The next important event which I find recorded is after the treaty of 27th August 1701, between ‘His Most Christian’ and ’His Most Catholic Majesty,’ by which the Royal Company of Guinea, established in France, was allowed to supply the Spanish colonies with 4800 Negroes per annum for ten years; of whom Trinidad took some share, and used them in planting cacao.  So much the worse for it.

Next Captain Teach, better known as ‘Blackboard,’ made his appearance about 1716, off Port of Spain; plundered and burnt a brig laden with cacao; and when a Spanish frigate came in, and cautiously cannonaded him at a distance, sailed leisurely out of the Boca Grande.  Little would any Spanish Guarda Costa trouble the soul of the valiant Captain Teach, with his six pistols slung in bandoliers down his breast, lighted matches stuck underneath the brim of his hat, and his famous black beard, the terror of all merchant captains from Trinidad to Guinea River, twisted into tails, and tied up with ribbons behind his ears.  How he behaved himself for some years as a ‘ferocious human pig,’ like Ignatius Loyola before his conversion, with the one virtue of courage; how he would blow out the candle in the cabin, and fire at random into his crew, on the ground ’that if he did not kill one of them now and then they would forget who he was’; how he would shut down the hatches, and fill the ship with the smoke of brimstone and what not, to see how long he and his could endure a certain place,—­to which they are, some of them, but too probably gone; how he has buried his money, or said that he had, ’where none but he and Satan could find it, and the longest liver should take all’; how, out of some such tradition, Edgar Poe built up the wonderful tale of the Gold Bug; how the planters of certain Southern States, and even the Governor of North Carolina, paid him blackmail, and received blackmail from him likewise; and lastly, how he met a man as brave as he, but with a clear conscience and a clear sense of duty, in the person of Mr. Robert Maynard, first lieutenant of the Pearl, who found him after endless difficulties, and fought him hand-to-hand in Oberecock River, in Virginia, ’the lieutenant and twelve men against Blackbeard and fourteen, till the sea was tinctured with blood around the vessel’; and how Maynard sailed into Bathtown with the gory head, black beard and all, hung at his jibboom end; all this is written—­in the books in which it is written; which need not be read now, however sensational, by the British public.

The next important event which I find recorded in the annals of Trinidad is, that in 1725 the cacao crop failed.  Some perhaps would have attributed the phenomenon to a comet, like that Sir William Beeston who, writing in 1664, says—­’About this time appeared first the comet, which was the forerunner of the blasting of the cacao-trees, when they generally failed in Jamaica, Cuba, and Hispaniola.’  But no comet seems to have appeared in 1725 whereon to lay the blame; and therefore Father Gumilla, the Jesuit, may have been excused for saying that the failure of the trees was owing to the planters not paying their tithes; and for fortifying his statement by the fact that one planter alone, named Rabelo, who paid his tithes duly, saved his trees and his crop.