It was not breaches of the Acts of Navigation and the acts concerning woollen manufacture that the ministers found it necessary to turn their heed to when the war ended, but, rather, the open piracies of the southern seas. By the treaty of Ryswick, which brought peace (1697), France, England, Holland, and Spain, the high contracting parties, solemnly bound themselves to make common cause against buccaneering. Spain and England had been mutually bound since 1670 to abolish it. Buccaneering abounded most on the coasts of America. The lawless business had begun long ago. Spain had provoked it. She had taken possession of all Central and South America and of the islands of the West Indies, and had bidden all other nations stand off and touch nothing, while her fleets every year for generations together came home heavy with treasure. She had denied them the right of trade; she had forbidden their seamen so much as to get stores for their own use anywhere within the waters of Spanish America. She treated every ship as an intruder which she found in the southern seas, and the penalties she inflicted for intrusion upon her guarded coasts went the length of instant drowning or hangings at the yard-arm. It was a day when there was no law at sea. Every prudent man supplied his ship with arms, and was his own escort; and since Spain was the common bully, she became the common enemy. English and French and Dutch seamen were not likely very long to suffer themselves to be refused what they needed at her ports; and after getting what they needed, they went on to take whatever they wanted. They were intruders, anyway, for whatever purpose they came, and they might as well, as a witty Frenchman among them said, “repay themselves beforehand” for the losses they would suffer should Spanish cruisers find and take them.