A brief outline will suffice to conduct us to the secure establishment of the French in Western San Domingo. Tortuga was attacked by the Spaniards in 1638; the Buccaneers were surprised, put to the sword, and scattered. A few joined their brethren in San Domingo. Their discomfiture was thought to be so complete that no garrison was left upon Tortuga. At the same time the Spaniards organized bands of fifty men each, called _la cinquantaine_ by the French Buccaneers, to serve as a kind of rural police to hunt down the latter and exterminate them. For safety the French collected, and put at their head Willis, an Englishman, who had just then appeared with two or three hundred men, with the view of joining those of his countrymen who were Buccaneers. He led them back to Tortuga, and threw up some rude works to command the harbor. But the national antipathies soon appeared, on the occasion of some encroachment of Willis, whose countrymen were the more numerous party. The French despatched secret agents to St. Christophe, who made it clear to M. de Poincy, the Governor of that island, that the English could be easily dispossessed by a small force attacking them from without, while the French rose within. The Governor thought it was a good opportunity to weed the Huguenots, who were always making trouble about religious matters, out of his colony; he did not hesitate, therefore, to cooperate with the outlaws for so nice a game as driving out the English by getting rid of his heretics. The operation was intrusted to M. Levasseur, a brave and well-instructed Huguenot officer, who took with him about a hundred men. Willis decamped at their first summons, knowing the temper of his French subjects; and Levasseur landed, and immediately began to fortify a platform-rock which rose only a few paces from the water's edge. This he intrenched, surrounding an open square capable of accommodating three or four hundred men. A never-failing spring gushed from the rock for the supply of a garrison. From the middle of this platform there rose conveniently another rock thirty feet high, with scarped sides, upon which he built a block-house for himself and the ammunition, communicating with the platform by a movable ladder of iron. He made the place so formidable as a buccaneering centre that the Spaniards resolved to attack it. They tried it at first from the sea, but, being well battered, retired and disembarked six hundred men by night to make a land-attack. They were defeated, with the loss of a hundred men.