The buccaneers were principally natives of Great Britain and France, and first attract notice in the island of St. Domingo. The Spaniards would not allow any other nation than their own to trade in the West Indies, and pursued and murdered the English and French wherever they found them. Every foreigner discovered among the islands or on the coast of the American continent was treated as a smuggler and a robber; and it was not long before they became so, and organized themselves into an association capable of returning cruelty by cruelty. The Spaniards employed coast-guards to keep off interlopers, the commanders of which were instructed to massacre all their prisoners. This tended to produce a close alliance, offensive and defensive, among the mariners of all other nations, who in their turn made descents upon the coasts and ravaged the weaker Spanish towns and settlements. A permanent state of hostilities was thus established in the West Indies, independent of peace or war at home. After the failure of the mines of St. Domingo and its abandonment by the Spaniards, it was taken possession of, early in the sixteenth century, by a number of French wanderers who had been driven out of St. Christopher; and their numbers were soon augmented by adventurers from all quarters. As they had neither wives nor children, they generally lived together by twos for mutual protection and assistance: when one died, the survivor inherited his property, unless a will was found bequeathing it to some relative in Europe. Bolts, locks, and all kinds of fastenings were prohibited among them, the maxim of "honor among thieves" being considered a more efficient safeguard. The dress of a buccaneer consisted of a shirt dipped in the blood of an animal just slain, a leathern girdle in which hung pistols and a short sabre, a hat with feathers,--but without a rim, except a fragment in guise of a visor to pull it on and off,--and shoes of untanned hide, without stockings. Each man had a heavy musket and usually a pack of twenty or thirty dogs. Their business was, at the outset, cattle-hunting; and they sold hides to the Dutch who resorted to the island to purchase them. They possessed servants and slaves, consisting of persons decoyed to the West Indies and induced to bind themselves for a certain number of years. They treated them with great severity. The following epigrammatic conversation is reported as having taken place between an apprentice and a buccaneer. "Master," said the servant, "God has forbidden the practice of working on the Sabbath: does he not say, 'Six days shalt thou labor; and on the seventh shalt thou rest'?" "But I say unto thee," returned the buccaneer, "six days shalt thou kill cattle; and on the seventh shalt thou carry their hides to the shore."