Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be accounted for. For example, it was often claimed that “the storm came back.” After blowing in one direction with awful force until great damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that had not been destroyed in the first blow. To add to the mystery, many ships were never heard from again. They became involved in hurricanes and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind. Men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships and men that were never seen again. And yet it is amazing to find how near some of these men came to the right answer. There were seafaring men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whose operations were centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. They were English, Dutch, Portuguese and French, all at one time or another opposed to Spanish control in the Carribbean. On various occasions they seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements. During these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. Doubtless, there were many more not recorded. A great number of vessels went down in the seas and harbors around St. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where the buccaneers sought haven from the Spaniards. One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was William Dampier. He was born in England in 1652, became an orphan at an early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he made a voyage to Newfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies and then fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year he went to Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiar with the harbors, bays, inlets and other features of the Carribbean coasts and islands. At times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the South American coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, they raided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed the Pacific to Guam, and then to the East Indies. At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately took him over most of the world. But he died poor, just three years before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars’ worth of prize money.