Considerations on the Rights acquired by the Discovery of Unknown Lands, and on the Claims advanced by the Spaniards
The accounts given by the Buccaneers who extended their enterprises to the Pacific Ocean, are the best authenticated of any which have been published by that class of Adventurers. They are interspersed with nautical and geographical descriptions, corroborative of the events related, and more worth being preserved than the memory of what was performed. The materials for this portion of Buccaneer history, which it was necessary should be included in a History of South Sea Navigations, could not be collected without bringing other parts into view; whence it appeared, that with a moderate increase of labour, and without much enlarging the bulk of narrative, a regular history might be formed of their career, from their first rise, to their suppression; and that such a work would not be without its use.
No practice is more common in literature, than for an author to endeavour to clear the ground before him, by mowing down the labours of his predecessors on the same subject. To do this, where the labour they have bestowed is of good tendency, or even to treat with harshness the commission of error where no bad intention is manifest, is in no small degree illiberal. But all the Buccaneer histories that hitherto have appeared, and the number is not small, are boastful compositions, which have delighted in exaggeration: and, what is most mischievous, they have lavished commendation on acts which demanded reprobation, and have endeavoured to raise miscreants, notorious for their want of humanity, to the rank of heroes, lessening thereby the stain upon robbery, and the abhorrence naturally conceived against cruelty.
There is some excuse for the Buccaneer, who tells his own story. Vanity, and his prejudices, without any intention to deceive, lead him to magnify his own exploits; and the reader naturally makes allowances.
The men whose enterprises are to be related, were natives of different European nations, but chiefly of Great Britain and France, and most of them seafaring people, who being disappointed, by accidents or the enmity of the Spaniards, in their more sober pursuits in the West Indies, and also instigated by thirst for plunder as much as by desire for vengeance, embodied themselves, under different leaders of their own choosing, to make predatory war upon the Spaniards. These men the Spaniards naturally treated as pirates; but some peculiar circumstances which provoked their first enterprises, and a general feeling of enmity against that nation on account of their American conquests, procured them the connivance of the rest of the maritime states of Europe, and to be distinguished first by the softened appellations of Freebooters and Adventurers, and afterwards by that of Buccaneers.
Spain, or, more strictly speaking, Castile, on the merit of a first discovery, claimed an exclusive right to the possession of the whole of America, with the exception of the Brasils, which were conceded to the Portuguese. These claims, and this division, the Pope sanctioned by an instrument, entitled a Bull of Donation, which was granted at a time when all the maritime powers of Europe were under the spiritual dominion of the See of Rome. The Spaniards, however, did not flatter themselves that they should be left in the sole and undisputed enjoyment of so large a portion of the newly-discovered countries; but they were principally anxious to preserve wholly to themselves the West Indies: and, such was the monopolising spirit of the Castilians, that during the life of the Queen Ysabel of Castile, who was regarded as the patroness of Columbus's discovery, it was difficult even for Spaniards, not subjects born of the crown of Castile, to gain access to this New World, prohibitions being repeatedly published against the admission of all other persons into the ships bound thither. Ferdinand, King of Arragon, the husband of Ysabel, had refused to contribute towards the outfit of Columbus's first voyage, having no opinion of the probability that it would produce him an adequate return; and the undertaking being at the expence of Castile, the countries discovered were considered as appendages to the crown of Castile.
If such jealousy was entertained by the Spaniards of each other, what must not have been their feelings respecting other European nations? 'Whoever,' says Hakluyt, 'is conversant with the Portugal and Spanish writers, shall find that they account all other nations for pirates, rovers, and thieves, which visit any heathen coast that they have sailed by or looked on.'
Spain considered the New World as what in our law books is called Treasure-trove, of which she became lawfully and exclusively entitled to take possession, as fully as if it had been found without any owner or proprietor. Spain has not been singular in her maxims respecting the rights of discoverers. Our books of Voyages abound in instances of the same disregard shewn to the rights of the native inhabitants, the only rightful proprietors, by the navigators of other European nations, who, with a solemnity due only to offices of a religious nature, have continually put in practice the form of taking possession of Countries which to them were new discoveries, their being inhabited or desert making no difference. Not unfrequently has the ceremony been performed in the presence, but not within the understanding, of the wondering natives; and on this formality is grounded a claim to usurp the actual possession, in preference to other Europeans.
