Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 10.pdf/360

350 and a small allotment of land at the expiration of the time. These were called "thirty-six months' men." Sometimes their regular indenture was respected, and sometimes violently set aside to make the signers virtually slaves. This was done occasionally by the French in imitation of the English. A number of engagés at St. Christophe, ﬁnding that they were not set at liberty at the expiration of their three years, and that their masters intended to hold them two years more, assembled tumultuously, and threatened to attack the colony. This was in 1632. Their masters were not in sufficient force to carry out their plan, and the Governor was obliged to set at liberty all who had served their time. In 1719, the French Council of State decreed, in consequence of the scarcity of engagés, that all vagabonds and criminals sentenced to the galleys should be transported for colonial service; and in order to diminish the expense of shipping them, every vessel leaving France for the Antilles was compelled to carry three engagés free of expense.

The amount of misery created by these various methods of supplying the islands with human labor cannot be computed. The victims were very humble; the manner of their taking-off was rarely noticed; the spirit of the age never stooped to consider these trifles of sorrow, nor to protect by some legislation the unfortunates who suffered in remote islands, whence their cries seldom reached the ears of authority. It would have been surprising, if many of these engagés had not assumed the habits of their masters, and kept the wandering hordes by land and sea recruited. Some of the most famous Buccaneers—for that name popularly included also the Flibustiers—were originally thirty-six months' men who had daring and conduct enough to make the best of their enforced condition.

These engagés were in all respects treated as slaves, especially when bound to agricultural service. Their master left them to the mercies of an overseer, who whistled them up at daybreak for wood-cutting or labor in the tobacco-fields, and went about among them with a stout stick, which he used freely to bring the lagging up to their work. Many cruelties are related of these men, but they are of the ordinary kind to be found in the annals of all slave-holding countries. The fact that the engagés were indentured only for three years made no difference with men whose sole object was to use up every available resource in the pursuit of wealth. Bad treatment, chagrin, and scurvy destroyed many of them. The French writers accused the English of treating their engagés worse than any other nation, as they retained them for seven years, at the end of which time they gave them money enough to procure a lengthened debauch, during which they generally signed away their liberty for seven more years. Oexmelin says that Cromwell sold more than ten thousand Scotch and Irish, destined for Barbadoes. A whole ship-load of these escaped, but perished miserably of famine near Cape Tiburon, at a place which was afterwards called L'Anse aux Ibernois.

The first engagés were brought by the French from Dieppe: they signed contracts before notaries previously to quitting the country. This class of laborers was eagerly sought by all the colonists of the West Indies, and a good many vessels of different nations were employed in the trade. There was in Brazil a system of letting out land to be worked, called a labrados, because a manager held the land from a proprietor for a certain share of the proﬁts, and cultivated it by laborers procurable in various ways. The name of Labrador is derived by some writers from the stealing of natives upon our northern coast by the Portuguese, to be enslaved. It is certain that they did this as early as 1501, and named the coast afterwards Terra de Laborador.

The Buccaneers, hunting in couples, called each other matelot, or shipmate: the word expresses their amphibious ca-