retarded the development of its natural resources. It was estimated that there were lost to the island between 1668 and 1671, in the designs against Tobago, Curacao, Porto Bello, Granada and Panama, about 2600 men,[529] which was a large number for a new and very weak colony surrounded by powerful foes. Says the same writer later on: "People have not married, built or settled as they would in time of peace--some for fear of being destroyed, others have got much suddenly by privateers bargains and are gone. War carries away all freemen, labourers and planters of provisions, which makes work and victuals dear and scarce. Privateering encourages all manner of disorder and dissoluteness; and if it succeed, does but enrich the worst sort of people and provoke and alarm the Spaniards."[530] The privateers, moreover, really injured English trade as much as they injured Spanish navigation; and if the English in the second half of the seventeenth century had given the Spaniards as little cause for enmity in the West Indies as the Dutch had done, they perhaps rather than the Dutch would have been the convoys and sharers in the rich Flotas. The Spaniards, moreover, if not in the court at home, at least in the colonies, would have readily lent themselves to a trade, illicit though it be, with the English islands, a trade, moreover, which it was the constant aim of English diplomacy to encourage and maintain, had they been able to assure themselves that their English neighbours were their friends. But when outrage succeeded upon outrage, and the English Governors seemed, in spite of their protestations of innocence, to make no progress toward stopping them, the Spaniards naturally concluded that the English government was the best of liars and the worst of friends. From another point of view, too, the activity of the buccaneers was directly opposed to the commercial interests of Great Britain. Of all the nations of Europe the Spaniards were those who profited least from their American possessions. It was the English, the French and the Dutch who carried their merchandize to Cadiz and freighted the Spanish-American fleets, and who at the return of these fleets from Porto Bello and Vera Cruz appropriated the greater part of the gold, silver and precious stuffs which composed their cargoes. And when the buccaneers cut off a Spanish galleon, or wrecked the Spanish cities on the Main, it was not so much the Spaniards who suffered as the foreign merchants interested in the trade between Spain and her colonies. If the policy of the English and French Governments toward the buccaneers gradually changed from one of connivance or encouragement to one of hostility and suppression, it was because they came to realise that it was easier and more profitable to absorb the trade and riches of Spanish America through the peaceful agencies of treaty and concession, than by endeavouring to enforce a trade in the old-fashioned way inaugurated by