The hunters tormented by mosquitoes and sand flies used leafy branches for fans, and anointed their faces with hog's grease to defend themselves from the stings. By night in their huts they burned tobacco, without which smoke they could not have obtained sleep. The mosquitoes were of all sorts, the buzzing and the silent, the tormentors by day and night; but they dispersed when the land breeze rose, or whenever the wind increased. The common mosquito was not visible by day, but at sunset filled the woods with its ominous humming. Oexmelin describes on one occasion his lying for eight hours in the water of a brook to escape their stings; sitting on a stone or on the sand, and keeping his face, which was above water, covered with leaves to protect him from the fiery stings. The Buccaneers made their pens of reeds, and their paper of the leaves of a peculiar sort of palm, the outer cuticle of which was thin, white, and soft; their ink was the black juice of the juniper berries, letters written with which turned white in nine days. They kept harmless snakes in their houses to feed on the rats and mice, just as we do cats, or the Copts did the ichneumons. They frequently used a handful of fire-flies instead of a lantern: Esquemeling, himself a Buccaneer, says, that with three of these in his cottage at midnight he could see to read in any book, however small the print. The Buccaneers carried in their tobacco pouches the horn of an immense sort of spider, which Esquemeling describes as big as an egg, with feet as long as a crab, and four black teeth like a rabbit, its bite being sharp but not venomous. These teeth or horns they used either as toothpicks or pipe-cleaners; they were supposed to have the property of preserving the user from toothache. They are described as about two inches long, black as jet, smooth as glass, sharp as a thorn, and a little bent at the lower end. Their favourite toy, the dice, they cut from the white ivory-like teeth of the sea-horse. Great observers of the use of things, and well lessoned in the bitter school of experience, they turned every new natural production they met with to some useful purpose, uniting with the keen sagacity of the hunter the shrewd instinct of the savage. Their horsewhips they formed from the skin of the back of a wild bull or sea-cow. The lashes were made of slips of hide, two or three feet long, of the full thickness at the bottom, and cut square and tapering to the point. These thongs they twisted while still green, and then hung them up in a hut to dry; in a few weeks they shrank and became hard as wood, and tough as an American cowhide, an Abyssinian scourge, or the far-famed Russian knout. From the skin of the manitee they cut straps, which they used in their canoes instead of the ordinary tholes.