At that time the French West India Company had a colonial establishment on the island of Tortuga, which was principally inhabited, as we have seen before, by buccaneers in all their various grades and stages, from beef-driers to pirates.  The French authorities undertook to supply these erratic people with the goods and provisions which they needed, and built storehouses with everything necessary for carrying on the trade.  There were plenty of purchasers, for the buccaneers were willing to buy everything which could be brought from Europe.  They were fond of good wine, good groceries, good firearms, and ammunition, fine cutlasses, and very often good clothes, in which they could disport themselves when on shore.  But they had peculiar customs and manners, and although they were willing to buy as much as the French traders had to sell, they could not be prevailed upon to pay their bills.  A pirate is not the sort of a man who generally cares to pay his bills.  When he gets goods in any way, he wants them charged to him, and if that charge includes the features of robbery and murder, he will probably make no objection.  But as for paying good money for what is received, that is quite another thing.

That this was the state of feeling on the island of Tortuga was discovered before very long by the French mercantile agents, who then applied to the mother country for assistance in collecting the debts due them, and a body of men, who might be called collectors, or deputy sheriffs, was sent out to the island; but although these officers were armed with pistols and swords, as well as with authority, they could do nothing with the buccaneers, and after a time the work of endeavoring to collect debts from pirates was given up.  And as there was no profit in carrying on business in this way, the mercantile agency was also given up, and its officers were ordered to sell out everything they had on hand, and come home.  There was, therefore, a sale, for which cash payments were demanded, and there was a great bargain day on the island of Tortuga.  Everything was disposed of,—­the stock of merchandise on hand, the tables, the desks, the stationery, the bookkeepers, the clerks, and the errand boys.  The living items of the stock on hand were considered to be property just as if they had been any kind of merchandise, and were sold as slaves.

Now poor John Esquemeling found himself in a sad condition.  He was bought by one of the French officials who had been left on the island, and he described his new master as a veritable fiend.  He was worked hard, half fed, treated cruelly in many ways, and to add to his misery, his master tantalized him by offering to set him free upon the payment of a sum of money equal to about three hundred dollars.  He might as well have been asked to pay three thousand or three million dollars, for he had not a penny in the world.

At last he was so fortunate as to fall sick, and his master, as avaricious as he was cruel, fearing that this creature he owned might die, and thus be an entire loss to him, sold him to a surgeon, very much as one would sell a sick horse to a veterinary surgeon, on the principle that he might make something out of the animal by curing him.