With the European countries constantly at one another’s throats, the men without a country, flying no flag but the Jolly Roger, could always find safety among these disputed isles, and were always sure of a welcome. The hated Spaniards were the chief sufferers from the pirates’ attacks, and while they might virtually be at peace with Spain, yet the other powers saw no real reason to interfere with the pirates’ activities merely to aid an hereditary enemy who might at any moment see fit to start another war. England, as ever, desired the supremacy of the seas, and, hard put to it to maintain her grip in the Antilles, she was quite willing that the Dons should be kept in check by fair means or foul. France was too busy with more serious matters to bother about the freebooters in the far-off Caribbean. The thrifty Dutch found it more profitable to trade with the pirates than to fight them, and the Danes,—with the adventurous blood of the Vikings in their veins,—no doubt had more or less of a fellow-feeling for the sea-robbers. And so, although the governments of Europe sent forth royal decrees, bearing most impressive seals, gay with colored ribbons and engrossed with lengthy words and involved sentences, and on parchment frowned upon the corsairs, yet no real effort was made to enforce the law. So the buccaneers laughed at the “scraps of paper” and went merrily and virtually unchecked upon their way. It may be well here to call attention to the fact that we should not confuse the buccaneers with ordinary pirates, for while buccaneers were pirates, yet pirates were not necessarily buccaneers; and even in their piracy the buccaneers or “Brethren of the Main,” as they called themselves, were by no means the conventional pirates of fiction. Nearly all of them started on their careers as privateers with royal warrant to prey upon the enemy’s ships. Then, having found the game to their liking and with no other means of earning a livelihood when peace was declared, they kept it up, regardless of such trifling matters as treaties of peace between kings and emperors several thousands of miles distant. With a few exceptions, they continued their depredations in much the same manner and along the same lines as they had conducted their privateering ventures. The British buccaneers—and the majority were of that nationality—never attacked a vessel flying the thrice-crossed flag of England; they did not molest the Dutch, who were ever friendly, for as long as there were plenty of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Frenchmen for the plucking they were quite content to pick and choose. The French buccaneers were perhaps a little less squeamish, while the Dutch and the Spanish apparently preyed on friend and foe alike.