Being driven from their original retreat on the island of Tortuga, the Bucaniers retired to the Keys. No doubt the inlets and islands of the southern peninsula of Florida attracted their bands. Not only the towns and settlements on the Spanish islands and on the Main became objects of plunder, but the commerce of every nation also. It is not till within a few years, that the remnants of this desperate class of men, who have long infested the waters in the neighborhood of the West India islands, have been driven from their haunts, and hunted down, by the American Navy. The Bucanier was terrible in his appearance, as well as in his profession. His dress consisted of a shirt dipped in the blood of cattle--trousers prepared in the same manner--buskins without stockings--a cap with a small front, and a leathern girdle, into which were stuck around his body, knives, sabres and pistols. Such was the filthy and terrific garb of the Bucanier in full costume. Such was Davis, who laid this city under contribution some eighty years after it was founded by Melendez. At this period, the Bucaniers seem to have regarded the whole Spanish race as their natural enemies, and their commerce and their cities as lawful objects of plunder. CAUSES OF BORDER TROUBLES. At the close of the seventeenth and in the beginning of the eighteen century, the English settlements of Carolina had acquired permanency and importance. But Spain had proclaimed her exclusive right to American possessions. By a permit from the Roman Pontiff, she had already seized and subdued a greater part of the New World, and left the prints of her bloody hand upon the rights and treasures of the aboriginal inhabitants. In the face of the civilized world, Spain, then one of the richest and most powerful states on earth, having asserted a claim to and planted her foot upon the soil of North America, how could she forego the exclusive control of the same? How could she endure the presence, or divide the occupancy of the soil with a rival state? She had already acquired the proud title in her sovereign, of “Defender of the Faith,” for the ardor and fidelity with which she supported the arrogant pretensions of the See of Rome, having given her strength to the extension of its interests, even to the prostitution of her civil power to ecclesiastical domination. How then could Spain consent that the Protestant religion should gain a foothold in North America? Had she not already extinguished it on the coasts of Florida? Were not the English colonies still in their infancy, as well as within the reach of her arms? It required but a single well directed stroke, and the Anglo-Saxon race and the hated Protestant faith would perish together.