First Santo Domingo, then Tortugas, and finally Jamaica were headquarters of the buccaneers, who were made up of men of all nations, united by a desire to prey upon Spain as a common enemy. They were thousands in number, possessed large fleets of ships and boats, were well armed, and finally formed a regular organization with a chief and under-officers. The most noted of these chiefs, perhaps, was Henry Morgan, a Welshman, who was at one time captured and taken home to England for trial. To his own surprise, instead of being executed, he was knighted by Charles II, who had not been at all grieved at seeing Spanish commerce harassed; and Morgan was returned to Jamaica as commissioner of admiralty, where at one time he acted as deputy governor, using his opportunity to make it unpleasant for those of the buccaneers with whom he had formerly had disagreements as to the distribution of prizes. The earlier buccaneers found ample plunder in the Spanish fleets. They patrolled the sea in the track of vessels bound to and from Europe, and seized them, allowing or compelling the crews to become pirates, or else to be killed or carried into slavery. This work, however, employed only a portion of the buccaneers; and early in the seventeenth century, as the commerce of Spain declined, it became too uncertain a means of wealth to suit them. But the rich Spanish settlements still remained; and often, therefore, they equipped a great fleet, enlisted men under certain strict rules as to sharing the spoils, and sailed away to pillage some coast. There was hardly an island in the West Indies from which, in this way, they did not extort immense sums of money under threat of destruction of the people. The mainland also suffered from the marauders. Great cities, like Cartagena in Venezuela, Panama on the Isthmus, Mérida in Yucatan, and Havana in Cuba, were attacked by armies of buccaneers numbering thousands of men. Sometimes their fortifications held good, and the enemy was beaten back; but sooner or later all these cities, and others, smaller, were captured, robbed of everything valuable that they contained, and burned or partly burned. For years the buccaneers were the terror of the Caribbean region, and after the famous sacking of Panama, under Morgan, in 1671, their power spread across the Isthmus and scourged the southern seas. We have no way of knowing the amount of the treasure which they captured from the merchant vessels and from the coast of Peru; for the moment they got home from an expedition they wasted all their booty in wild carousing, so that the spoils earned by months of exposure, and wounds, and danger of death, would be spent in a single week.