeloupe, the soldiers at Martinique, and the peasants at Grenada."

Things remained for a long time in the state we have just described; the filibusters, growing bolder and bolder through the Spanish cowardice, enlarged the scene of their exploits, and retaining a bitter memory of the sack of their island, felt a double hatred for the Spaniards, who had branded them with the name of Ladrones (robbers). They no longer displayed any moderation, and seated in the light canoes that composed their entire fleet, they watched for the rich transports from Mexico, dashed boldly aboard them, carried them, and returned to St. Kitts loaded with plunder.

The colony prospered, the land was well cultivated, and the plantations were carefully made.

For these men, the majority of whom had no hope left of ever returning to their native land, had performed their work with the feverish ardor of people who are creating for themselves a new nationality and preparing a last asylum, so that only a few years after the destruction of the colony by the Spaniards, St. Kitts had again become a flourishing colony, thanks in the first instance to its fertility and the energy and intelligence of its inhabitants, but above all to the incessant toil of the engagés of the company.

We have now to explain what these poor fellows were and the fate they met with at the hands of the colonists.

We have already stated that the company sent to the islands, men whom they had engaged for three years.

They accepted anybody, workmen belonging to all trades, even surgeons who, persuading themselves that they were destined to carry on their own profession in the colonies, allowed themselves to be seduced by the fair promises which the company did not hesitate to lavish.

But once their consent was given, that is to say, signed, the company regarded them as men belonging to it body and soul; and when they reached the colonies, agents _sold_ then for three years to the planters, at the rate of thirty or forty crowns a head, and did so in the broad daylight and in the governor's presence.

They thus became real slaves, subject to the adventurers of the colony, and condemned to the rudest tasks.

Hence, the poor wretches, so unworthily abused, beaten terribly and worn out by a fatigue under a deadly climate, generally succumbed ere they had attained the third year, which was to set them at liberty.

This was carried so far that the masters at last attempted to prolong the stipulated slavery beyond three years. Toward the end of 1632, the colony of St. Kitts incurred great dangers, for the engagés whose time was up and whom their masters refused liberty, took up arms, organized a resistance, and prepared to attack the colonists with that energy of desperation which no force can resist. M. d'Esnambuc only succeeded in making them lay down their arms and arrest bloodshed by conceding their just demands.

At a later date, when the sad condition in which the company's agents placed the engagés, became known in France, it became almost impossible for the latter to find volunteers; hence they were obliged to go about the roads and highways to enlist vagabonds whom they intoxicated and induced to sign, while in that condition, an engagement which it was impossible to break.

We will dwell the more earnestly on this point, because during the course of our narrative, we shall have frequently to revert to the engagés. We will only add one word about the wretches whom England sent to the colonies under the same conditions.

If the fate of the French engagés was frightful, that of the English, history proves to us, was horrible.

They were treated with the most atrocious barbarity. They formed an engagement for seven years, and then, at the end of that time, when the moment to regain their liberty had at length arrived, they were intoxicated, and advantage was taken of their condition to make them sign a second engagement for the same period.

Cromwell, after the sack of Drogheda, sold more than 30,000 Irish for Jamaica and Barbados.

Nearly two thousand of these wretched succeeded in escaping on board a vessel, which, in their ignorance of navigation, they allowed to drift and the current cast it ashore at Saint Domingo. The poor fellows, not knowing where they were, and being without food or resources, all died of hunger. Their piled-up bones, bleached by time, remained for several years on Cape Tiburón, at a spot which was called Irish Bay on account of the terrible catastrophe, and still bears the name.

The reader will pardon us for having entered into such lengthened details about the establishment of the filibusters of St. Kitts; but as it was on this little island that the terrible association of adventurers, whose history we have undertaken to tell, had its birth, it is necessary to make the reader fully acquainted with these facts, so that we might not be obliged to return to them hereafter. Now, we will resume our narrative to which the preceding chapters serve, so to speak, as a prologue, and leaping at one bound across the space that separates Sainte Marguerite from the Caribbean islands, we will proceed to St. Kitts a few months after the escape, for we dare not say the liberation, of Count Ludovic de Barmont Senectaire.