We are accustomed to speak of Morgan and his associates as buccaneers. Now let us understand at once the meaning of this term. Originally the word meant one who dried and smoked meat on a “boucan.” A “boucan” was a hurdle made of sticks on which strips of beef newly salted were smoked by the West Indians. But the name of buccaneers was first given to the French hunters of S. Domingo, who prepared their meat according to this Indian custom. From the fact that these men who so prepared the flesh of oxen and wild boars were also known for another characteristic, namely, piracy, the name was applied in its widest sense to those English and French sea-rovers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who employed their time in depredating Spanish ships and territory of the Caribbean Sea. Hence from signifying a man who treated his food in a certain fashion, the word buccaneer came to mean nothing more or less than a robber of the sea. After young Morgan had finished his time in service at Barbados, he joined himself to these buccaneer-robbers after arriving at Jamaica. It should be added that Morgan’s uncle, Colonel Edward Morgan, went out from England in 1664 to become Governor-General of Jamaica, but his death occurred in the following year. There are gaps in Morgan’s life, and there has been some confusion caused by others possessing the same surname. But it appears pretty certain now that in the year 1663 Henry Morgan was at sea in command of a privateer. Even by this time he had begun to be an expert in depredation and in sacking some of the Caribbean towns, and striking terror into the hearts of the wretched inhabitants. We may pass over these minor events and come to the time when, his uncle having died, Sir Thomas Modyford was sent out from England as Lieutenant-Governor. Bear in mind that intense hatred of the Spanish prevailing at this time, and which had not been by any means quenched by the defeat of the Armada. To put it mildly, the Caribbean Sea was an Anglo-Spanish cockpit where many and many a fight had taken, and was still to take, place. Modyford wanted the island of Curaçoa to be taken, and there was then no better man to do the job than a very celebrated buccaneer named Edward Mansfield. Sir Thomas therefore commissioned Mansfield to seize this island. He got together a strong naval expedition and accomplished the task early in the year 1666, Henry Morgan being in command of one of Mansfield’s ships.