Tortuga

Tortuga — Île de la Tortue, "Turtle Island" — is a long narrow island some twenty miles off the north coast of Hispaniola (now Haiti). It is rocky, broken by cliffs, and small enough to circle on foot in a hard day. Through the middle of the seventeenth century it was the most important pirate base in the Americas.

The buccaneers proper

The original buccaneers were not pirates. They were French, Dutch, and English hunters living on northwest Hispaniola who shot wild cattle and pigs and smoked the meat over green-wood fires on grills called boucans — hence their name. They lived in rough company, dressed in skins, drank prodigiously, and traded smoked meat and hides to passing ships. When Spanish authorities tried to dislodge them — by killing off the wild herds — they took to the sea instead, in canoes and small captured craft, raiding Spanish shipping to feed themselves.

Tortuga, separated from Hispaniola by a narrow channel and possessing one small but defensible harbor at Basse-Terre, became their refuge.

A revolving sovereignty

Through the 1630s, 40s, and 50s the island changed hands repeatedly: French, English, and Spanish governors landed, were thrown out, returned, and were thrown out again. In 1640 a French Huguenot named Le Vasseur arrived, fortified the harbor with a stone redoubt called Fort de Rocher, and ruled the island as a private kingdom until his murder by lieutenants in 1652.

By the 1660s the French government — recognizing that the buccaneers were a useful unofficial weapon against the Spanish — sent Bertrand d'Ogeron as governor. D'Ogeron formalized commissions, established an admiralty court, imported French women, and licensed the buccaneers to raid under the cover of letters of marque. Some of the most famous expeditions of the era — including those of François l'Olonnais against Maracaibo, and later operations associated with Henry Morgan — were outfitted at Tortuga.

Decline

By the 1670s the center of buccaneer activity had shifted to Port Royal, which offered a larger harbor and a more sophisticated market. The Treaty of Ratisbon (1684) and the broader European peace with Spain made the buccaneers an embarrassment rather than an asset, and the French authorities began to discourage them. Tortuga dwindled to a small French outpost.

The harbor at Basse-Terre is still there. The ruins of Fort de Rocher are not.

Related: Henry Morgan · Port Royal