The storehouses are finished and of great use, and so is Fort Charles with all the advantage the ground will afford. Captain Lilly would have had it built in another figure, but that was more to show his desire it might be done by his directions than of any use, for, as he proposed, there would have been much less room, and the spurs were not capacious enough to contain any guns. I had the approbation of all people in the figure I proposed, and it’s not only very useful but very beautiful also. The next public work we go about is to lay a line of thirty or forty guns in good stone work to the eastward of Fort Charles, which guns will be right up the channel where all ships come in, and make the place not easy to be attempted by sea. From the earliest times the members of the House of Assembly, ever ready to insist on their rights, were admitted to view the forts and fortifications, and a joint committee of the Assembly and Council used to report annually on Fort Charles. After pointing out various defects for thirty or forty years, the committee in 1736 got angry, and complained “that the present state and condition of the fortifications in Port Royal, which is very defenceless, require the immediate consideration of the Legislature, as they are the strength and security of the island,” and that “little or no notice had been taken to remedy the grievances complained of.” Towards the close of the eighteenth century there were thirty forts and batteries in the island. At present there are but three worthy of the name—Fort Nugent at Harbour Head, Fort Clarence, opposite Port Royal, and Rocky Point, on the Palisadoes. As the island became more settled under the British colonists, vessels which had at first been equipped for home defence began to assume the position of private men-of-war, or privateers, and to bring into Port Royal, sometimes with the warrant of the governor, sometimes without, spoils from the Spaniards. When it suited the home programme the local Governor was praised for zeal in Imperial service. When the complaints of the Spanish court became too insistent, he was made a scapegoat and recalled. But the habit of plundering the hated Spaniard had got into the blood of men who were ill-fitted to lead a sedentary life, and the steps from authorized privateersmen, first to unauthorized buccaneer, and then to pirate and murderer, were easy. And no close scrutiny was placed upon the origin of the wealth poured into Port Royal, which its owners squandered in drinking and gaming as quickly as they had gained it. Port Royal was then the centre of much debauchery. Modyford, the governor, wrote home, “The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew of the strength of their drinks, but then they wondered more that they were not all dead.” The buccaneers, another writer tells us, “have been known to spend 2000 or 3000 pieces of eight in one night.”