described to have been found upon this island, are at present very much diminished. For the Spaniards being informed of the advantages which the buccaneers and privateers drew from the provisions which goats' flesh here furnished them with, they have endeavoured to extirpate the breed, thereby to deprive their enemies of this relief. For this purpose they have put on shore great numbers of large dogs, who have increased apace, and have destroyed all the goats in the accessible part of the country; so that there now remain only a few among the crags and precipices where the dogs cannot follow them. (Note. 'The buccaneers.' The name "buccaneer" originally meant one who dried or smoked flesh on a "boucan," a kind of hurdle used for this purpose by the natives of Central and South America. The English, French, and Dutch smugglers who, in spite of the monopoly so jealously guarded by the Spaniards (see Introduction above) traded in the Caribbean seas, used to provision at St. Domingo largely with beef, jerked or sun-dried on the boucans. These men formed an organised body, under a chief chosen by themselves, and, under the name of the buccaneers, were for three-quarters of a century the terror of the Spaniards. In 1655 they were powerful enough to give material assistance to the English fleet which conquered Jamaica. In 1671 they raised a force of 2,000 men, marched across the isthmus, and besieged and took Panama; their success, as usual, being marked by horrible atrocities. In 1685 a Spanish fleet of fourteen sail, which had been fitted out to put them down, found ten buccaneer ships in the bay of Panama, but dared not give them battle. The war between France and England after 1688 dissolved the alliance between the French and English buccaneers; and the last conspicuous event in their history was the capture of Cartagena in 1697. Soon after this date they disappeared as an organised body, though for many years members of the band remained as pirates in the South Seas.)